Your attention is the most valuable resource in your life, and everyone is after it. We live in a world that's highly optimized to distract you and suck your energy because your energy follows what you give your attention to. Advertisers are trying to get your attention right now; I'm getting your attention, other people are getting your attention, etc.
So you have to selectively choose what you actually give your attention to. Some people give you energy when you give your attention to them, while other things and people just take it from you. Thus, you need to really pay attention to the quality of the interactions you are having with the thing or person you are giving your attention to—be it with the food, the habit, or the content that you consume.
If something is always just taking your energy—taking and taking and taking—this is just going to leave you drained, numb, and dull. You can't really live a profound life; you can't really self-actualize and self-transcend if you're habitually drained by various things in the external world. Some things and people just take your energy; they just suck your attention.
Other things, however, actually engage it and then give back to you because they truly care. They have a high enough moral development to the point where they actually will care about you. I want to list some examples now—some very extreme examples—so you get a very clear idea of what I'm talking about when I say that your attention is the most valuable resource in your life.
Your energy follows your attention, and what you give your attention to has formative powers—or, rather, it has a formative effect on your mind and your life. For example, consider reading a book for 12 hours versus mindlessly scrolling on Instagram for 12 hours. We can see from this very clear extreme difference that one is going to have a profound effect on your mind, while the other one is just going to be sucking your energy, usually for personal gain, for a very selfish motive.
It's kind of sick and twisted, actually. Another good example is practicing meditation for 1 hour a day versus eating hot dogs and watching TV for 1 hour a day. This is going to lead to a huge shift that occurs over time based on these simple choices.
Essentially, you get to choose what you give your attention to. The problem is that humanity has figured out how to hijack your attention. Humanity has figured out how to manipulate you into giving things and people your attention, so that you mechanically buy from them or help them with their own agenda—and their agenda doesn’t actually give you any value.
There's nothing wrong with making money, advertising, or utilizing technology; the problem arises when these things are used in an exclusively selfish way that doesn't actually provide meaningful and healthy value to people. People are just addicted to this junk. The issue, then, is that people have figured out how to manipulate you.
Social media, news and media, junk food, gaming, online shopping, streaming services, etc. —various companies have essentially figured out how to exploit you so that you just get sucked into their products and services, creating addictions within your own psyche. You end up addicted to things that are dysfunctional for you, and you don’t really know any way out—especially since this is baked into our culture.
Most people don’t really know other ways of being in the world; they just see what everyone else is doing, and they mimic that behavior. They watch TV, eat junk food, and scroll on their phones. They don’t meditate, clean up their diets, go on meditation retreats, or self-actualize.
They don’t really know any other possibilities that exist. So, without learning how to protect your attention and give it to what’s meaningful and healthy for you, it will end up getting sucked into something unhealthy rather fast in our modern world. There is so much unhealthy garbage that is incredibly stimulating and easy to latch onto, especially when you have no discipline, impulse control, or vision for your life.
When you're not clear about your values and who you want to become, and when you don’t live your life by a certain set of principles, your psyche becomes easily distracted and infected. You actually have to counter all that noise trying to infect your mind and focus your attention on what’s meaningful and healthy for you. You need some kind of boundary—some way to counteract all the external BS, all the noise that is just trying to infect you for personal gain.
This is why you actually need to know yourself. As the Greeks said, "Know thyself. " You have to uncover your values, take personality tests, read books, study psychology, practice meditation, connect with like-minded individuals, spend time in nature, and eat for nutrition—not to escape yourself.
And here's my favorite: sit in an unstimulating and undistracted room by yourself. Have you ever noticed how you can’t really do this? You jump for stimulation all the time; you always have to be doing something.
Escaping yourself—essentially, this is really what's going on. Our call culture is not really going to change anytime soon; there’s going to continue to be an endless bombardment of advertisements, new games, new TV shows, and new crap for you to spend your money on—new material garbage that doesn't actually do very much for you and just sucks your energy for you to be spending your money on. Right?
It's basically this ridiculous amount of stimulation that's completely unhealthy for you, causes all sorts of mental illness, and creates cracks and holes in your psyche. And it's all being done really for the benefit of others, right? You're actually just being exploited, so you need to figure out how to protect yourself from this so your entire life does not get sucked away.
That's why I said, "Give me a few minutes of your attention, right, and I'll save you years. " I literally talk to people who say they spend ten hours a day scrolling on their phones, right? And it's not just phones; it’s all forms of distractions and just highly stimulating garbage that infects your body, your mind, your awareness—right?
Your whole experience of yourself, really; your being, your soul, right? You need to actually have strong boundaries with this stuff, be aware of this stuff, and actually have structures and habits in your life that counter those things—various principles and values that actually counter that stuff so that you can be healthy. Because we live in an extremely sick world, right?
And, of course, we’re not taught this in school ever; it's not shown in the media, on the news at night, of course not, right? So you need to defend yourself from the numb existence that most people are unfortunately living due to ignorance. You need to defend yourself against the constant bombardment of distractions.
Our culture is built on escaping reality, escaping ourselves, and escaping the present. We can't just be present in our existence; we can't sit in an unstimulating, undistracted room by ourselves without freaking out, right? We get bored, angry; we're just too neurotic.
We're too addicted. We have all these coping mechanisms to just escape and avoid, right? So our culture is just built on escapism and basically the avoidance of unprocessed pain—really from childhood stuff we’ve been running from over and over and over again.
We're in this constant cycle of just pain, avoid, pain, avoid, pain, avoid. And all this emotional pain especially doesn't go anywhere; it gets stored in the body, and it plays itself out in a cyclical fashion. It cycles; it comes back around to bite you in the ass over and over and over again.
You're always avoiding, right? You're never cleaning up what's going on inside you. You remain stuck in a cycle.
So you need to pay attention to how you feel when your attention is absorbed in certain things. Feel the quality of the energy that certain things actually give to you—certain foods, right? When you wake up in the morning, right?
Pay attention to the quality of the energy that waking up and scrolling does for you versus waking up and meditating or waking up and having some water with, you know, squeezing some lemon into it; waking up and going for a run; spending time in nature; waking up and reading or journaling, right? Basically, as you go about your day—giving your attention to certain things—notice the felt experience and the energetic flow between you and the thing that you are interacting with, right? The people, right?
There’s always an energy transaction, basically, between you and what you give your attention to, right? When you really practice a lot of meditation, you get very sensitive to this. You become very aware of this; you can’t ignore this anymore.
This is just your lived experience—it's like the default, right? So notice the quality of the energy that you get from certain things. If it’s just taking from you and what it's giving you is feelings of exhaustion or just dysfunction or sickness, you have to cut that stuff out of your life.
Right? Some obvious examples of that are just like fast food, endless entertainment, endless scrolling, etc. If it gives you energy, right?
It adds vitality to your being, right? Makes your body feel alive, right? Makes your mind feel clear, sharp, lucid, rather than foggy, numb, and dull, right?
Those things are great—that’s like meditation, nature, reading, writing, spending time by yourself, reflecting, you know, in solitude, spending time with healthy people, right? Who actually care about you, right? Interacting with things that want to be giving you energy, right?
Fair energy exchange, right? That’s basically how the world works. There’s always an energy transaction going on, and some people are just trying to scam your energy, right?
You need to interact with people who want to give to you, right? And especially want to interact with people for whom it’s just very natural to be giving value because they’ve transformed themselves into someone who effortlessly provides value. Right?
These people exist, right? You want to interact with habits, foods, etc. , that give to you, right?
Rather than just always taking from you. That’s it for this video. You can apply to work with me one-to-one; the link is in the pinned comment and the description.
Take it easy.
