Touch Grass (Test Impressions)
Plus a lesson from 'Civil War' to resist division and joining Geeky Stoics Book Club
“In a given year, you meet (dozens) or more people you spend enough time with to appraise their character. Think about them: How many do you think are decent, normal people who do volunteer work, help shovel after a storm, look out for family and neighbors?”
This is a question asked often by Jim VandeHei of Axios when he’s speaking to audiences across the country, and it’s an important one. Do you think of the real human beings in your personal network as someone who’d chip in when there’s a need? I do. Most certainly. How can it be then, that when I think of online personalities and digital acquaintances, I am less certain?
Perhaps, it’s because I don’t know them. Perhaps, all I have to operate on is my impressions of those people.
What they look like, how they dress, the way they speak.
Is it possible that our media ecosystem is designed to obscure reality? It’s not a novel suggestion. In fact, most people understand this. We call this the “echo chamber”, and everyone more or less chooses which one they want to be in. In the echo chambers, America is a deeply divided place with a civic culture broken to pieces by radicalism and distrust.
Before you continue….
Paid Subscribers to Geeky Stoics should scroll to the very bottom of the post for login information to our monthly First Friday video hangout. This happens tomorrow at 12:30 PM EST, May 3rd.
Geeky Stoics’ next book club is on C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Sign up below by clicking the button if you’re interested. We’ll meet on Sunday evenings in May and discuss this iconic book about good & evil and also be joined by some special guest experts on Lewis and Tolkien.
About that division….What if it’s not true? What if this thing we feel and experience in our online lives is an illusion? Check out this survey by AP-NORC, which shows the opposite of what so many expect when it comes to public opinion on heated issues of the day.
Remember, test your impressions. Your focus determines your reality.
If you want to live in a world of distrust, radicalism, and division, then you keep doing what you’re doing online and in your news consumption habits. If you don’t want that, maybe…as they say…touch grass.
“From the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, ‘You are an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Next, examine and test it by the rules you possess, the first and greatest of which is this—whether it belongs to the things in our control or not in our control, and if the latter, be prepared to respond, ‘It is nothing to me.’”
—Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1.5
More on Alex Garland’s Civil War + video hangout links for Paid Subscribers can be found below. Have a great weekend my friends.
I couldn’t get this out of my mind while I was sitting in the movie theater for Alex Garland’s, Civil War, starring Kirsten Dunst: The disconnect between public perception about the movie and the movie itself. It’s a brilliant and beautiful movie that I can’t recommend enough. The movie got a rough reaction when the trailers first dropped. Commentators and Twitter-dwellers were suspicious of the political intentions of the movie, which is par for the course for a film premised on America’s political divisions devolving into total war.
Yes, the movie is about a second American Civil War. No, it has nothing to do with the political headlines of the day. Remarkably, the movie never even addresses the reason for the war. Audiences are just dropped into the final weeks of the conflict, at a time when people don’t even remember what is was all for in the first place.
First impressions were all about journalists being the main characters.
Must be a puff-piece film for pious journos.
Must be an anti-Trump January 6th propaganda movie.
Texas and California allied in a fictional civil war? Impossible.
How can people live like this? Just making baseless assumptions about the message or practicality of a movie on 2-minute trailers? In the end, A24’s Civil War was nothing like what the Twitter Class said it would be. I almost let them fool me and set my impression of the movie without seeing it.
It’s funny. Civil War is about photojournalism in the heat of war. You have characters working film cameras and snapping a hundred shots in any given situation, collecting all sorts of information in incredibly stressful situations and under duress. Then there are quiet moments where they look through the film, knowing that out of every 100 images, only one will maybe be worth publishing.
What is that if not the perfect analogy for all the impressions we receive about the world on any given day? We sort through mountains of shit “photographs” every day, looking hard and with discernment for the one that is true. The one impression or image that is representative of objective reality.
Geeky Stoics video hangout for First Friday
Save this to your calendar!
First Friday Hangout - GS
Friday, May 3 · 12:30 – 1:15pm EST
Time zone: America/New_York EST
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/vmq-yesu-soc
'How can people live like this?' Indeed. How can people feel so much anger a) over something they are only assuming about and b) when there is enough to be legitimately, almost universally, angry about? There's so much else to do with your time. (Like watching good movies and reading 'Geeky Stoics' posts!)