Don’t Let Billboards Ghostwrite Your Mantras
There is messaging all around us; most of it will bum you out.
The internet is a cauldron of horrors, fomenting anxiety and distress. Middling Content helps readers take ownership of their media diet to stay centered and sane. Subscribe for our weekly newsletters, where we bring data and theory together to provide tools and frameworks to help you take back control of your eyes and ears so you can achieve the life you want.
Have you had a good conversation with yourself lately?
A 2008 study found that people are talking to themselves around 26% of the time.1 So you probably talk to yourself pretty often. But I’m asking about a good, high-quality conversation. When you talk to yourself, what kinds of things do you say? What questions do you ask? What do you hope for? What do you worry about?
Most people can recognize aspects of other people in their inner voice -- often people from their childhood, like parents or teachers or other adults. These unique influences on our inner voices can be particularly noticeable when we interact with other people with different inner voices. We recognize this influence so much that it’s a trope for a therapist to ask “so, tell me about your parents…” and then take out a notepad, preparing to take copious notes. But parents are just one of several sources!
If we want to have more useful conversations with ourselves, then it’s worth understanding more broadly the messaging sources that ultimately train and direct our inner voice. I’ve drawn three primary external sources out below, and perhaps they will be reflective of your own self-talk sources as well.
Families: In growing up, we spend a lot of time receiving messaging from our parents or primary guardians. With roughly 8800 hours in a year, that’s maybe our waking hours (~4400 hrs/yr) as young children, under half of our waking hours (~2200 hrs/yr) as school age children, and a few hours daily (~1100 hrs/yr) as teenagers; and as adults, depending on proximity, that could be something in the neighborhood of ~100 hrs/yr.
Communities: When we’re growing up, schooling is the main source for this. Public schools provide all Americans on average ~1200 hours of education per year2, where we receive a lot of messaging as well -- some from teachers and some from friends. And eventually, our school community is traded in for a work community. This is a lot of time, and as a result I know I can identify aspects of my inner voice that derive from teachers and managers. This is in part how the impact of teachers and leaders cascades through society!
The Media: Last but not least, we have our “screen time”. By patching together a mix of sources across age groups and screens, I found that people go from consuming under an hour of media content when we are under 2 years old to consuming nearly nine hours a day in our 20s3 -- bringing together mobile phone data, computer data and television data.4
If I project this out, these estimates suggest that I, as a 35-year-old, have spent perhaps 2X as much time receiving messaging from media than I have from family. This is also more media-sourced messaging than from family and community combined.
In some ways this is good news. I’ve had more agency in selecting the media I consume than my family or schooling, though I’ve been lucky in both. And even so, the messaging family provides us as children suits a particular context; it shapes an inner voice that helps us through adolescence and into independent adulthood. But after we achieve independence and adulthood, we may grow to ask new things from our inner voices. And just as we grow baby teeth only to lose them and grow new adult teeth, we have the power to train a new voice that is more helpful in later phases of life. Our jiminy cricket can be less of a moralizer/motivator, and more of a mindful moderator. And choosing how we spend our mediated time (or time engaging with media) is the best way that we can train this capacity.
I started the Medi(a)tation Mondays in part because I believe that digging deeper into my own media data can help me identify ways to assess and improve the quality of my media diet, pursuing more content that aligns with my goals both as an individual and more broadly as a human. And I’ve made this choice because I believe in the following three statements.
Most Media Tries To Make Me Feel Bad
Changing My Media Diet Is Possible
Healthier Media Will Help Me Feel Better
Let’s walk through each of those points in this first ever Theory Thursday!5
1.) Most Media Tries To Make Us Feel Bad
The Problem with “Selling the Problem”
You may have noticed I added a new opening to the newsletter, highlighting the modern plight of being online. There’s an old adage in marketing: “don’t sell the problem, sell the solution”. And because I am trying to grow subscribers to said newsletter, this tip is useful to me. But this problem-centered style of messaging is also at the core of why the internet can make us feel so miserable.
The Ads Make You Feel Bad
We’re being advertised to constantly. Anywhere you go, pretty much everyone is trying to sell you something. This is evident in all the ads we are exposed to on a daily basis. And ads can be very heavy-handed in how they center problems -- think of an infomercial for the food processor, where an actor is fumbling through cutting carrots, carving awkward chunks of vegetables while mutilating himself. The more difficult and miserable the problem looks, the more appealing the solution is. If you make the problem seem terrible enough, people will be desperate for just about any solution. Such is the art of strategic sales.
Maybe we would be okay if it was only the midroll and banner ads that we do our best to ignore or avoid. But this just the beginning.
The Newsmakers Make You Feel Bad
In his book, To Sell as Human, Dan Pink claims "Like it or not, we're all in sales now. Whether we're employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others." And when everyone sells, everyone is centering the problem. Politicians of the world are selling visions for the future, so it should be no surprise that they are increasingly drawing our attention to the problems of the world.
You can probably think of a politician you dislike and you cannot imagine how anyone could possibly support them. And usually, their supporters are less aligned around the repugnant politician than they are aligned against the problem they’ve sold. The newsworthy folks who play this game well often succeed, and it results in more and more problem-centered media, driving viewers to adopt a more problem-centered sense of the world.
And these doom-and-gloomer types always have an easy time getting coverage. Because the covering publications have interests in keeping the vibes in the muck too.
The Journalists Make You Feel Bad
Whether it’s a profit-driven channel seeking revenue or a state-run outfit seeking relevance, media outlets generally understand that they need to center problems to compete for clicks. If a person has only a few minutes before work to catch up on the news, they will prioritize items that feel urgent. As the parlance goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.” Even in a world before server farms were algorithmically serving up panic fuel, ink-and-paper editorial teams operated on more-or-less the same principles.
In my work for a nonprofit that measures wellbeing levels globally, I was talking with journalists asking for advice on how to increase coverage, and a major piece of advice was to focus not on “happiness” (an unserious issue) but on unhappiness or despair or depression. And the shift away from advertising to direct subscription revenue only has increased the need for seriousness and severity; they want you to be so aware of the problems in the world that you see their reporting as essential, so you’re willing to part with your hard-earned cash.6
And they are doing everything they can to get your subscription support, because their ad revenue has largely been usurped by the tech companies. And you’ll be unsurprised to hear how they tend to impact your mood.
The Tech Companies Make You Feel Bad
We’re living through historical leaps forward in computation, and these new technologies are being employed primarily to sort the affairs of the world in just the right sequence to keep you glued to your smartphone. To buzz your pocket with a notification at exactly the right time. To prominently feature the profile pictures of your optimal peers as social proof. To create an experience that compels your constant attention.
Gamification was supposed to make everything a game, but the game isn’t so much fun as it is a constant wearying competition. Like rats anointed by lab technicians with the capacity for intracranial self-stimulation, we compulsively paw at our dopamine trigger. While we are served engagement bait of both inflammatory and mundane varieties. Anything to keep you on platform.
So perhaps you can escape the news instead? Kick your feet up and escape into works of fiction? Not so fast…
The Entertainment Makes You Feel Bad
For a while, there was an idea that Netflix had brought on a “golden age in television”, but I’ve never been personally convinced that this has panned out. Never before has serialized video content so plainly been focused on renewing subscription renewals. Just this past month, people were deeply frustrated when season two of Squid Game led only to a cruel cliff-hanger, rewarding hours of viewership only with a hook to prevent you from cancelling your subscription; this is crass commerce. You can try the cinema instead, but now the films too are now secretly incomplete.
The classic 1001 Arabian Nights anthology is framed by the storyteller Scheherazade who -- to avoid being beheaded by her murderous husband -- must tell stories so gripping that he keeps her alive so he can hear the resolution. This is the world platforms find themselves in, doing everything they can to maintain their audience and relevance. They must captivate or they will die. And we, their viewer-captives, can only endure. No story is merely a story, but is a tactic designed to push you further through a monetization funnel. The funnel has no happy ending; the funnel keeps you on the edge of your seat never satiated, always awaiting more. The IP will be milked and milked until it is unceremoniously cancelled and then, after an appropriate mourning period, rehashed and reheated so the cycle continues forever.
This was not always the way. It used to be commonplace on television to find 44-minute stories that would get us invested in new characters and their journey, to see them learn and grow with twists and turns, and ultimately to see the situation resolve.
Maybe you can still find rare content outside the mainstream that is in-itself good. There are still challenges.
The Makers Make You Feel Bad
The people that make things for the internet are wonderful people. But they are unusual people. And the ways in which they are unusual shapes the internet as an ecosystem, and how it makes you feel. These dimensions are beyond those like Noam Choamsky’s four filters, where owners, advertisers, experts and public limit conversation.
For example, movies are expensive and difficult to make; movies consequently represent the viewpoints of those with resources and who seek to do difficult things. Algorithmic short-form platforms may seem safer because the content is low cost to creators, but building and training an algorithm requires the participation of millions to billions of people, which often requires resources, coercion, or both, and they have pro-creative incentives to keep the party going on their platforms. Plus, those that create unpaid content can have be motivated by their own insecurities and need for affirmation, so prominently featuring their voices in your media diet can unnecessarily distress you.7 Creations are inherently pro-creativity; I myself am not sure what the right production/consumption balance is, but the very nature that much media is created means that you're consuming content that biases toward creation.
So you can avoid professional creators entirely and opt to surround yourself with your friends.
This is probably the best choice. But still, sadly, imperfect.
Your Friends Love You, But Still Make You Feel Bad
Even among friends, particularly on the internet there’s still the mundane “sales” of everyone trying to convince you that they have everything figured out and are living their best lives. People just don’t post selfies with those blank dead-eyed faces that photo subjects had back in the days of slow-exposure cameras. I won’t be making blank dead-eyed faces at you either, but I will at least be honest that I find the pursuit of happiness to be a real struggle. By subscribing to this newsletter, I’m not sharing any secret wisdom; I’m just creating a space where you can observe me attempt to analyze my media environment and take greater control of it.
The ads, the newsmakers, the journalists, the tech companies, the “entertainment”, the makers and yes even your friends -- these all can make media a destructive force in your life. And this is why, unless you are deliberate about creating a media diet for yourself that centers the messages you want centered, you will likely struggle.
You probably pick what to watch in many different ways. We want to know what’s going on in the world. Our friend recommends a movie. An all-knowing algorithm pushes us some short-form videos we like. We’re partway through a TV series, and we need to know what happens to the protagonist left hanging on a proverbial cliff. These aren’t bad reasons to watch anything, but if we don’t deliberately prioritize content that makes us feel empowered and centered, we will very rarely end up receiving the nourishing messaging that positions us to do best.
There’s a good chance you probably don’t want to change what you’re consuming, because you like what you consume. But fortunately, liking new things is often a matter of “mere exposure”.
2.) A Better Media Diet Is Possible
How Humans Mostly Avoid Eating Poisonous Mushrooms
The good news in all this is that we live in a time with more media options than any other time in history so far. And so much of changing our media environment is just a matter of putting some new stuff in front of our faces. There is some challenge in finding new stuff; there is a great challenge in breaking ourselves from our existing patterns. Even though we can tell the old media diet makes us miserable, we also kind of… like it? How can that be?
Neuroaesthetics is a field that explores the neuroscience underpinning our artistic tastes and desires, first introduced to me in The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee. For example, one popular neuroaesthetic hypothesis would be that humans are predisposed to like blue because it signals water or red/yellow/green because they often mark fruit bearing plants.
We can look to neuroaesthetics to understand why we see beauty in the things we currently enjoy. In short, our efficiency-seeking neurocircuitry likes consistency. The more cognitively complex a thing is, the more burdensome it is to carry with us, and the more it displaces other pieces of information. It’s possible this kind of effect explains the prevalence of the art’s golden ratio or music’s pentatonic scales across distinct cultures. We are drawn to elegance and simplicity in the same way that sweet foods provide needed glucose and salty foods provide needed electrolytes that help us sweat healthily to maintain homeostasis in warm climates. Things that are familiar don’t require much new processing; they have a high glycemic index, they are sweet and ready for utility.
This kind of “familiarity bias” is present in how we see beauty. The recipe for a star back in the old Hollywood days was someone who was largely moderate/familiar, but had a single differentiated feature. Too many differentiating features, and a person becomes cluttered and overwhelming to look at. But just one differentiated feature adds charm and brandability, while the mostly moderate aspects drive familiarity and thus likeability. This principle explains not just classic cinema examples like Marilyn Monroe’s beauty mark or Humphrey Bogart’s lisp, but also current examples like the hot rodent boyfriend archetype’s… rodentness.
The expression “a sight for sore eyes” is less about your eyes, but more about the cognitive load of said “sight”. Generally, it is the face of someone you care about, who you’ve looked at or imagined so much that their visage has been burned into your brain. And there is really not much cognitive labor in setting your eyes on them and doing that simple work of “seeing”. It then follows that if you want to find something or someone beautiful, you simply need to spend more time looking at and pondering it/them.8
Indeed, “familiarity bias” is why people tend to rate AI-generated poetry more favorably and why people find AI-generated human images to be tragically hot. An LLM will produce highly derivative work, providing highly expectable outcomes. Many consider “beauty” to be a kind of cosmic truth awakened in our souls, but indeed it may just be our body signalling to us that we’ve come across something before and -- since it hasn’t killed us on previous occasions -- it is likely safe.
One can see how a bias-toward-the-familiar could be reinforced. For those who reach adulthood, the choices they’ve made have served them well. So given the choice between the familiar and the unusual, we stick with the tried and true choice. “Now is not the time to try new mushrooms”, our risk-averse evolutionary impulse directs us.
There is a less desirable side to this system of taste-making, though. Along with an affinity for the familiar, we also foster its more sinister twin -- a fear of the novel and unfamiliar.
But if we buy into the logic of neuroaesthetics, then the theory can also guide us out of the problem it created -- familiarity has trapped us but new familiarity can set us free.
Pal, Wash Your Brain
The concept of “shifting the overton window” became a common reference in political discourse of the late twentyteens, but the psychological concept I’m more familiar with for this is called the “mere-exposure effect”. They are similar concepts. Seeing a thing makes it more familiar, familiarity makes it more safe, safety is a thing we value that drives affinity, and affinity provides a basis for action. Individual exposures have small effects, but multiple exposures have stacking effects. This is why billions9 are spent each day forcing content into your eyes and ears. It works.
It follows, then, that so long as you have agency in what is put in front of your face, these same forces used by powerful media companies to shape your attitudes and behaviors are tools you can use to become the person you wish to be. Ultimately, this becomes a kind of DIY brain surgery. It is certainly an undertaking. I’ve personally seen benefits from exposure therapy with regard to OCD and phobias. It’s certainly no fun exposing yourself to anxiety-inducing unfamiliarities, but the unpleasant process has favorable results. The payoff can be worth it!
I find it helpful to contemplate how newborn babies look around the world, unable to really make sense of much in terms of “seeing.” It’s a process that takes time to learn, though since babies lack nuanced communication skills we don’t necessarily understand how they experience this intermediate method of sensing the world. The world is chaos for a while, but slowly we make sense of it. And when we later see or hear things that reinforce our existing concepts, we feel an experience of beauty.
I’ll admit I’m generally skeptical of evolutionary explanations, so if those parts of neuroaesthetics are off-putting to you, I understand. When provided on their own, they are mere stories or theories. But having worked in ad effectiveness research, I’ve analyzed how hundreds of thousands of people respond to ads. And I’ve seen it: exposure drives not just familiarity with products that are advertised, but those exposed feel more affinity for them and are more likely to pursue them. Though effect sizes vary across platforms and creatives, it is a general truth.
This is all to say: If you think you love your current media diet and could never change, you are underestimating yourself. Exposure drives familiarity drives affinity drives behavior. You can program yourself however you want. If you change what you consume, it will become your new normal, and it will be just as enjoyable as whatever you consumed before. It just takes some time to readjust toward a new healthier media diet.
3.) Intentional Media Usage Help Us Feel Better
The Promises of Mindhole Management
I spent several years travelling and trying to understand how media operates differently in different places, and it is actually somewhat odd how little focus there is in the US on mindful media usage. We are a country that often expresses deep concern about propagandistic media environments abroad, but there isn’t much guidance on how we can use our agency to make the most of the media available to us. The USDA provides us MyPlate (as a replacement for the Food Pyramid), but certainly the information and ideas we expose ourselves to matters as much as the food we consume?
Contemporary American culture almost encourages us to just take in the most available information to us without much thought or reflection. In many cultures, the voices and messages they expose themselves to have been tested on generations upon generations for over a millennia. The messages we tend to expose ourselves to are completely untested, serve the narrow interests of strangers, and we saturate ourselves in them so much that some jingles haunt us forever.
When I was visiting monasteries in Bhutan, a country that puts happiness at the center of its policies, I was really interested in how they used the “dzongkha” -- a half-monastery/half-fortress public space in every city that serves a mix of political, social, and spiritual functions. Part of the spiritual practice of Buddhism in Bhutan, though, includes the chanting of mantras, which is a more kind of deliberate inner-voice-training process that we tend to lack. While the US is a place that lets us take individual ownership of how we consume media, the loudest and shiniest media will draw us into its orbit if we don’t take specific effort.
What we’re trying to achieve with intentional media use is not radically outside outcomes humans have achieved for themselves in history. You can still have an authentic and informed voice that simply is not so soaked in negativity. It’s just a matter of tweaking what you put in your eyes and ears.
How are you using your 9 hours a day of screen time Maybe a quick newsletter or two a week from Middling Content could help you get more out of it? Subscribe below and next Theory Thursday, I’ll dig into a four-prong framework for humanist aesthetics that I developed after dividing the world’s 8 billion people into four equi-populous similarly-perspectived quadrants. It provides a system of “media macronutrients” that I employ to assess my own “healthy media usage”! See you there!
Heavey, C. L., and Hurlburt, R. T. (2008). The phenomena of inner experience. Conscious. Cogn. 17, 798–810. (Sometimes on Theory Thursday, I will have fancy academic footnotes in my posts! Here’s a link to the paper! Figure 2 shows the frequency of inner experiences that 30 research subjects were experiencing, such as self-talk, visualization, feelings, etc.)
180 school days per year on average, with between 6-7 hours of schooling per day. Source: Wikipedia.
Pulling from the Bureau of Labor Statistics's amazing American Time Use Survey as well as Phone Screen Time Statistics pulled by a company called Harmony Health IT (that actually has a pretty solid methodology). For young people, I drew on Common Sense Media’s studies on screen time for children under 8 and a separate study on screen time for 12- to 18-year-olds. Patching together these different methodologies does make me miss my old days working with Nielsen data!
As a child I lived overseas where they didn’t have much in terms of live children’s programming, but my grandfather would tape and mail to my mom. So I expect maybe 50% of my media consumption in the early days was The Land Before Time, providing a solid foundation for doomerist existential discourse of our modern era.
It’s still Thursday somewhere, so please humor me and consider this sent in some part of Greater Thursday.
The best example of a publication “selling the problem” was WaPo’s “democracy dies in darkness”, though these days that reads less as a warning and more as a polite notice or perhaps an apology.
After writing this, I was like “Oh wait… is this me?” And I think it’s not. (1) I intend for this exploration to result in paid tools I can promote and monetize. (2) A friend once told me that launching a newsletter is “cringe”, and I think they are probably mostly right and people find this kind of self-broadcasting odd and annoying. (3) As much as people complain about the big media institutions like Google and Facebook, I get way more social validation when I talk about the work I’ve done with them versus the fact that “I’ve launched my own Substack”.
I often think about how before screens and mass photography, couples used to be the people of opposite gender they would look at most in the world, and so they would be each other’s default form -- and consequently they would likely be each other's most beautiful person.
Over $1.2 trillion USD per year in 2025! Or ~$0.41 per person per day. Source: Statista.