3026

The internet was the first medium where the general public could manipulate text and images. Prior to that, media was fixed in the form of printed books, magazines, and newspapers. But the internet allowed us to make our versions of these, and perhaps in the process, allowed us to fool ourselves–in the sense that we were perhaps pretending to be someone we were not. But as I've said before–and is one of my other Dynaxioms–pretending precedes becoming. For a while in the early internet, this was effective, where people were trying out different personalities, and becoming those new personalities. I think it's imperative that we have pretend in order to try out different possibilities. But there can be too many possibilities, which would increase the possibility that we could be fooled by some of them. But perhaps it is better to fool yourself than to be fooled by someone else. But nobody thought before the internet in the days of print publishing that they were necessarily being fooled. Now it seems like everywhere you look there's an erosion of trust.

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Rick Hanson: "The frequent discrepancy between the rewards you expected to get from a want, and what it actually feels like to fulfill it. Similarly, notice that the anticipated pain from the things you want to avoid - especially things that would be good for you to open to or go after - is usually worse than the discomfort you actually feel. In effect, your brain is routinely lying to you, promising more pleasure and more pain than you will actually experience. The reason is that the pleasure and pain circuits of the brain are ancient and primitive, and they manipulated our ancestors to do things for their survival by overselling them about apparent opportunities and over-frightening them about apparent risks."