It's been pretty exciting to watch Svetski's intellectual development over time. I very much liked his Bushido book and have generally been pretty favorable to his takes on things -- even though they can be extreme and rude angry and insulting. (It's not like Den is a stranger to those things!)

...and he's kept pretty quiet recently. Until today:

The last time I posted anything was about three months ago and I can quite proudly say that I have no idea what’s going on in the world, what the current thing is, what flavour of hysteria is tending today, whether the right is mogging the left or vice versa, whether the trannies or trads are winning, or what Musk or Trump recently said or did.
I have no fucking clue. And it’s amazing. It’s one of the best feelings I’ve had in many, many years.

"I’m committed to treating my time and attention like the precious commodity that it is, and not a cheap trinket that I trade for whatever the algo or this ever-pervasive media-machine wants to draw my attention to.""I’m committed to treating my time and attention like the precious commodity that it is, and not a cheap trinket that I trade for whatever the algo or this ever-pervasive media-machine wants to draw my attention to."

In defense of zooning out completely. Hashtag detox

In some small ways I do practice this... there's a HARD RULE of zero news broadcasts in my home (which I have strongly enforced at family homes during the holidays). Also no screens at the dining table. Generally, then, I stay pretty ignorant of random news noise -- which, let's be honest, boil down to catastrophic crimes, murders, or what Orange Man said or Bad Man Putin "wants." It's kind of ridiculous. Dude has a point:

It’s all so fake and ghey. All of it. The so-called “good” content and the rage-bait alike. It’s all bullshit. It’s all a show. It’s all a LARP. None of it is real. It’s just people afraid to actually live in the present. Too afraid to look in the mirror, so they look at the screen or the camera instead.

Getting rid of Twitter isn't the flex it was a few years ago, but it's certainly a good idea to remove it from your phone. (I brought it back some months ago for participating in Twitter Spaces, but honestly who needs that...?)

THIS resonated with me:

[consciously exiting information flows] is the kind of ignorance that is deliberately oblivious to what is going on in the world because none of it matters an iota in the grand scheme of one’s life. It’s the kind of noble, savage and ruthless ignorance that doesn’t even waste energy saying: “I don’t care.” It’s just blissfully above to the noise, present only with what matters, here and now.

Sure, individual events may matter to some people, but because of how we’re wired and how the internet and social media have connected us all, the number of events that can (a) happen and also (b) be brought to our attention is infinite. ...Which in short means that everything matters all the time. But when everything matters all of the time, then the only reaction for the mind and body is to become numb.

I've thought about that a lot over the years... the extreme selection of "newsworthy" events being the things that zoombiefies our minds, making us less informed about the world than more -- even though we're literally watching something that (most of the time) literally happened. It's the constant reminder that shapes our minds into mistakenly believe certain things are crucial/important and others common and risky. I wrote about this in my first article ever for HumanProgress.org in 2019, an article I cringe at reading today (as with most of my the stuff HP puts out these days).

"Your precious life-blood was poured into things you don’t or can’t have, or shit you cannot do anything about.""Your precious life-blood was poured into things you don’t or can’t have, or shit you cannot do anything about."

Tl;dr attention is a market (#1383362), and you're selling yours for way too cheap.