Medium’s Opinion Overload

M.O.O. seems fitting. It’s all starting to sound alike.

Maybe I need to adjust my feed. That’s kind of funny. (Non-grass-fed cows eat “feed”)

Okay, I’m exaggerating when I say “all,” but it did make me wonder about some related mechanisms we humans have — which involve our sense of salience and sensed need to decide.

We aren’t capable of paying attention to everything, so various subroutines in our mind create levels of salience for us to focus on. Some of those are natural, and some are constructed for profit (or politics/movements).

Neither the natural ones nor the constructed ones necessarily provide what we might really want to focus on, assuming some outcomes are way better than others.

Separately, it would seem that we humans would have a built in bias to decide, so that we don’t just stand there contemplating all day and starve or not mate.

And if marketers and influencers know this, then Stralfs know this, according to Bug Stu (currently my best friend).

So we wrote this poem. On the one hand, the “they” in it can refer to human influencers and marketers of any type — philosophical, political, or material. Or “they” can refer to The Stralfs, which is a little less villainizing toward real people and whole cultures/zeitgeists.

Oh, the Hand referred to below is just the Invisible Hand that Adam Smith referred to in a couple of 18th century books where he wrote about everything, including our sense of morality and economics in the most basic sense.

I’m keeping this short, so more explanation might be in the comments later.

What If I…

What if…
What if I…
What if I…decline to decide.
It would seem to expose
a reliance they hide.

What if serving our wants,
we’re observing for once,
is reversed in the roles
of who hides and who hunts.

Did I decide?
What’s that word hide?
Decide…
Decide…
And want…

I have.
I have tried…
to peel back the hide
of that Hand that’s so blind
to drives from inside.

And I’ve seen that if I…
that if I…
that if I…
attend to their sly
tricks they tend to deny,
and keep my own wants
despite what I might buy,
not wants that they serve
from their tray as I lie,
and not what I deserve,
in that way that they pry,
and sell what will sell
that will not satisfy,
and push in my mind
who we are, who am I,
that Siren Of Salience,
“Help,” I have cried,
well I…
well I…
contend we will find,
a dystopic drive
of an alien kind.

Excited by More
and its ties?
How they bind.
I’ve decided deciding’s
how they keep us confined.