What Do You Consume?

(Repost) A few years ago, I realized that I was consuming more than food: TV, internet news, billboards, video ads, webpage ads—it was all being absorbed by me and having an effect on me.

You know what I did? I made it a point to stop looking at all of that stuff: When driving, I’d put the visor down so the billboards wouldn’t be visible to me; I’d put my hand over internet ads; I wouldn’t look at or listen to TV—ever; if a webpage were full of ads and I wanted to read the page content, I’d copy and paste the entire page into a blank document and read it from the document. Essentially, any time I was presented with information that was in someone else’s best interest for me to consume, I did not consume it. And it was—and still is—a game changer internally.

At the beginning, I quickly learned that the act of looking was a compulsive, habitual behavior in me—I felt magnetically drawn to look. (You can try this for yourself; try not looking at billboard and see how you feel.) In me, this behavior of consuming was tied to various beliefs that I held, so I had to do some self-inquiry on those beliefs.

It was worth it though; it freed me from experiencing the negative emotion that consuming that information would have otherwise evoked. And I live in a very happy world now. 😊

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