Most people won’t read this, and of those few who do most will stop after a paragraph or two because reading has become too hard for them. They are already doomed. Meditate on that, even if you don’t keep reading.

The most immediate and accessible antidote to modern demoralization and pessimism is reading. And I’m not talking about reading short tweets or even short articles like this one. What is happening to the mind of the individual (and by that, the whole mass of humanity) by removing any substantive reading and replacing it with memes and short, scrollable videos, is amazing to witness – if it weren’t so horrible and sad. And it isn’t by accident.

The capacity for abstract, creative, original thought is being erased daily – and right before our eyes. There is no trickery to it.

Face it, if you’re reading my articles regularly you are WAY ahead of the masses who will never take a few minutes a week to exercise more brain cells than it takes to grab a can of pringles and scroll through TikToks and Facebook Reels for micro-hits of dopamine. The textbook brainwashing of the masses is so obvious and advanced that it can only be interdicted individually and with earnest intention.

You say, “Well, I’m one of the 1% and I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t have Tiktok or Facebook, and I live in a glorious happy bubble of social media-less bliss.” Good on you if that is true, but they’re getting at you in other ways if you don’t read. They’re even shortening baseball games now.

While I do kind of like the pitch clock thing speeding up baseball, in the long run it is another cave to the shorter attention spans of moderns. The end of this slippery slope is TikTok baseball where every batter gets one pitch thrown by a robot and there are only 3 fielders, and they are all wearing clown outfits and making spaghetti. Then you’ll scroll to a politician using one-word Manchurian triggers that give you your dose of outrage or pleasure so that you will attack your neighbor when you are needed.

In every field of endeavor, in every area of entertainment, in politics, in commerce, in modern lightweight consumable religious media… in every aspect and corner of every interaction you have with the world today, there is an intentional plan to modify and shrink your attention span and to feed to you your ideas and thoughts faster and with less resistance from your depleted ability to reason. If they can micro-dose you on boredom they can mitigate and direct your outrage.

You have to read, and you have to force yourself to do it. And you have to read things that challenge you or give you pause for thought. Your everyday romance novels, cozy murder mysteries, or spy novels won’t do it. Your attention span is being purposefully and intentionally shrunk so that you become, daily, no more than a chicken pecking a blue dot or a red dot for your dose of some neurotransmitting chemical making you a robot reacting predictably instead of a thinking human.

I lost 95% of you who started this article because it is “too long” and “uses big words.” The rest of you 5% need to make a plan because your life and the lives of your children and their children rest on it.

To that end, I’ve started a kind of blog and future podcast if you want to read things that challenge you, enhance your attention span, and cause you to think. Of course, I’ll keep writing my columns here, but if you want a larger dose of the antidote, maybe check this out: https://michaelbunker.substack.com/

I’ll be adding stuff there weekly.

Have a great rest of your week!

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.