Kill Traditional Media

No I’m not suggesting that traditional media is dead or finished, even though you don’t need me to tell you they are doing a fine job digging their grave. What I have done and highly recommend it to everyone is to put a drastic end to every negative message that comes your way. If you are surrounded by negative people, move away; if you listen to the morning news in your car, watch the nightly news when you get home, read newspapers during the day – STOP. It’s slowly grinding away at your soul and will seriously compromise your future in the present era of “crisis” after “crisis”.

Last month, I took this step – stopped listening to all the news whether on radio, television or newspapers. I now carry my iPhone with headphones ready to play anytime I am sitting in a room, cafe or in a queue at the bank and hear people whine about the economy or anything else related or unrelated. If you think that the financial crisis is the worst crisis to hit us in years then think again. Most of us haven’t yet come to terms with the mother of all crisis’ – the coming to terms with the fact that no one really understand the world we live in.

We were brought up to believe that our banks were the foundations of our existence, where we placed our money – we never even questioned how safe it was. Then we found out that banks can sink quicker than your local grocery with the added value of knowing first through the media and by which time it’s probably too late. We also found out that they only guarantee a certain (relatively small amout) of the value of your deposits.

Then we found out through our education whether at school, through our parents, or in best selling books, that the big bad nationalized communist economies were a threat to us. We needed to spread the faith of democracy, liberated markets and free speech. Our governments want us to believe that this is only a hitch – actually they are nationalizing industries that are technically bankrupt. I guess that’s different from the rest of the uncivilized world that tend to nationalize profitable businesses.

We were led to believe that private schools and their excellence of education were a priority for any parent that had that insane amount of money readily available to invest in the future of their children. I got my share of education last week when I was at the receiving end of the most arrogant and backward director of one of the top private schools in Portugal. I never thought someone responsible for the education of our children could be so stuck in the past, lacking all transparency, honesty and humility. Screw them, in fact screw him. I’m having no part in that.

Ironic that most of the messed up things in our society are caused by the “intelligent”, “smart” and “highly educated” quadrant of our society.

So no news? Have I chosen to live in Noddy land? No. I searched for the websites that have quality content in my interests and then I pulled the RSS feeds for them. I made a list of all the words that were of no interest to me: layoffs, Iraq, terrorism, crisis, doom, etc. Then I fed those RSS feeds into Yahoo Pipes placing filters to ensure that none of that crap came through. I’m tweaking them as I go along. I didn’t choose to be ignorant. I chose to be informed. I didn’t become insensitive. I can only imagine the hardship that those that have suddenly lost their jobs must be going through, but I can do nothing to change that. I can only ensure that I do not contribute to that so I chose to make a difference – to be different and to help everyone else climb out of their comfort zone. It’s what got us here in the first place. I want to be in a different zone.

I am positive, focused and happy. A work colleague sent me this:

“When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”
John F. Kennedy