Don’t fall for it. Let go of the bait.

A kind and gentle friend fell for a link to content on YouTube. He reacted, and with good intentions, he sent it to me.

I think we all tend to react to what the Internet spoon-feeds us. It has become mindless and habitual. I am no different. We are all doing our best to navigate.

This reminds me of a dream I had some years ago: A farmer in business attire with his pitchfork was tossing hay to feed the horse in the barn. The horse’s front was inside the barn, and its back end was outside over a well-dressed buffet table. Folks were helping themselves to what was served on the buffet table. The farmer proudly grinned at me and said, “What do you think?”

I try to avoid watching or reacting to spoon-feed stuff on YouTube, social media, commercials, or so-called news anymore. Alas, sometimes I still fall for it and take the bait! Still learning. Always learning.

Under the guise of educating, informing, guiding, or even uplifting, their intentions are to receive your attention and your clicks by triggering your anxieties, fears, anger, and insecurities.

Scroll through social media and news sites and others like YouTube, and take note of content creators’ craftily phrased content titles and their AI images to illustrate their content. Notice that they always trigger something that causes your insides to rise. They are mindfully crafted to manipulate the human ego of anxieties, fears, anger, insecurities, judgement, condemnation, and divisiveness. Our human emotions are their money-generating crops.

There is a lot of money to be made playing this game. They are profiting because we allow them to by giving up our power to them with just one reaction and a simple click to dive right into their trap. Their profit-making quagmire. The ugliness of capitalism.

Don’t fall for it. Let go of the bait.

The power is yours.

Namaste