_bear_bull

This is painful to write, but I need to get it out... For years, my “news” came almost entirely from left-leaning podcasts and media outlets. The other day I scrolled back through my podcast history from that era and it honestly made my stomach drop. Thousands of hours of my life, just gone. Hours I’ll never get back, the vast majority of it I know now wasn’t even information… it was just propaganda packaged as news. I’m writing this because I want to warn you, because I wish someone had warned me. It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived inside it just how insanely bubble-like the grip on your perception of reality becomes. How it doesn’t feel AT ALL like you’re being shaped to think a certain way, it just feels like you’re being informed and in the process... you feel morally superior and smarter than "them" (the conservatives). For me the routine was simple: A couple minutes of CNN with my morning coffee. A “breaking news” push notification from the NYT. Pod Save America or The Daily on my commute. They all said the same stuff!!! Same framing. Same villains. Same moral conclusions from the news. It's literally the right-wing meme of "the script has gone out!" It's so so true. Yeah the companies were different, but they all had essentially an identical script, all corroborated by experts. In hindsight, it's a freaking miracle I ever broke out of it. It's a near-perfectly-sealed echo chamber. And now, as I'm scrolling through my past, it looks like a record of someone slowly being put to sleep. Episode after episode. Commute after commute. Day after day. Just thousands of hours of my life with headphones in, letting someone else narrate reality to me. And I'm sick with regret. Because I know that a part of me liked it. Like I was smarter, kinder, and more evolved because I just knew so much more, and was on the team of empathy! I was wrong. And I can’t rewind who I was in those years. But I’m writing this because I KNOW there are people still living in that trance. I talk to you (yes, you know who you are) often. And I know you think you're just “staying informed,” and I hear in your voice the moral superiority, the immediate reaction to take offense on behalf of some group or people... Please. Please wake up before you lose years of your life the way I did. Because one day you’ll look back and realize the biggest thing they stole from you wasn't just your time... They stole the truth.