Don't Outsource Your Beliefs To Influencers

There's a reason they call them "influencers".

They are the people using social media to convince a large audience to think and act a certain way. To convince followers to desire to a certain way of life. To convince you to take a specific action whether explicitly or implicitly.

A lot of influencers are well intentioned.

And even if they weren't, the "niche" communities they influence are typically small enough that it doesn't have a great impact on the entirety of your total worldview. They influence the type of protein powder you buy, the brand of yoga outfit you wear, and the brand of tech accessaries you choose to use.

Small and narrow scoped influence.

But a problem arises when you start allowing these influencers to impact your beliefs on everything.

It’s a slippery slope when what you wear becomes the path to who you aspire to be like, the words you use to communicate, the ideas you find meaningful, and in growing cases, the people you think you should vote for.

That's when it become dangerous. That's when you unwittingly start giving up your free will and agency.

Stop letting strangers on the internet dictate your entire personality and belief systems.

The systematic outsourcing of our beliefs to the “influencer” class is one of a growing number of major reasons why so many people are mentally ill and unhappy these days.

Attempting to emulate the lives of others instead of finding your own path and beliefs is the quickest way to unhappiness. It’s also the quickest way to living a life without freedom.

Rapid Fire

• Work All Over the World Without Ruining It: Ethics for Digital Nomads - An interesting perspective on the impact of remote workers as a “gentrifying force” around the world. There’s no doubt that a byproduct of cost of living arbitrage is that cultures will blend and fuse together. Some of that will be good and some will be bad. This is an example of the new social class divide forming between people that can easily relocate and those that cannot. Think about it: how does the perception of gentrification impact the policy choices these two groups advocate for?

• Compounding Optimism - “Most new ideas and inventions are pretty bland on their own. But when you mix several of them together, you can get magic.” “Small ideas mixing and compounding into big ones – that’s what really drives the world.”

• GPT best practices - If you've played around with ChatGPT but have struggled to figure out how to structure prompts you should check out this guide in OpenAI's documentation. A lot of useful tidbits and examples of how to structure prompts for better outcomes. This trend isn't going to disappear so you might as well learn some of the fundamentals while it's still "early". High leverage skills like the ability to make use of AI to do more work with less resources is a path to personal sovereignty in the digital age.

• The independent researcher - I recently went back and read this short essay again. I figured I’d share it here because it was one of several essays that inspired me to start exploring self sovereignty and writing about it online.

• The Russian Soldier Who Surrendered to a Ukrainian Drone - We’ve entered the age where drone warfare is dominating the battlefield. As this tech accelerates you’ve got to wonder, how long until soldiers are surrendering to autonomous drones on the battlefield? And what will that mean for the structure of society?

• The Way of Mediocre Man - “People have a hard time believing that an attitude of lightness and ease can be compatible with work because they have so deeply internalized the idea that doing anything good must involve extreme effort.”

• Finding agency - freedom and agency aren't the same thing.

• The political establishment keeps flip flopping on whether de-dollarization is happening but facts are facts and a trend is a trend. To be clear: it’s a trend worth watching and preparing for the potential fallouts. Here’s a link to a good thread sharing a non-establishment perspective and a warning that de-dollarization could accelerate much more quickly than most people realize. Caveat: as I say in the feature of this newsletter, don’t just outsource your thinking to an influencer. Take this thread (including my perspective) as one data point you use to create your beliefs on the topic.

  

Extras

• Party-loving night owls fly to an early grave - Finally, I am vindicated at last.