🍀ACTIVISM IS A SOCIETAL AWARENESS TRIGGER- Issue 140

Hi, I am JOE and I write on "Mindful Productivity & Cerebral Happiness". My endeavour is to share life lessons, some thoughts, quotes & links to articles/podcasts/books, I discover during the week.

Hey Friends

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Well, I wanted to explore the intersection of awareness and society for a long time. I feel that there’s a rich and valuable line of inquiry here, and it this week I felt that best way is to simply start digging, and I am excited to share the same with you.

Firstly, I need to reiterate one of my core belief -

‘ You can’t make choices with respect to something if it lies outside your awareness.’

That state of being ‘unable to notice’ is critical and is overlooked as a fundamental and common error of our day to day experience. In general, we are being interrupted by a colleague or notification or other reasons. Until the moment that spell is broken and our awareness expands, it’s impossible to do anything about it.

So let's consider that every time you make a choice to move, to speak, to eat, even to think a particular thought — you must first be available to the idea that you could do any of these things. The expansion of awareness to include the notion or the idea that you might make a choice will always precedes the choice itself. Because of this simple observation -

I wholeheartedly believe that developing conscious control of awareness is a crucial skill that gives us the capacity to make new choices and free ourselves from stuck patterns.

This collapsed awareness state of ours leads to a kind of ‘stuckness’ in which certain pathways for action become closed. Until something frees the society from that rut, expanding its awareness to new options, it can’t do anything but stay stuck in its rut.

Fortunately, societies are made of diverse, heterogeneous individuals, each with an awareness and perspective of their own. Some people may have the capacity to notice that new choices which can or should be made, and others may notice that many people around them seem incapable of seeing what they are seeing. In this frame, the role of activism then becomes clear and necessary.

The role of the activist is to point out to society at large that it may be literally unable to notice and act upon something vital.

The activist seeks to expand society’s awareness to include the thing that concerns the activist.

I am aware that things are never that straightforward and the situation can get loopy. But awareness has a habit to collapse over and over again in response to what happens within us or in the world.

This is why activists need to keep being activists over and over again, because where society’s awareness may initially expand in response to the activist, it quickly collapses again. It’s also why activists need to change their messaging all the time, because the tricks that expand awareness at first rarely work for long. New tricks are required to break the spell.

On the contrary, it’s also worth noting that the activists themselves can get stuck in their own collapsed awareness and perhaps may not see that their tactics aren’t working. It may be because they point out thing which are actually of low importance. So it’s extremely important to see that the narrative made out is for the overall growth of the society as such.

All these manifestations suggests that conscious control of awareness may free us from the limitations in perspective and choices that get collapsed owing to unawareness. But until this skill is widespread, let’s remember the existence and implications of collapsed awareness and seek to re-expand the awareness of others where we see them stuck in choice unconsciousness. In this way we can all serve as activists for each other and, hopefully, become better able to wisely navigate our path forwards together.

Take good care & enjoy reading your weekly dose of cerebral happiness! And if you liked it then do not hesitate

Joe

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❤️ 🧠 Stuff, I invested myself during the week🧤🧤

Article :- Elon Musk Thinks Every Child Should Learn About These 50 Cognitive Biases would the world be more rational if we did as Musk recently suggested and taught kids about cognitive biases in school?

🍀Blog Post-

I am reading - Decision fatigue can lead to poor choices and irrational trade-offs in decision-making. (Read 👆 it here.)