Once upon a time there was a fairly bright boy who didn’t always see things the way most people did. By the time he was a teenager he was often doing what Apple later recommended: Think different. Naturally, he became an Apple fan.
Because the fellow liked to think, he was impressed with people who thought. Some of those had died long ago but had left behind many of their thoughts in writing. And so he read. Some of that love for thinking came from his father’s encouragement, some of it was just how he was created.
You already know I’m talking about myself, so you also probably know that a side effect of this “thinking” is disapproving of those who seem not to think at all. And those people are everywhere, right?
While I’m the most frequent target of my own disapproval, I want to change any tendency I have to disapprove into a habit of discernment. I want to think better.
Discernment
The three questions in the title are both guardians for my mind and guides to help me discern.
I believe the world would be better if we were more discerning and less damning. That takes work, but I can tell you that it is rewarding work. When I do that I feel better about others and about myself. It is a far better way to live.
Like yours, my mind is assaulted every day with ads, images, and words. Studies indicate that the average American sees between 4,000 and 10,000 ads every day. We ignore most of those, but other studies suggest that we notice or recall around 100 of them. Even that is a lot of information to add (no pun intended) to your mind.
We sometimes dismiss or keep ads without noticing. Of course the cookies from all the search engines know what we have kept, and what we have been looking at/for online, then they feed us more of it.
So, a way to know what you are “letting in” is to see what kinds of ads pop up when you are online. If those are the things you want to see, great. If not, it may be time for a little “discernment” practice.
Is it good?
A key to discernment is to think critically. I don’t mean disapprovingly, I mean analytically. A movie critic might say good things about a film, for instance. To think critically is to analyze whatever is before you, and the first question I ask about something being presented to me is this: Is it good?
What is being presented to you? It might be an opportunity to buy something or an invitation to play golf. A meeting, a book, a movie, a TV show, a thousand things you can consume or give yourself or your time to. But should you?
A simple example for me is a movie or TV show that is liberally peppered with f-bombs, gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence, etc. You get the idea. None of that is good, so it is an easy choice for me to give it a miss.
I will see and encounter enough evil in the real world that I don’t have to look for it in fiction, especially when I am paying (through a subscription or a ticket price) for it.
Would you rather eat a meal prepared by an excellent cook or the food that you found in a garbage can?
This is like that, and you get to choose.
Is it true?
Truth is that which agrees with reality. If I say the sky is clear when in fact there are clouds, I have not told the truth. As a wise person once noted, when we say that which is is not, or we say that which is not is, we have lied. All of us have done that at some time in our lives, but we have heard it done millions of times.
How do we know if something is true or not true? We must be discerning. Sometimes we think we are being discerning when in fact we are practicing confirmation bias. That is the tendency to believe something solely because it came from a source we approve of.
My grandfather taught me this when I was quite young by telling me something that seemed improbable was true. How did he know it was true, I wondered out loud. He said, “I read it in Reader’s Digest, so it has to be true.”
Decades later that became, “I saw it on the Internet, so it has to be true.” A popular and current version is “AI said it was true.” Be very careful to trust a statement based solely on its source.
One discernment trick I’ve used here is to imagine that the statement came from a different source. Would you believe it if it came from a source you trusted and disbelieve it if it came from one you didn’t trust?
You might consider the source, but you must discern truth by looking at the thing itself.
Does it matter?
The smaller our lives get, the more important external events seem to be.
Conversely we make our lives smaller by ascribing far more importance to events than they deserve.
This becomes a negative spiral which can be seen in social media and even in mainstream media. It is one reason (along with Is it good? and Is it true?) why I almost never watch the news.
This past week there has been a great deal of commentary about an advertisement for some blue jeans. I confess that a tiny bit of the repartee around that was entertaining, but does it matter? No.
Much of what we are fed on social media — and even mainstream media — would not pass any of these three tests. It isn’t good, it isn’t true, and it doesn’t matter. Leave those things. Fill your mind and life with the good, the true, and the people and things that matter.
Do good by being discerning. It’s in you!
