Why Media is Generally Bad For Your Personality
To understand the detachment effect that the piling of media impressions has on your personality and ultimately who you are, we need to take a quick de-tour to the 18th century.
Philosopher David Hume on impressions:
Scottish philosopher Hume in 1740 published the "Treatise of Human Nature". It's considered one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. It covers topics such as knowledge, reason and morality in depth. Immanuel Kant even claims the book awakened him from his "dogmatic slumber".
The first lines of it distill the following idea:
Perceptions are whatever can be present in the mind, and all perceptions resolve themselves into two distinct kinds: impressions and ideas.
In other words: your mind is full of mental objects called perceptions, which come in two types. These types differ in that:
Impressions are lively and strong perceptions, ideas are fainter and weaker
The distinction between impressions and ideas is as evident as the difference between feeling and thinking
All ideas come from impressions
What does this all have to do with media?
Impressions are all over media. It's actually a KPI that (mainly) social media uses to measure the amount of times a piece of content has been displayed. All the media that you recurrently consume contains within it an impression. Over the years, you have accumulated layers and layers of these.
You sit under a mountain of impressions.
These often contain biases, opinions, rage and fear due to the business incentive of attention-capturing. And our mind is moldeable.
Anything pressed against it leaves an imprint that eventually penetrates your subconscious. Then your personality. If you're not aware of this, the effects kick-in even faster.
Over the long run, you start to lose a sense of who you really are. You can't seem to find yourself - your true self - in this mess of impressions. You feel confusion and inner tension because you want to be your true self but seem lost in the search.
A media impression is generally toxic. Gently uncover the ones you have slowly accumulated and avoid most moving forward in the path to discover who you truly are. You are what remains.