How Not to Lose Yourself in the Flood of Content

In this episode I look at how content and social media affect a person's perception and their spiritual development. How many people do we actually let into our lives through a screen? And what should we do in a world where there is more and more information, and different sources constantly contradict each other?

How Information Affects Your State

How well does a person even understand what is happening to them when they consume a huge amount of information every day? You open your phone, watch one creator, a second, a third, read all kinds of news, tips, Reels. And it seems that you have simply received some information. But what is happening to your state, to your energy, at that moment?

How many people have you actually come into contact with in a single day, even if physically you had no contact with any of them and never met them? How many friends do you really have? A person says they have no friends, yet they have watched so many Reels. And where does ordinary learning about the world end and dependence on the very process of getting information begin?

Today I suggest looking at this a little more broadly. Of course, what information you consume matters a great deal for a person's development. And today a huge amount of content is made so that you get drawn into it more and more.

It is now much harder not to get drawn into content than it was thirty years ago for a grandmother who switched on the television. Because there is more content and more access — that is, more opportunities and more dependence. You don't have to go into a room and switch on the TV, where the antenna has to work. You can switch on YouTube on an iPad or on your phone while still in bed, or scroll through your Instagram feed.

It used to be hard. I remember coming to the dacha, and the antenna there simply didn't work — and that was it. So you had no series, no films, there was only… You wait once a week for some series or a film, and everyone comes to watch it. And half the street might gather at the dacha, because someone doesn't have a television.

Is this dependence? It is a crazy dependence. This dependence is basic, and it is very stable.

It is important to understand that having a phone is, in general, a dependence. Someone will say, "I have no dependence," — it is there all the same.

Again, we are not going to extremes here. You should be aware of this very calmly, clearly, systematically. The next question is: is this a dependence that you perceive adequately and are able to give up? Or is it a dependence that carries very serious weight — just as the content you consume carries a certain weight?

The thing is, when something carries strong weight, information gets in through it with a wider window, so to speak, or a more open door. And a person, of course, starts to take it in very seriously across all of their energies. That's why, of course, one has to be careful about receiving information.

My mother once told me about this. She has a neighbour who says: "I haven't watched television for fifteen years or however many, because if I switch on the TV, my blood pressure starts to rise. And I realised there is a very direct connection: I mustn't watch any news, I mustn't take in any information. I feel genuinely unwell."

I see it myself: sometimes I start discussing some topic with acquaintances, and certain information makes them feel unwell. If I start analysing the political and economic system of the world, I will be more or less stable. Although there are topics that can affect me too and in which I will feel out of harmony. But basically I will feel calm. And there are people who cannot talk about such topics. It raises an incredible amount of very difficult energies in them, right up to the most critical ones.

It is as if a person has had a trauma — they were beaten up in the street, raped or robbed — and you tell them, "Remember that." Their attitude will be negative. Or a person broke something, an arm or a leg — they will have negative memories. Through a certain kind of content the same type of energies can rise in a person.

For example, if people talk about others being killed somewhere, a crazy amount of energy automatically rises in a person, worries — for themselves or for other people. The person will feel out of harmony.

It's one thing when it rises in the physical body, and you feel unwell in your body. It's another when it rises in the mental, and you feel unwell in your thoughts. And it's something else entirely when some energies rise, for example, in the astral worlds, and you have no idea what is happening. You aren't aware of them, you don't see them, you don't feel them, you don't even know what is happening when you consume certain information.

You may feel some effect — and you never know which: you might even feel good, or you might feel bad. But in fact, from the point of view of life, freedom of life and everything that happens, this can be a good stage of working things through so that you never run into it again.

Nobody is saying you shouldn't watch any content. On the contrary, for many people certain content can bring a plus, and for many — catastrophic destruction, where a person will feel completely out of harmony and will suffer. Everything depends very much on circumstances, on the character traits of the particular person and on the nature of the information they receive.

Why the Same Content Affects People Differently

You know perfectly well: if you are told now that ten people were killed in some country, you might react by saying, "That's a bad story." If you are told that ten people were killed in the flat next door, you will react differently. And if you are told that ten people were killed among your closest relatives and you have no close people left, you will react completely differently. Although it is the very same ten people who were killed.

This is just an example of how one and the same content can affect a person in different ways. Incredible!

And why do people react so differently? It all depends on what energies are present in them at that moment, what state they are in, how they perceive the world. After all, there are people who calmly, normally accept that someone around them has died, because they understand that people in general die. In fact it is natural, it is a natural perception of the world.

That's not bad — it's the reality we live in. Someone will say, "You must cry in this reality." Are you sure you must be in a negative state in this reality?

Who says you have to be in a negative… A person will say, "All right, not necessarily about other people, but about my loved ones — necessarily." What kind of ego motive is that? It's a pure ego motive. Then let's be the same about everything. Or look further: why are you one way about your loved ones and another way about strangers?

But there are people who are in a very bad state of perception about everyone, because they are driven by an energy of understanding people's death or, for example, the evil that exists around them. Or of not understanding people's death.

Because a concept has been built: if this person lived ninety-five years and died — no big deal. But if that one lived ten years — that's a problem. But this is a misunderstanding of reality, a failure to perceive the reality that exists. The world is not made so that all people live a certain amount of time — say, a hundred years or ninety. It's obvious!

We can endlessly calculate the average and median age of a person, break it down by country, race, nationality, climate, year — and we won't find any patterns. It changes. You can say as much as you like that humanity has reached some super-state, that the average age and the number of people on planet Earth have grown.

What are you controlling? Do you really think, does anyone really think, that there is some group of people controlling this? Look: we simply arrived at this as humanity.

What Content Shapes in Us

And then the question arises: what should each person do? What should you specifically do: watch the news or not, read Reels or not, watch Shorts or not? You should understand right away that all of this is dependence. Scrolling a feed — that builds dependence.

For example, I need to open Instagram because I am a blogger and I have followers. I need to check information or post — although mostly my team posts, I still have to open it. And willy-nilly I start looking through the feed. That is pure dependence.

And if I have the opportunity to remove myself from Instagram, I delete it: the team does everything, and I don't personally get involved or look. Or I keep living in this dependence, developing it, and then I can form an understanding for myself: what will happen if this channel is deleted, how will I feel? Or what happens when I read and consume information that I don't need at all — I don't need this knowledge, these people?

It's like Telegram. Telegram has a strip at the top that tells you whose birthday it is. But why do I need to know the birthdays of five thousand contacts in my phone book? Tell me: why do I need to have this information at all? Of course, there is a contact who stated when their birthday is. But why is it needed at all?

I understand public people who need contacts. But now everyone is becoming public, and it turns out everyone needs this information. It is an endless contact with these energies and with these people.

How Many People We Let Into Our Lives Through a Screen

Can you imagine where a person is today in terms of the volume of contact? A person sits at home and says, "I'm not in contact with anyone." For example, my wife has a limited circle of contacts: you can list the people she calls or interacts with. Mine is much wider because of my professional activity, a large number of businesses, projects and everything else. That is, a great many different people.

Her circle is limited — but does she have fewer contacts with people than I do, or more? It's a big question how many people she has scrolled past in her feed and how many she has come into contact with. If you look at the contacts with these people over three hundred and sixty-five days, watching their videos, then two hundred bloggers could be called her friends.

Think about how much time a person spends in contact with a blogger — seemingly one-sided. But this contact is two-way. It's just that you don't talk, while they talk to everyone, not only to you.

And believe me, it is two-way, including where you, bloggers, pass on some information. It's obvious. If a hundred people watch and say how disgusting it is or how great it is, envy or rejoice — that is all absolute energy, far greater than what can arise in an ordinary conversation or in what's called small talk.

What small talk? Today the whole world is engaged in endless small talk, scrolling feeds, watching videos, watching bloggers, Shorts, Reels, TikToks and everything else.

Simply an endless amount of content. In cities like Nice, or in big tourist places, stand in the middle of a square, sit in a café or walk through all the rows. How many people are there at all? Or take a walk in the evening where everyone sits and drinks in the streets, in cafés and restaurants — through such a large mass of people.

People feel different when they go to a stadium, to some concert or a sports event. They feel different not because of how the singer performed. There are all the people who came with a certain energy. They broadcast that particular energy, broadcast a particular state. There you have the number of contacts.

Maybe my wife or my mother has fifty times more contacts than I do. Could that be? Easily. It all depends on what a person does during the day.

Can You Isolate Yourself From Social Media and Scrolling

Can you isolate yourself from this? There are people who don't use social media and don't watch YouTube. Of course you can. And it's probably a very right choice. Basically it is a very sound choice — from the point of view that you endlessly scroll the feed. That's a fact.

Can you restrict yourself from scrolling the feed? You can, but it's very hard. The systems are built so that, in essence, they don't let you do it. You have to come very deliberately and open, for example, a particular channel on YouTube. And Instagram and Facebook are definitely not made for that. You cannot switch off this endless feed of recommendations.

Whatever content you watch there, it is still watching certain people. Perhaps it's useful and interesting for someone's mother to watch her child on an Instagram account — perhaps there are some pluses to be found in that somewhere. Better that he sends his mother the same photos through a messenger.

That's why the effect itself is happening right now. Australia has banned social media for children. England, I think, passed a law banning social media. There was recently a big case in America regarding Instagram and Facebook — a really tough decision to restrict young people's use of social media. Daily time limits, no ability to receive notifications or log in at night, and so on.

Of course, social networks should have been banned for children from the moment they were created, but for adults too it is huge damage. It looks kind of cool. I remember when Odnoklassniki appeared. For your generation it didn't matter, but for my generation and older it did: a sharp surge of communication and acquaintances. But Odnoklassniki didn't bring me or truly restore a single acquaintance. It is a fleeting contact.

It's as if someone writes to me now on my social media: "Alexander, I'm in Nice too, let's meet." If you're not a close person — why? Our day isn't that long, all in all. People often write: "If it's convenient for you, help me, give me thirty or forty minutes on my project." I'm willing, I'd like to answer everyone, but how do you imagine that? Do you really think there's no queue of people or of things I have to do? How could that possibly be fitted in? Then, it turns out, there has to be some kind of interest.

Of course, humanity won't sort out social media right now. It's impossible, it won't happen. Can it somehow be limited for yourself and for your children? It definitely can. But it's a very difficult question. For yourself it's much easier, for children it's extremely hard. Because of the social world: they have friends, acquaintances. A lot depends on what energies your children have and whether it will be taken calmly or with conflict. On how stable and expanded a person you are in terms of perceiving what is going on.

But a person can take this action for themselves — although most people won't. Just as most people will go on drinking alcohol, lying, manipulating everyone around them — in their family, at work and everywhere. Just as they will go on living in anger or rage and paying no attention to other people. They will go on living in a closed cage, unwilling to truly breathe out and breathe in.

It's a very hard action. And there are a great many such actions, a huge number.

Why Do You Need This Information at All

What's also important: this doesn't mean you have to root out all bad actions. You sit and write every day: I'll root this out, and this, and this. Then the question is: why? What do you want to learn? Where are you going, what are you relying on?

Are you rooting this out so that you can later write about it on that same blog? Or so that you don't harm other people?

Are you rooting this out so as to deal with loneliness somewhere other than on social media, to really get to the bottom of this question? To really understand: what is actually going on?

It would seem that there is now a huge amount of high-quality information on YouTube, and high-quality content on Instagram — it seems to me it has grown a lot in terms of quality. And there is so much useful information there: how to cook food properly, whether this or that product is good or bad for your health.

The whole world learned there that Russia, it turns out, fits into the continent of Africa four times. Can you imagine what a deception that is, what an illusion? It's amazing what has happened now with this map of the world. I remember seeing the story: a line was drawn somewhere across the north of Africa, and that distance is longer than the entire distance across Russia from left to right, from west to east. I thought: what a crazy story.

You're not ready to accept that the territory of Russia fits into the continent of Africa four times, that the map is visually not real. We live in a world of science. Science presented the information to us this way and deceived everyone — obviously, guaranteed.

And now a huge number of countries have shrunk. Seriously. Russia has seriously shrunk, Belarus has shrunk, Kazakhstan has shrunk, Ukraine has shrunk. And some not so much, some didn't shrink at all, and some grew on the map — but on the real one.

Useful Content and False Knowledge

So, on the one hand, we say that endless false knowledge is coming at us, and on the other, there seems to be useful information inside it. But is it really needed? And how will a person figure out which of this information is true, so as, again, not to consume information?

After all, we all consumed the information that Africa as a continent is small. It's a fact: we all consumed it. My friend and I were laughing about it — just a week ago a UN resolution was adopted on this map: how great it would have been, when we were at school twenty-five or thirty years ago, to go to the teacher and say, "That's not true, this map isn't drawn correctly." What would have happened, what would the result have been?

Although it could have been calculated: the areas of countries were known. But I'm a fairly healthy and reasonably well-educated person, and I didn't know about it. Now someone may shout, "What, you didn't know?" I didn't know that four Russias would fit into Africa. And how could I know it? I can't know all these details. They aren't communicated.

And in the same way a huge amount of information is communicated: how to behave with your wife, how to behave with your husband, how to raise children. Some endless proofs: if you look your wife in the eyes every morning — that's a plus. If you touch her nose — a plus. If you have a cat — a plus. If you ate lentils instead of avocado in the morning — a plus, and here it's like this.

And simply an endless amount of information that, again, starts to contradict itself.

Before, you at least lived in a world that didn't contradict itself, but here people come to you and say: "Actually, there is a completely different picture of reality. Look: here is one, here is another, they are different." And they differ on this question, and on this one, and on this one. Even now it's unclear whether four Russias fit into Africa, or six, or two, or three.

But now there is ChatGPT, and you can double-check with ChatGPT. And everyone rushed to double-check. Pay attention: a huge number of people have started double-checking each other. We have ended up in a world where everyone endlessly double-checks everyone else.

You're walking along, talking — here I am walking with two of my friends — and sometimes you say something and think: is he checking you right now or not? Hop — he's opened his phone. Phones and contacts everywhere, endlessly. Sometimes someone says, "I looked up additional information, and it turned out like this." And yet he too might have double-checked you incorrectly. So whom do you trust then? Where is the truth then?

How to Choose Content

Here, of course, a separate question arises: how do you choose whom to trust at all, if one person says one thing and another says the opposite? And double-checking absolutely everything is, of course, impossible.

There is a separate episode on the channel about exactly this — "Whom to Trust Online: How to Choose Content and Not Live Inside Someone Else's Picture of the World." In it I look at which question you should start with when choosing content, why you go to a particular author, and how not to end up inside someone else's picture of the world, taking it for your own. If it matters to you to understand not only the amount of information but also how to choose what is truly worth your attention, watch that episode.

🎥 Video for this article