Nine Silent Pandemics Nobody Talks Enough About
#1 – We quietly do work we hate
We all face issues that most of us pretend aren’t real.
The reason is that we suffer from these issues ourselves. Life is already hard enough so it’s easier to just put these issues to one side.
I suffer from many of these too, so don’t think I’m some choir boy.
I call these issues silent pandemics. Just like the coroni-rona virus of March 2020, they spread from person to person at lightning-fast speed. You can’t see it. You don’t know it’s there. But they’re real.
The only vaccine is awareness, then acceptance.
We do work we quietly hate
As a guy who writes career advice for millions of LinkedIn users every month, you’d be horrified to see my DMs.
The average job is a prison sentence.
Work has little to no creativity. The leadership is a hierarchy with not a lot of feelings about your career, or the fact you’re trading your most precious currency (time) to sit in their office chair and rot away.
I’d rather decay in a jail cell than work for most corporations. The lack of empathy and kindness – two things that make the world go round – is criminal.
If you’re in this category, just get the heck out of there. Go anywhere. Somewhere.
We let entertainment steal our self-learning and side hustle time
Why do we need so much entertainment?
To numb us from the pain of the day. And because we have stuff-all energy left after it’s stolen away from cheap foods, lack of exercise, a firehose of device notifications, and low-quality work that makes us go insane.
The only way to escape this common reality is to build your Plan B. That takes time. Call it hustle culture if you will (and be a useless hater). Or just accept that it’s what has to be done and get to work.
Yes, it won’t happen in 60 seconds. But it will happen faster than you think. A few years of pain, for decades of personal gain.
Sounds like a bloody good deal to me, mate.
We eat food made in a factory
Go to the health food section of your supermarket.
You’ll find it full of boxes and plastic wrappers. Now be a good little informed consumer and read the ingredients on the back.
Notice all the ones that have numbers after them. They’re chemicals.
As a hipster vegan, I am most vulnerable. All these low-sugar, no-meat replacements are mostly code for “this contains a boatload of chemicals, and you’re welcome!”
Vegans (like me) eat this garbage and think we’re healthy. The truth is a lot of it is worse than the devil foods they’re trying to escape.
Food is simple. If it’s in some sexy packaging it’s probably full of chemicals.
Eat more plants and stuff that comes directly out of the ground. Not to wave your hands and sing kumbaya while saving all the lambs from slaughter. No.
For these reasons:
To have heaps of energy
To save money on prescription medicines
To have less time off work from random illnesses
This stuff works. I can work 16 hours straight and *not* feel tired. I haven’t had a cold or flu for 8+ years. And when I caught the dreaded bat virus, it was chill as hell compared to what my unhealthy friends copped.
Eat for energy.
We have our thoughts/ideas suppressed by algorithms
If you haven’t read the Twitter Files that Uncle Elon leaked then go do it. Now.
Your friendly tech bros trying to save the world suppressed people and ideas.
They colluded.
They profited.
They did evil despite their motto being “do no evil.”
Even this email will be suppressed by your email provider because of the flamdemic word in the title. For years tech companies got away with it. Their free products that made our lives easier were just too damn addictive.
Now we’re learning. That’s okay.
The days of centralized algorithms with zero oversight are coming to an end.
The way to beat this plague is to get content recommendations from people you trust. Because if an algo served you up the content, there’s a good chance it has an incentive to (that’s in the opposite direction to yours).
The key isn’t to become a conspiracy theorist or hater.
It’s to accept what’s happened and to take the vaccine offered to prevent the spread and infection from getting deeper.
We sit for most of the day
My old boss said “sitting is the new smoking.”
There’s a bunch of research that says it’s not great. Stand-up desks have helped a bit. But still, we’re stuck in front of some dumb screen for way too long.
Who knows the damage we do to our eyes on a daily basis.
The part that scares me is, while I’m looking at a screen and being distracted, my newborn daughter is in the other room wondering why daddy isn’t there to play. Don’t just stand more. Get the heck out in nature and put your bare feet on the ground.
All this screen time kills your creativity.
And creativity is what makes you stinking rich.
We’re afraid to write our thoughts online
I run a large online academy for people who want to join the creator economy. We conduct surveys every month.
Want to know the biggest fear of our students?
That something they write will get them in trouble. They feel like naughty school girls smoking behind the classroom while the teachers drink their coffee and can’t see. This is what the modern world has done to us.
Cancel culture has made us afraid to speak.
Unless we speak we can’t share ideas. Without ideas we can progress as a species. And bad ideas grow underground where they are most dangerous, rather than out in public where we can all see and critique them.
Free your mind. Share your thoughts. Just stay away from conspiracy theories and most of politics and you’ll be fine. I pinky promise.
We think views and ‘likes’ matter
It’s why the TikTok plague is out of control. What they do with the data is still unknown. We’ll likely find out soon.
Just because content is popular doesn’t mean it’s good.
A lot of it has a recency bias. And it makes us all sound and care about the same trivial things. That’s why it pays to read history instead or get lost in a fiction book.
Otherwise, all you do is keep up with the Kardashians or debate the latest season of some dumb Netflix show that lacks imagination and follows the same old hero’s journey Marvel movie plot.
We buy stuff we don’t need to impress people who don’t care about us
Most of our lived experience centers around quiet status.
We want the promotion to look good. Or want a job at Airbnb to sound cool at a cocktail party or sexy – and on the way up – to the opposite sex.
All the stuff accumulates. Our houses get overloaded so we need bigger houses that require more debt to fund them. We even buy storage containers for the overflow.
The people we try to impress mostly don’t give a crap about us. They’re playing the same dumb game, entirely unaware of the insanity loop they’re trapped in – that keeps them from ever being happy.
I just don’t believe buying stuff makes us happy anymore.
The best item I acquired of late is my daughter. She makes me so damn happy. Time spent with her is free. Going to the free park for a free 1-1 staring session is the highlight of my week.
Same with my best friend. He cares about me and what I’m up to. He doesn’t care what stupid car I drive or where I went to school. If I was broke he’d still be my friend. If I lost everything he’d bring me into his home.
If you took all the money you invested in bullsh*t and, instead, invested it in free time to spend with your three best friends, I guarantee you’d be happier.
All this stuff can’t come to the afterlife with you.
You’re literally wasting hours of your life to pay for it all, because ads told you it was a good idea. Those ads are nothing more than quiet brainwashing. They’re designed to make you think you need more through clever psychological manipulation humans can’t resist.
Less stuff, more experiences.
We replace material possessions that don’t need replacing
Obviously you need some stuff though, unless you wanna live in a tent at your local park and shower in the rain for free.
The challenge is we replace items we own with new ones instead of fixing the old ones. My in-laws recently had an old man on drugs run into their Toyota.
I went to pick their car up after it got repaired. The damaged section wasn’t repaired at all. They just spent 10 minutes attaching new plastic parts and threw out anything they couldn’t be assed to repair.
This creates waste. And waste is why we have to keep buying the same crap over and over. If quality became cool again, we wouldn’t need to re-buy stuff all the time.
That’s the final silent pandemic you rarely hear spoken about.
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To the line
"We buy stuff we don’t need to impress people who don’t care about us"
one could easily add. . .
"with money we do not have"
(referring to the use/ misuse of credit cards)
In regards to your point about food, I recently published an article about my experience living in South East Asia these past three years, but one topic I didn't cover was the food. The food is SO. MUCH. BETTER. here than it is in America. Most of the food I eat here is prepared from real ingredients and it's delicious. Furthermore, I don't have proof for this but I think that high fructose corn syrup is especially deleterious for your health. That corn syrup seems to be a unique American thing, and isn't nearly as prevalent in other countries.
In general, America has some of the worst food I've ever seen out of the 20 or so countries I've been to.