March 1, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
06:07
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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
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| In case you missed it, I'm just back from a whopping 10 day social media news hiatus. | ||
| Yeah, believe it or not, it is true, I did not look at my twitter feed or follow current events or anything for 10 whole days. | ||
| Amazingly, going offline for more than a couple hours seems like a superhuman feat these days, doesn't it? | ||
| Just having one single day without looking at your phone, without reading the news, and without reacting to someone else's opinion, most likely someone else you've never even met, is becoming increasingly rare these days. | ||
| This rarity, the ability to live life without being constantly connected, is going to become more and more important as our physical world continues to collide with the digital world. | ||
| We're so connected these days that we can't stop the onslaught of information for any amount of time that would allow us to figure out what's important and what is irrelevant. | ||
| Or perhaps even more importantly than that, what's fact and what's fiction. | ||
| It's very obvious to me that occasionally pausing this endless stream of noise is going to be one of the biggest challenges that faces humanity in the next decade. | ||
| This challenge will be vital not only for millennials, but for old-time Gen Xers like me, as well as the baby boomers who came before us. | ||
| As for the kids growing up with an iPad in the crib, well, good luck with all that. | ||
| By doing pretty much nothing on my vacation besides laying at the beach, going fishing, and taking bike rides, I was able to reset a little of this mental clutter. | ||
| This reset was kind of tough for the first couple days, even though I tested my off-the-grid skills less than a year ago. | ||
| Last time, and some of you may remember this, I literally locked my phone in a safe for a week to disconnect. | ||
| But this time I just put my phone on a shelf in the closet, in a shoebox, under a couple other boxes. | ||
| I guess that's some sort of progress right there. | ||
| The first couple days I had the knee-jerk reaction to go to my pocket and look at my phone for no reason at all on more than one occasion. | ||
| Eventually that wore off and I found a strange sense of freedom in not being online. | ||
| By the final days of my vacation, part of me didn't even want to come back online at all. | ||
| If you're not, here I am. | ||
| Apparently the world didn't stop while I was off the grid. | ||
| From the Milo scandal, to this Trump CNN fiasco with the press briefings, to the Oscars best picture screw up, the world kept on spinning along. | ||
| If you missed it, I did a live stream this past Monday with my thoughts on some of the craziness I missed, and we'll post a link to that right down below. | ||
| Putting aside these specific news stories and current events, I noticed something else as I disconnected from the Matrix. | ||
| I actually felt calmer, more present, and generally happier by being offline. | ||
| Maybe this had something to do with the beach I was on and the margaritas I was drinking, but it wasn't just that. | ||
| I don't think our brains are wired to be taking in endless amounts of information all the time. | ||
| Just think, 200 years ago, to get a message from London to New York, you had to write a letter, get it on a boat, wait a couple weeks for it to get there, and then wait another couple weeks for the response to get back across the pond to you. | ||
| 100 years ago, our fastest communication was a relatively new invention known as the telephone, which now seems totally archaic. | ||
| 50 years ago we only had a handful of television channels, and 20 years ago cell phones were so big they made Zach Morris' phone on Saved by the Bell look small. | ||
| Soon enough you'll be able to live stream video aboard a supersonic plane that'll take you from New York to London in about 20 minutes. | ||
| The point is, the world is now speeding up at an incredible pace, and our own evolution, the ability for our minds to evolve along with the technology, isn't changing at the same pace. | ||
| I believe this goes a long way to explaining why people are constantly outraged and always ready to fight with random strangers online. | ||
| Our connectivity is evolving faster than our conscience. | ||
| There's no way for us to stop scientific progress, and I would never be for it if there was, but we can certainly try to deal with its side effects more effectively. | ||
| And by the way, you've all heard me say how incredible this online connection can be. | ||
| It's how you guys got to me right here. | ||
| This is the irony of our current situation. | ||
| We all have an awesome power at our fingertips, but it's up to us what to do with it. | ||
| As Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. | ||
| Talking, or more appropriately fighting, about politics endlessly isn't good for our brains or for our society. | ||
| One of the reasons that I talk about small government so much is because I believe that a good government is one that you don't have to think about too often. | ||
| And if you don't have to think about it too often, you don't have to tweet about it every five seconds or write endless Facebook diatribes about it either. | ||
| If the government doesn't have too much control over your life, you don't have to fixate over its every move or every policy that it institutes. | ||
| This is always an incredible irony of the progressive ideology. | ||
| They constantly complain about how the government operates, but their solution is always to make the government bigger. | ||
| If only their guys were in charge, then we'd have some sort of magical utopia. | ||
| This isn't only childish thinking, it's also just against human nature itself. | ||
| The only way to rear in power is to rear it in regardless of who's in charge. | ||
| The feeling that we all have to comment on every news story, to fight over every political point, and to debate every little issue is exactly why a smaller government would be better these days. | ||
| Don't like Trump? | ||
| The answer isn't to try to upend democracy. | ||
| The answer is try to rein in the power of government. | ||
| If we could only live and let live, as our founders intended, we would spend less time worrying, fighting, and distracting ourselves from our own lives. | ||
| So to wrap this up, I'm deleting this channel, closing my Twitter account, and shutting down my Facebook. | ||
| I think we've had a pretty great run here over at the Rubin Report, but nothing lasts forever. | ||
| Alright, you got me. | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| But what I will do is make a renewed commitment not to add meaningless noise to your already hectic life. |
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