Although focused, I chased the rabbit – thanks Alice!

A Facebook post - then a share

I needed a distraction from some of the heavier things at work, so I’ve been sitting with a theme that keeps resurfacing for me: discernment.

We live in a moment where almost‑infinite information arrives in microseconds. Coherence and speed often get mistaken for understanding. But lived experience—and too many observational signals—keep providing discernable evidence that’s not how truth works.

So I’ve been sketching an image (shared with the post) that captures the gap between:

• source‑based reporting (what actually happened),
• narrative‑based framing (what someone wants it to mean), and
• the noisy middle layer we now call modern media (perception capture), full of attention‑grabbing cues, gamification loops, and “trust me bro” systems that reward reaction over reflection.

This isn’t new. Edward Bernays began orchestrating these dynamics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays) as early as 1929. But the scale and speed today make discernment a survival skill.

A recent example from the Utah legislative cycle brought this into focus for me:

A legislator introduced a substitute bill replacing kratom restrictions with the LDS Church’s Word of Wisdom. The floor video shows no humor cues—no laughter, no satire—just a procedural argument about consistency in health‑based regulation.

Yet a reporter framed the move as “cheeky” and “tongue‑in‑cheek.”
One interpretive word, and suddenly the public read the act as performative or mocking, even though the source material showed none of that.

That’s the power—and danger—of narrative insertion. It’s not just tone; it’s a form of engineered framing that can override what your own eyes and ears would tell you.

And the further a story drifts from its source, the more this line from Orwell echoes in my mind:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I’d swap “Party” for “SYSTEM” because that’s what it feels like now.

So I stay skeptical. I try to preserve and guard and maintain my autonomy. I calibrate, interpret, discern, and distill—because courage, temperance, wisdom, judgment, and lived experience still matter. Especially when the noise gets loud, chaotic, and overwhelming.

After some interaction it lead to this thought and I am sharing here!

Since sharing the image and thoughts attached to this share of mine:

A phrase has been echoing in my mind lately: “ubiquitous assimilation.” Not as a future threat, but as something we are living in real-time.

Ubiquitous — everywhere, ambient, woven into the background.

Assimilation — the slow absorption of the individual into a larger system.

Put together, it’s the quiet standardization of human perception happening all around us.

Curated perception has become the catalyst, the enzyme, the invisible machinery shaping how too many people think long before they realize they’re thinking it. And I keep wondering: when the masses finally wake up from their hijacks, how far from their own minds will they find themselves?

The next stage is already underway in the background, mostly unnoticed: the invalidation of human discernment in our loops, our feeds, our interactions. The message is subtle but constant — don’t think, we’ll think for you.

A line from Blaise Pascal keeps pacing the asylum between my ears:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

If he only knew what modern media would become.

Because today’s media ecosystem isn’t just reporting. It’s a blend of:

the factual layer — source‑based journalism; the event itself, objectively distilled.
the interpretive layer — narrative‑driven framing; how the event is shaped and positioned.
the engineered layer — a middle space built for attention extraction, gamification, and emotional hijack; what the system is designed to provoke.

Edward Bernays sketched the blueprint a century ago. Social platforms and AI systems have simply scaled it to a velocity and density the human nervous system was never built to withstand.

And yet, there’s still hope!

Not naïve hope — more like the kind Mark Manson jokes about in his blue book:

everything is… well, you know – F%&#(!.