Not Outraged

Perhaps my amygdala has malfunctioned.  Perhaps the FB designers have failed.  Now more than ten years into social media of various types the comments no matter the provacative intent do not get a rise from my inner self.  I was watching a TED talk not long ago by a psychologist trained at Stanford to study emotions and attention span.  That has great commercial value in a setting where maximizing eyes on the screen is the value to their commercial advertisers.  And like much physical and social science, the academics have greatly refined the process.  Outrage me and I will type a response.  Toxic content, of which I encounter much less than what is written about in public media, creates the visceral response that keeps the vision processing what is on the screen.

I recently subscribed to Bari Weiss' Common Sense postings, which have a higher level of analysis but again depend on creation of outrage to woke and other progressive intrusions that detract from a more sensible rational approach to addressing some very real problems of ethnic and economic exploitation.  The articles chosen to appear are selected to generate irate responses.  Alas, I am never irate when I read them.

My inner brain probably works just fine.  After decades in exam rooms, bedsides, and ER's in the grand pageant of medicine, there's probably very little I've not encountered before.  In my Jewish world I've been mistreated.  In my medical world I've been sued despite unyielding diligence to what I am supposed to be doing.  The stories of misplaced wokes or intimidation from the Oval Office just don't connect with me.  That's not to say they don't exist or are not worth opposing.  They are.  But not for the purpose of having my visual fields hijacked by them.  They aren't.  The tactic of provocation may have failed.