Contact with reality hardens, and contact with current events inhibits. You're walking down the street and you can't stop: "Would you please not give your phone to the kid?", "Not the can in the bank, in the trash can," "Don't you know it's against the law to ride a motorcycle on the sidewalk?" You turn to the media and the world's coverage is so cruel that you declare yourself overwhelmed, perhaps as a shortcut to not committing to anything. Or you commit so much that no one around you passes the acid test of your new purity, recently developed in the niche influencer market, and you conclude the world is hopeless.
With art becoming a distant subject from high school, there's music, which we consume in massive doses to the point that, at the end of the year, Spotify crunches the numbers and makes rankings.
Therefore, the pleasure of listening to a CD or vinyl record is twofold: that of the music playing and that of the freedom to play it without any algorithm drawing conclusions about your tastes. The same happens with books, or with handwriting, or with the stalls at municipal markets that have everything and everything, or with a walk that is consciously careless, or with a conversation with your phone in your bag.
Distancing yourself from the excess of emotional stimuli and material offerings, especially those we can't afford and that leave us with that unfair aftertaste of life failure, is a first step toward balance. There is much more to the world than meets the eye, both inside and outside of us, and approaching it selectively, especially what raises the bar and makes life more beautiful, helps us lift the heavy weight of evidence that tries to do what it wants with us. Until we say enough.
