People spend enormous time and corporations make enormous sums out of news that becomes obsolete almost immediately. If you follow any substantial event or individual, you will see that the narrative is strung out over weeks or months, changing perhaps at a rate of 1%, a snail’s crawl from day to day.

So why does this occur? The reason for most things — people’s fear of anything they don’t know or already understand. That never changes, and that’s what sells periodicals and now, after worldwide digitization, is probably the largest industry of all. Especially if you properly include all media, none of which produce, across the board, as McLuhan made clear, anything resembling reality. What you get is a man-made chunk of flavorless pablum laced with who-knows-what designed to keep you cheaply fed, anxious and afraid, so you’ll have to focus on it every day, or else something bad might happen. You never know, you know.

It is in essence an addiction, like so many people who end up drinking because they feel bad. Why do they feel bad? Often because they want to, so they can drink, even though they are unconscious of that hidden drive. Taste, flavor, foreign substances of any kind, are associated with all substances, tangible and intangible. So, you cut out what is making you sick, like food that will kill you, and you eliminate it from your life.

The wisest place to start, the primary offender, would be television. All broadcasters disperse some version of Agent Orange for the mind, and the more you take in, the further it takes you away for actual life. The principal cause of the grotesque distortion of our lives we feel and see occurring but do not understand, which makes us feel helpless, is television. Far more watched, far more concocted, commercial and phony, are its contents. Try 29 million shows on whether or not Hitler is alive as a start. Some voters honestly believed that Donald Trump was continuing to play the character on “The Apprentice.” They saw him as no less masterful than he had been while playing a role someone else wrote for him to deliver. They didn’t want that show to end and voted to keep it running.

We would all be much better off if we restrict the access of propaganda, which TV has entirely become over recent years, and broaden, rather than narrow to, say, one channel or one newspaper as a way of understanding the whole world. There are a million better things you can do with your life, but watching TV is the easiest, so lazy people do it, and so do anxious people, and tired people — tired of this life they feel like that have to endure rather than enjoy. Television took over and made us passive and easily entertained by relatively childish, and far-fetched, nonsense. All “reality” shows are exactly the opposite — fake concoctions that create absurd situations and make people act unnaturally, which is made to seem funny. A much broader focus will enlarge our vision and will fight our way to much greater clarity and transparency, creating a better road for all than this road we are on picking up speed toward a road to nowhere with a capital N.