Medea, the Goddess of Illusion

I have a gruesome week coming ahead of me. I say gruesome cause it’s kind of the final lap during this semester. And it wasn’t just any kind of semester. It was a weird one, and not the good kind.

I’ve tried to have some productive study sessions all to no avail. The first one of the many was a successful one because I had very little to think about. But as time passed, so did my worries. And then other factors got added into the picture. Now it wasn’t just me anymore but a couple of friends who were also lost and needed a ship so they could dock back to shore. And I provided that ship. I don’t mind helping people. I do believe in shared experiences and knowledge. But the twist of the story is, I ended up doing all the paddling, wearing myself out while the rest of my mates just… enjoyed the views. I was exhausted from being the Good Samaritan. I still am. Some lessons are costly, they say.

I used to have this ugly habit of social media addiction. Whenever I’d feel bad or upset about something, I’d immediately jump onto Instagram and scroll until I was distracted enough to not remember the causes at that moment. But then, the painful emotion would resurface hours later when I was doing something boring or mundane, and this would bother me. Probably because the system was playing me and not the other way round. I’d get even more upset over this and it would send me down a rabbit hole with endless digging. All these troubles for not wanting to adapt and cope with the harsh surroundings. For not wanting to accept and deal with uncomfortable truths.

During one of my twitter scrolls, I bumped into a tweet that explained how social media was named after Medea, who was the Goddess of Illusion in the Greek mythology. She was also a witch who would use her charms and spells to get people to do whatever she wanted. It worked to her favour for the most part until the people soon realized the power she had over them. They could have killed her but they just protested and chased her away.

She may have died years later as a victimised character but her theory lived on. And just like Vincent Van Gogh, it was only after her death that she was celebrated and recognized by her own people and everyone else all over the world. Times have changed a little bit but the end game is still the same. They do not use spells or charms to hypnotize us into what they want us to be but it is still enough to keep us hooked. Society has taken over Medea’s role.

Leeor Alexandra once filmed a video on You Tube about things the society did not want us to know, and one of them was the fact that our attention was being hijacked. Companies and marketing agencies pay billions of dollars for your attention every single year.

Hear me out, your attention is the single most powerful force of this universe, but what do they do to it? They limit our attention. They make our attention smaller and shorter by recreating people who can only pay attention to fifteen second Tiktoks and not two hour long documentaries. If our mind is attuned to paying attention to things that matter then we can make good choices. We can make better decisions. And that would be detrimental to their businesses and profits.

It is always interesting to consider the fact that all these people who created these apps, none of them have social media. None of them use social media the way that we use them addictively. Dependently. None of them are harming their own attention spans. In fact, all of these companies all have meditation rooms. They all go on meditation retreats. They all do things to strengthen their consciousness and their attention. Their working on having more mind power while creating apps that diminish our mind power.

So we spend so many hours of our days, entertaining ourselves. Glued to our screens just so we could get our daily dose of dopamine hits. And then what?

I now know how important my attention is. Because where attention goes, energy flows. I no longer want to be just a pawn to their end game. If fact, I will do as these creators do. I strengthen my attention. I will limit my screen time. I’ll read books. I won’t give in to those dopamine hits of short content. Once in a while, it is completely okay. But making it a lifestyle is self-destructive. Nothing good ever comes out of feeding these harmful thoughts with our energies. Be discerning about what you are consuming. Our thoughts become our realities, after all.