What Did You Feed Your Gods Today?

Why we need to be more wary of toxic “reality” entertainment

Image by Midjourney after a whole lot of attempts, I think my prompt engineering skills are getting worse.

This article was inspired by my wife and I agreeing to turn off Power Slap: Road To The Title, after seeing enough to arrive at the conclusion that this is not the launch of a new and exciting sport, rather a disparate bunch of people being invited to hurt each other for spectacle’s sake.

The Background

Hillman

I once went on a date with someone who couldn’t stop talking about James Hillman, which convinced me to acquire a copy of one of his books, Re-Visioning Psychology. It’s a fascinating piece of work that covers a number of aspects of psychology, notably incorporating mythology (“archetypal mythology” is Hillman’s thing) and theology.

This was probably the toughest book I’ve ever read, as much for the density of its content as for the extreme academic nature of the work. For months, I would struggle through a page or two, then spend days digesting. In spite of the effort required to understand and internalize what Hillman puts forward, this book triggered months of introspection and an obsession with how we construct our internal multiverses (“me-niverses”, I like to call them), and how we interact with each other through the interstitial layer of objective reality.