A friend I met through the Internet shared this jaysanalysis with me. So far, I've been really impressed by the quality/depth of the content. There's a handful of topics here that interest me, including

• Christianity, Church history
• Cultural/symbol analysis
• Geopolitics

I think I've mentioned on this blog once or twice about my interest in looking into more Orthodox Christianity stuff. Some issues with (Evangelical) Protestantism I've tried to work through, in no particular order

• Philosophical problems (e.g. problem of evil; what is "belief" in sola fide; where does scripture come from in sola scriptura?
• Lack of tradition, historical roots; many songs/images/etc of modern Christian movements look like whatever advertising is popular. Constant new materials instead of engaging classic works ¹
• Uninspiring/bad aesthetics ("hippie rock concert")—doesn't feel holy

I hope that through spending some time studying Orthodoxy, including doing more readings of the Church Fathers ²

Diving into the work of content creators

Since 2010 or so, there's been a handful of content creator people's work I've engaged a lot. Each, I've found especially engaging for some personal reason.

For instance, on this blog, I've shared some links to the work of Luke Smith. A bit older than me, I was surprised to see how he had similar thoughts that I did about stuff that I did, and went further doing more homework/research and producing more content on these topics than I had done.

Pretty much no news has been good

Spending more time reading books, talking with people, etc. has been very good. I only keep up with enough news to know what I'm allowed to/not allowed to do, and often I can find this out through other people without even opening social media.

Some practical suggestions for making media consumption a better use of time,

• Make default homepages on your web browsers blank or something really dry and boring (e.g. the weather in California)—this shields you from getting attention splashed with what others push on you; you can start your Internet interaction with what you decided to look at
• Whenever possible, consume older media first—choose a novel from 50 years ago rather than 5 years ago. One upside of consuming older media is you can probably find more informative commentary/analysis as well (e.g. reviews on old movies)
• Whenever possible, consume longer form media* if you are interested in a subject; e.g. if you're going to express an opinion about Afghanistan, see if there is some old book by someone on Afghanistan and read that rather than assuming you understand the context of some rando Twitter remark. If you are unwilling to do your homework, don't be an echo chamber conduit if you don't have to be.
• Jump past the first Google results purposely; try to go to anywhere other than Wikipedia first. Then, go to Wikipedia.
• If you choose to browse news sites, intentionally do some "meta analysis". Scroll back a week or two and see what the past week's headlines as an aggragate look like before jumping to the present. Appreciate the bias of a newspaper, e.g. you can expect CNN to push one sort of narrative, RT to push another, and so on and so forth.

Using the strategies above, I would like to think that I keep my views more independent in the sense that I don't just plug myself into the Google hivemind and accept the first few results; hopefully these techniques facilitate exercising critical thinking in that they force me to slow down and take time to digest the various forms of messaging thrown at me.

In the coming months, I'll probably be doing some more reading on communications, adverising, and that sort of thing.