Parenoia

We missed the time change yesterday. When we woke at our usual time, it was an hour later. My wife found out first when she put the TV news on. She didn’t believe it so she called the time & temp phone #. They confirmed it. Still, I was vaguely uneasy about it.

 

How could we have missed it? We usually know well in advance. It made me feel paranoid. I owned that feeling and let it drift around my consciousness for awhile then realized why I felt that way and this is what I want to share.

 

I was paranoid because I had no way to verify on my own--by my own experience - that the time really did change. It was still dark, there was just no way to know. I had to depend on the external man-made sources and worst of all, the media. I couldn’t know and believe on my own or use my own sense experience to validate. I had to trust and that need to trust what I considered an unreliable source and my inability to verify with my own experience made me paranoid.

 

Wow, having to trust the media! What an eye opener! And for something so basic as the time of day. The news is similar. Like the time change, because I can’t verify the so-called news with my own experience and sense data, I’m paranoid about what is distributed by the media and called ‘news.’ That’s why it’s so important if I’m to keep my paranoia at an ‘acceptable’ level and avoid the severe paranoia infecting so many people, that I, and you too, have many different sources of news and information, stay mindful and use scientific techniques like General Semantics.