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There is a limit to how many messages a man can attend to and process in a day. What messages are you attending to? What messages are you ignoring and why?
You may be attending to this article because you are interested in contemplating what messages might inform you on how to be a better man. This may be the reason you decided to devote some of your limited incoming data bandwidth to visit the goodmenproject.com webpage. If so, good choice.
This website is devoted to exploring new understandings of what it can mean to be a man in the 21st century. This exploration is accomplished, in part, through reading the stores of other men and writing about your stories of manhood.
It is becoming more and more common for men to filter out messages related to being a man.The thinking here is that gender specific messages are no longer relevant. That is any message directed at men on how to think, behave, emote, should just as well be directed at women and other people who don’t identify with the label of man or woman.
If you are working on employing this filter, your visit to goodmenproject.com may be motivated by an interest in debunking male messaged content. There is much to be debunked and much to support you with further developing this filter.
Some of my most powerful personal experience with goodmenproject.com have been experiences of adjusting my manhood filters to free up bandwidth by the act of writing posts for the website.
For example, I used to write about some of my associations with playing and watching sports with being male. In the course of this writing I lost almost all of my interest in sports, without feeling any less of a man for it. I had saved a great deal of bandwidth since early boyhood for things sports. I needed to pay attention to changes in players, their performance statistics,which teams they were playing for and so much more. I was highly motivated to avoid the shame of not knowing a basic sports fact should it come up in conversation with other males.
Some of the freed up bandwidth has gone to attending to messages relevant to my health and keeping up on what is going on with family members.
I wrote some reflections on the 2016 US Presidential Election. Keeping up with politics and political conflict was important to me as a man. I felt that being informed on local and global current events was a vital part of being a good citizen. As I wrote, I came into awareness that keeping up with current events didn’t seem to inform me at all as how to be a responsible countryman. I was once again motivated to avoid the embarrassment of not being able to offer an informed political opinion when called on to do so.
I also became increasing aware of how entities wield power by clogging pubic bandwidth with mis-information. I pay little attention to global affairs these days and the world doesn’t seem to be much worse off for it, as far as I can tell.
I have written about the tricks of advertisers and a growing worldwide interest in exploiting labor.I have become more uncomfortably aware of how much bandwidth I save for the contemplation of my consumer choices. I need to write in that subject some more sometime soon.
I have written some reviews of movies that are popular with men. In the process I have reduced by television to about zero and don’t care about what film will be available to a theater near me soon.
I have written about some of my experiences as a working man, which has helped me adjust to my health related forced retirement. I no longer identify as much with what I used to be able to do in the work force. ( I do identify writing for goodmenproject.com as playing an important role in my adjustment to retirement).
These and other reductions in what used to take up a good deal of bandwidth, have freed up space for messages tagged spiritual. Spiritual contemplation has rushed into fill bandwidth voids. I used to think of spiritual thinking and practice as something I wanted to get around to doing more of before I die, not as something that would come streaming to me unbidden.
Man, take an inventory as to what messages occupy portions of your bandwidth. You know what you spend too much time attending to. Just cut some of that out and pay attention to what takes its place. Now don’t be surprised when new crap snatches up bandwidth vacated by old crap. Just stop paying attention to the new crap as it rises. You will know the good stuff when it comes.
To be fully alive is to spend time feeling peaceful, tranquil, serene, alternating with feeling joyful,ecstatic and filled with awe. If this isn’t happening much, check you bandwidth and what you are devoting it to.
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Photo/Pixabay
