STATIC: The Messages That Bombard Us, the Noise That Damages Us, and How to Shut It All Down

By Alex Rivlin

Static | stat·ic | noun: noise produced by various natural or man-made disturbances

Life is noisy. From mass media to social media, family input to friend

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781544537351

Alex Rivlin

Alex Rivlin is a father, self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie, eternal optimist, and entrepreneur. Born just outside New York City, he utilized his ambition from a young age to pursue lofty goals, a trend he has continued throughout his life. Before pursuing his passion for writing, Alex launched several successful businesses and currently operates four companies. He lives in Las Vegas and is always looking for a new adventure.

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© 2022

alex rivlin

All rights reserved.

static

The Messages That Bombard Us, the Noise That Damages Us,

and How to Shut It All Down

isbn

978-1-5445-3733-7 Hardcover

978-1-5445-3734-4 Paperback

978-1-5445-3735-1 Ebook

Contents

Introduction

1. Your Brain on Static

2. Parents: The Enduring Voice

3. Siblings: First Companions

4. Friends and Coworkers

5. Love Hurts:The Static of Romance

6. Society: The Voice of Your World

7. The Media and the Message

8. Mind Over Marketing

9. Everybody’s Talkin’: Social Media

10. You Are the Product: Social Media and Advertising

11. Toward a Static-Proof Life

To my daughter Alison and my son Benjamin,

who have led me to look inward and see what is most

important in life. You have both given me deeper purpose

to leave the Earth better than I found it, and to follow my path and core beliefs. I love you both to infinity and back!

‘Finding yourself’ is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.

—Emily McDowell

Introduction

As much as I hate to admit it, I’m a product of my society.

Sometimes I feel otherwise. I feel out of place, like I should have been born decades or even a century earlier. But that’s all relative. Whether we like it or not, we all have a context to consider.

You and I were born in our specific places, in our specific years, to our specific parents. We’ve been defined by our where, our when, and the near-infinite messages we’ve received in our minds as a result of those factors.

My personal context and yours will differ, of course. But in many ways, we’re much alike because we have a shared context: we’ve been shaped by many forces: the vast marketing machine that lurks behind our culture; the voices of friends, relatives, and career acquaintances; the media in all its many forms. It’s ongoing, almost moment to moment.

We’ve not only been defined by this machine; we’ve been trained by it. Drive to any desolate corner of our country and repeat certain commercial catchphrases, and whoever happens to be there can complete your sentence. Not all the messages are good ones, needless to say. The vast majority have an agenda that has nothing to do with our well-being. I call this barrage of messages static.

In radio terms, static is random noise that comes between the broadcast point and the receiver. There’s a true signal we want to receive, but never a clear channel. The fluctuations of static, perhaps bits of other radio transmissions, may fade in and out, but it’s always there. The radio station in your car may be set on the baseball game, then a preacher’s voice fades in, and then a political call-in show. The static in our minds is something like that—the random noise that comes from any number of other sources, but has nothing to do with where we want to go in life.

As an American consumer, I’ve received my share of static. I’ve done things, said things, and become things simply because they were expected and promoted by our society. The clothes I wear, the car I drive, the foods I eat, and the ways I socialize—they’re all reflections of my cultural context, and I adopted them because someone somewhere gave me advice, told me they liked this or that, and maybe even spent vast sums of money to influence my thoughts and perspective.

But before I start to feel like one more cookie from the cookie cutter, or make you feel that way, we both need to remember the noise isn’t all bad. My context is a nice place in many ways. I enjoy wearing clothes that look good and driving a nice car. I enjoy it so much that, for years, I’d have told you I was a free agent. I make my own choices. I do it for me.

For example, the car I drove was fancy and fast. It was everything I’d been told I should want—but it was very much my call. I did my own research instead of responding directly to a glossy TV ad, and I selected a model a lot of my friends wouldn’t recognize. That made it easy for me to say I bought the car because it was my hands-on, personal, and careful choice.

The truth, however, is that somewhere, deep down beneath my telling of the story, I knew it was a little more complex than simply me marching to the beat of a different drummer. I knew that a handful of people were watching, and whether I consciously thought of them in that way or not, they were people I wanted to impress. People I aspired to be like. And they could recognize and admire that car.

And the others? Maybe they couldn’t call out the name, the model, but they could recognize it as a luxury car with a prestigious symbol. They might be impressed. And that was a factor that surely played into my decision process.

These weren’t conscious deliberations on my part. I didn’t think, When I buy these wheels, X and Y will sit up and take notice. Taking pride in my uniqueness as I do, I would have been disgusted to catch myself thinking such thoughts. I’ve tried to resist the fact I was molding myself to an image calculated to impress; that I longed to be accepted and respected. And that I wanted to be the one others aspired to be like. But how can I be honest with you or anyone else, if I am not being honest with myself? All these things represent deep-rooted programming in my subconscious belief system.

I would say most, if not all, of us live and think and strive toward impressing others and wanting to be liked, whether we want to admit it or not. Up to a point, that drive kind of makes the world go ‘round. It gives us things in common to talk about—cars, music we like, clothing styles, all of it. Where it goes bad, however, is when it begins to divert the course of our lives so that we’re no longer headed in the direction of our true north, the purpose we’re here on this planet to achieve; the destination that, above all directions, would give us the most happiness.

I don’t believe any of us are cookies fresh from the cookie cutter, identical daisies from the wallpaper of life, or generic faces in the crowd. It’s my firm conviction that we’re all not only unique, but uniquely equipped to leave a mark for good on the world that is exhilarating for us personally. And when we get lost in the static emanating from our culture; when we become misdirected by trying to become someone we could never be, or never be happy if we could; when life becomes about impressing others rather than fully expressing our potentialities—then I see that as a tragedy.

So it’s time to contend with all this static, don’t you think?

It’s all around us, more than we know, and in varieties we’ve never considered. In this book, we’ll consider the varieties of static, from womb to tomb; from parent to sibling to buddy to boss; from mass media to social media. I’ll demonstrate the ways we’re being bombarded 24/7 by signals and messages and ideas and images and empty promises that can’t help but inspire a false step here or there on our part. Enough false steps, of course, can lead to places we really don’t want to go.

But we’ll do more than point to the bad stuff. We’ll also explore strategies for minimizing and even eliminating the negative static; turning it off, tuning it out, or better yet, finding the true and healthy messages, the signposts that point us down the road of being the people we were meant to be. Despite the scary title, you’ll find points and perspectives of hope in this book.

Not that there’s anything easy about this task. Cutting out the static is a lifelong practice—or set of them; an armory of skills that must be internalized. It requires actions and reactions that must be repeated until they become our lifestyle. We need a positive mindset that says we’re determined to be something better, more true to ourselves, than all those voices are pushing us to be. Then we need a strong sense of direction, with the course toward true purpose mapped out inside us.

Yes, it’s a battle, and yes, the opposition keeps changing its battle plan, inventing new forms and flavors of static all the time. But the good news is, battles do more than hold off destruction. They create heroes. If you and I do all we can to resist the negative influences, the noise that doesn’t apply to our lens, and messages that don’t serve us, we’ll become wiser, stronger, and more savvy in the struggle.

We’ll help not only ourselves, but the circle of friends and acquaintances around us. We’ll not only find the pathway wide open to becoming those people we long to be, but we’ll find that path filled with others who like what they see in us, and want to come along on the journey.

After a while, the static will fade out. And that’s when the beautiful music of hope can break in.

—1—

Your Brain

on Static

I need to tell you something, and it’s sort of disturbing. But don’t panic. Everything’s going to be alright. I promise.

I need to tell you that you’re in a trance. Right now.

I’m in one, too. We all are.

It’s not like the plot of The Matrix. No aliens involved at all. But have you ever seen a hypnotic trance? Real hypnosis, not the guy on stage who makes you cluck like a chicken. Let’s say someone wants to stop smoking. The therapist talks to the patient softly and helps her into a suggestive state, so that he’s speaking directly to her subconscious. There’s focused attention and usually some question-and-answer times.

She’s in a trance.

While she’s in that state, they’re going to talk about smoking—how she should think about it, and that she isn’t a smoker by identity—and then he’ll gently bring her out of the trance. She may not remember the conversation, but there’s a good chance the session will be helpful. If they’d conversed normally, maybe she’d take it to heart. But through the power of the subconscious, she’ll take it to mind. And the mind is mission control for all we do.

Hypnotherapy is controversial, of course. There’s a lot of debate about its benefits and flaws. But the point I’m zeroing in on is that we are suggestible people. Our minds can change through various methods and for various reasons. There are ways to get through to our subconscious and suggest actions and attitudes to us, and you could describe the process as trance-like.

I did some research on all this, and frankly, it was a little frightening. Your brain is basically a portable radio station, WYOU (KYOU if you live out west). Let’s start with brainwaves. If researchers place little electrodes on your head, what will register are beta waves, alpha waves, theta waves, and delta waves. The mind gives off electric signals to communicate with all the parts of your body.

There are a lot of interesting studies being done on brain waves and child development. From the time you’re born until you’re about seven years old, we find, your brain operates in terms of these waves—particularly alpha and theta waves. The latter are comparable to an adult in hypnosis.

There’s a reason for that. Theta waves process information and create memories, and these are the programming years. You’ve probably noticed how incredibly sponge-like a child’s mind is, soaking up everything. Words, sights, facts. Kids don’t miss a beat; they’re in learning mode all the time. They’re much more open to suggestion than we are because of the theta trance they spend most of their time in.

The hypnotherapist, working with an adult, seeks to relax the mind and get into those good theta waves that amp up the ability to accept suggestions. Then he can speak directly to the subconscious. But young children don’t need the hypno-guy. That phase is where they live.

These waves also enhance a child’s ability to imagine, and that’s why kids are constantly playing. The child’s imagination is powerful, insistent. It wants to exert itself. As we grow older, of course, we become more and more rooted in patterns of living and in what we concretely know about the world around us. We’re much less imaginative. There’s no longer any attraction to making a mud pie, or pretending a broomstick is a horse so we can gallop around the playroom. We don’t see the imagination as a practical tool. After all, people might stare and start whispering about us, especially if we pretend at work or the grocery store.

Have you ever seen a child who is concerned about people staring? Me neither. Kids have almost no inhibitions (which can cause quite a bit of embarrassment for Mom and Dad). They’re in theta, and the mental framework is under construction at a rapid rate, to help the child power through that cognitive development. If they’re suggestible and the imagination makes a crazy suggestion—this backyard is another planet! the trees are aliens!—why not act on it?

Learning Mode

Keep in mind that our actions, even as adults, are largely ruled by the subconscious—to the tune of 95 percent of our actions coming from that level, and only 5 percent from a conscious level. Quick example: stand up and walk across the room. That’s a simple command, yet it involves a series of highly complex actions. You use your sense of balance to stand, you mentally navigate the direction and any obstacles in the way, and you place one foot in front of the other, which is itself a series of connected actions involving various muscles and judgments.

Yet consciously, all you thought was,