What do you think about...?

I was reading a trash media "article" on a news site (I am not even going to link it here) that was talking about some TikTok nonsense where women asked their male partners how often they think of the Roman Empire, with supposedly many saying relatively often.

Is that so strange?

Just the other day I was thinking about the Roman Empire too, as I use it as a reference for many things to do with centralization. I mentioned it also in this context where I stated that all centralization fails eventually - The Roman Empire fell, but Rome is still standing.

In my opinion, people who don't think about the Roman Empire enough, might need to reevaluate their thought process.

However, as ridiculous as this "challenge" is and despite the ridicule of men in the article that stated "all men think alike" it is worth having a look at the statement a bit. Let's assume that it is true and men indeed all (on average) think alike - isn't this a case of genetics playing a role in outcomes?

The process of creation is Though, Word, Action, where our thoughts form the words of a dialogue (internally or with others) that leads into actionable steps to create a reality. This is what humans are - A creative force. But, there are differences amongst humans as to how and what we create, meaning that we aren't all the same when it comes to ability.

However, most of us believe that our thoughts are a large part of designing our reality and therefore, what we think about matters to our outcomes. As I have mentioned before, it seems that most couples I know and have heard about have one person who is far more interested in financial investment considerations than the other and, that is almost always a man.

While these guys might be thinking about the Roman Empire a bit, what would be more interesting is to consider what they are spending the majority of their time thinking about, because that is going to influence that creative process. Similarly, it would be interesting to know where women are on average spending their mental energy, because that is going to affect their outcomes too.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Which category does the Roman Empire fall into?

That time in our history spanned almost 1500 years in some form and a lot of what was learned throughout that period are still lessons we use and quote today. It is a colorful and robust story that due to the diversity of subjects it covers, can be used in various ways, similarly to my illustration about the inevitability of failure for centralized societies.

It is not surprising that the key demographic for reality television shows are women and these have taken some audience from the "soap opera" dramas. This kind of content targets the second and third category from the Roosevelt quote by engineering events as buckets to collect the behaviors of people. It isn't about developing ideas, it is about engaging our needs for feeling connected to others, even if it is an illusion.

Men are big consumers also, but there is probably a difference in what they are consuming and I wonder what kinds of thoughts the content inspires. Our thoughts are products influenced by our surroundings, so it is going to affect our entire process whether we are surrounding ourselves with trash or treasure. Yeah, "one man's trash is another's treasure", but when it comes to specific outcomes, is that true?

If a thousand people spend their time thinking about reality television people and events and another thousand spend their time thinking about how the Roman Empire has affected our present day, which group would you expect to be better off financially? It is a tricky question to answer, because neither are directly related to finance, but one is about ideas and processes and require an understanding of the post as it applies to the present, and one is experiential but unlikely actionable.

Last night, I wrote an article called "Kill your Darlings", which looked at reducing the number of life focus points, so that we can focus more intently on the most important ones. This article goes in a similar direction, where not only do we choose our focus points, but perhaps we can surround ourselves with the kind of content that facilitates them.

This is something that I have discussed for many, many years already, where I believe we are what we eat and from a content perspective, we aren't eating nutritiously for our mental processes. Instead, what we are doing is surrounding ourselves with a lot of useless information that due to its content and volume, is negatively impacting our creativity and limiting our practical abilities.

It might feel good that we are spending our time thinking about what we enjoy, but perhaps this is part of the reason for so much disparity in outcomes, where some people will spend more time thinking about what gets them closer to their goal, whilst some spend time thinking about what slows them down.

The argument might be the "work too much" argument, but value-adding thinking doesn't have to be work, nor does it have to be a chore of any kind. In fact, spending time thinking about what helps us reach those goals, can be very, very rewarding. This means that we might want to consider the reward we get from thinking various thoughts and whether (as the article mentioned) thinking about "Taylor Swift and Vampires" are actually just distractions that will reduce our ability to develop the structures that feed our wellbeing in the long term too, not only the short term, instant gratification model.

I have no idea what you think about, but I do feel that we should all spend some time reflecting on our thought processes, the topics we invest our attention into and whether they offer us what we actually value and want.

The article was one of those "look how dumb men are" articles, however there are likely a lot of different thought groupings across populations and it would be interesting to see what kinds of overlaps and variances there might be. For instance, if you wanted to improve your financial position, what were other people who wanted the same thinking about on their journey to an improved position? If you wanted to improve your health, what are those who are successfully doing it thinking about and what kind of content are they surrounded by?