And maybe to make yourself useful to the world around you.

Stop paying ANY attention to content that makes you feel good. Content that you enjoy has almost certainly been DESIGNED to be reaffirm your values, not just to entertain and uplift you, but to make you feel comfortable and relaxed so that you can be hypnotized ... any halfway decent AI contentbot can generate content will make you harvestable as a prospect for things you do not really need OR to make you readily hypnotizable, even weaponizable for political purposes.

You can read this in the crowds of people around who ... if you know what programs they like to watch, you can pretty much predict exactly what they are going to care about or talk about ... the crowd around you is completely readable ... more readable than anyone wants to imagine. We live in an age in which people have been programmed ... it's not just the recommendation engines serving up ads or suggestions for what people [thought they] were thinking about anyway ... we now see AI producing content that is engineered to be especially sticky with an audience's eyeballs and ears.

You would be far better off developing your OWN artificial intelligence bot to deliver something in accordance with your own preferences ... but that necessitates having some awareness of what your preferences are and why they are.

ALmost all of us are just not that original ... the gregarious nature of humans underlies our psychological tendency to be part of families, tribes or circles of friends ... seeking out our kind of crowd and then sticking with them is why humans have a survival advantage -- we are not that smart or capable on our own; we get by with a little help from our friends; we tend to have to humbly rely upon our crowd and we generally want to make ourselves useful to the crowd. The nature of crowdliness is reciprocal or recursive -- we tend to believe what our crowd believes, especially if we imagine that we want to influence the crowd ... deeply recursive crowdliness ... with thousands of layers upon layers of layers of subconscious acceptance-seeking, re-evaluating, influence peddling and all kinds of social games is what humans do ... it's why people say something like "Family is important" even when they don't completely believe that. Every single one of us, regardless of how unique we want to imagine ourselves to be, tends to be product of the massive crowds of humans that have come before us. That is hardly a bad thing! Our ancestors somehow met, enjoyed one another's company and we came into existence and then continued to develop into what we are because we are products of what has worked -- for most of us, everything that brought us to where we are has actually worked out extremely well ... it has worked so well, that we have the luxury of worrying that we are not quite superstars or ridiculously wealthy or famous.

The insecurity of crowds of prey animals is also part of crowdliness ... it's not all upside ... just be aware of the downside of crowdliness.

Nowadays, the minds of far too many human minds have become products of massive telemeterized human psychology experiments using propaganda and marketingspeak programming. If you want to find yourself wanting to look at content ... perhaps catch up on scores, team standings, celebrity athlete gossip on ESPN, for example ... then probably you have been hypnotized or programmed to want to look at that content, think in certain sloganized cliches and buy things or affect a lifestyle behavior that serves someone else's agenda.

A a human being, you sort of HAVE TO BE programmed ... that's just how it works -- the need to programmed by the crowd around you is hard-wired into your neurology ... you cannot invent everything yourself; you can do a lot -- but humans tend to specialize ... it is likely that you as human probably did not grow your food last year; you probably did not clothe yourself, you probably did not build the shelter you live or install the power, water and HVAC yourself -- you cannot survive and enjoy life as well as you can without accepting most of what YOUR crowd believes. Geography is less of an absolutely dominant force now; so you can pick YOUR own crowd of the 100,000 people on the planet that you want to hang out with the most -- BUT you cannot control that you will need consume the content projected onto the screen of your subconscious ... that's fine, because you can control the projector better now than you ever could before.

In other words, you can pick the parts of crowdliness that best advance your cause ... whatever you have decided your cause is ... and you should give some thought to deciding EXACTLY what that cause should be going forward ... just do not look in the rear view mirror and say the past is your cause ... although, you might want to look far enough back in the rear view mirror, ie to look at the Art that was produced or the Classics written over the last 2500 years OR to look at the history of musical expression or scientific thought in Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics over the last 250 years ... you want to look far enough back, that you can entirely detach yourself and all of your internal drama ... you don't want to waste a lot of time looking at the drama of today's news, yesterday's news, last week's or last month's news ... get enough distance so that you can be impartial, so that YOU are not the focus of your thought ... time is no different than space ... your opinions of what's happening on Earth are probably not too biased if you can look back at the Earth as if you were looking back from a point outside of this solar system.

If you want to LEARN to read the crowd, then you can't be misled by current content and mind manipulators ... most importantly, you cannot be misled by your own emotions or desires for comfort and affirmation. You need to work at getting an ice-cold, faraway perspective ... take your emotions out of the equation ... get some perpective in order to see the crowd for what it is

You would be better off if you took control of your AI and actually started using it to deliver better content, partly by using what has been written and discussed over and over and over in the last 2500 years or so ... the Classics will serve you much better than anything that you will read in the news media ... you are better off looking at sufficiently old bestsellers that were exhaustively studied in their day, especially valuable might be the Classics or the timeless ancient wisdom from sacred texts ... ANY time spent worrying about what might be trending in the news is worse than merely useless -- content now is engineered and studied to draw lowest-common-denominator consumers with clickbait that makes people feel needy or anxious about culture, politics, their fellow humans ... stop being a sucker ... read the Classics, go at least a couple decades back to see how predictions and prognostications play out.

It's unlikely that anyone else reads our notes ... that does not matter; we annotate primarily for ourselves -- by re-reading and re-revising our own annoations from prior reading ... the work can go COLD ... given the benefit of something going COLD, we get to reflect, re-calibrate our thinking and possibly get just a bit closer to be able to take our emotions of the equation ... and we can see how successful our forebearers were at reading the crowds of their day ... and we start to understand something about successfully using crowdliness.

Not that much has changed. The most recent stuff that we look at is at least a decade old ... but that's enough time that we can ask is that true?