Stoic Prompt Week 10 (2024)
"If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled have you no shame in that?" Epictetus, Enchiridion, 28.
Am I protecting My Time and Attention
When trying to sell an idea, or a product, acquiring the audience's Share of Mind and Top of Mind Awareness are two critical components. The cost to the advertiser, or propagandist, is measurable. The objective is to take the audience from: Unawareness to Awareness to Understanding to Conviction to Action.
Calculating how many times the message has to be presented to the target audience before they take the desired Action determines how efficient the campaign is. Associating the message with a product that the target audience desires determine the likely hood of success. The audience only pays for the associated product, for example a song, or a movie, or their previously held values and assumptions. It might include their propensity to vote a certain way for a specific party or clique. Most humans sell themselves cheaply.
If the audience is afraid, or fearful, and they think of your message first, then you have their Top-of-Mind Awareness. If the audience can only think of your product or your message when they are afraid, to the exclusion of other products or messages, then you also have their Share-of-Mind.
Having achieved both allows you to sell your product or your idea over and over again, until that's the only product or message they will buy when they are afraid. That's how a product that was originally a standalone brand becomes a generic product: like Kleenex, for example. Or nativism, or antisemitism, or racism. We sell ourselves cheaply. I do, too.
Our mindfulness is always a cheap date.
One of my life's goals has been to avoid giving my Top-of-Mind awareness and my Share-of-Mind away to the lowest bidder hawking shiny new products or ideas, willy nilly. I still do it though, but I fight it. My goal is to be informed without being indoctrinated and, hopefully, not sell myself too cheaply. Work in progress.
Epictetus Discourses, 4.6.34-35
Ask yourself the following things in the morning:
-What am I lacking in attaining freedom from passion?
-What for tranquility?
-What am I? A mere body, estate-holder, or reputation? None of these things. What then? A rational being.
-What then is demanded of me? Meditate on your actions.
-How did I stray away from serenity?
-What did I do that was unfriendly, unsocial, or uncaring?
-What did I fail to do in all these things?
