Day 1652
Kill Your Heroes. Guard Your Mind. Keep One Pedestal.
How to stay informed without letting the internet live in your nervous system
I saw something about Covid today that made my blood boil.
It was one of those stories that instantly drags you back into that era. The fear. The policies. The incentives. The way institutions behaved when asking basic questions suddenly made you a bad person. I could feel the heat climbing up my neck just reading it.
A husband in Texas, Brad Seiler, told a story on camera about his wife Gail’s hospital stay in 2021. According to him, she spent days without food, days without water, and was treated less like a patient than a problem to be managed. He said his family was told she was unsalvageable. He said a DNR appeared. He said the posture shifted from helping her recover to preparing her to die.
At one point, Gail asked:
“Am I a patient, or am I a prisoner?”
Brad says he got her out through the freight elevator. A nurse allegedly told him, “Mark my words, she’ll be dead tonight.”
Gail is alive today.
Now, I cannot verify every detail of that story, but I also don’t need every detail pinned down to know what it stirred up in me. I lived through that period too. I remember enough. I remember the atmosphere, the pressure, how quickly “trust the experts” turned into censorship of dissident voices.
And I could feel myself getting pissed off. Then I stopped and asked the only question that mattered: What can I actually do about this right now?
Does me sitting on my couch, jaw clenched, fix what happened? Does it change hospital policy? Does it help a single victim? Does it make me a better husband, father, worker, writer, or man?
No. Obviously not. So I did what any sane person should do.
I updated my priors, stored the lesson, and moved on.
But moving on is not the same thing as forgetting.
Forgetting is weakness. Pretending nothing happened is weakness. Getting fooled twice because you were too emotionally fragile to remember the first time is weakness.
Remembering means you learn the lesson, install it, and keep walking. Like a software patch. Institutions will often protect themselves before they protect you. Noted. Installed. Rebooting.
That is useful. Sitting there marinating in rage for an hour is not useful.
Anger contains information. That’s one of its jobs. It can alert you that something is wrong. But once you have extracted the signal, continuing to stew in it does not make the lesson more true. It just makes you miserable. The hospital does not feel your outrage. The people in your home do.
That realization led me to a second thought I’ve been chewing on for a while now. Your attention is under siege.
Scroll your feed for ten minutes and you’ll be invited to become emotionally invested in a hundred things you cannot affect. A criminal case three states away. A political outrage cycle. Some viral clip designed in a lab to make men hate women or women hate men. A million comment sections recruiting you into some battle that existed five minutes before you saw it.
The feed is very good at this.
It knows that rage keeps people staring at glass. It knows that moral theater feels like action. It knows that if it can keep your nervous system in a constant state of agitation, it owns you for another hour.
That’s why I’ve started thinking about cognitive security the same way I think about locking my front door.
I would never let some random stranger walk into my house, track mud across the floor, rearrange the furniture, and start a fight in my living room. Yet I’ll casually open an app that does the mental version of that and call it “staying informed.”
No thanks.
Your attention is one of the most valuable things you own. It is more valuable than money because you can make more money. You cannot make more time. You cannot buy back a day you spent in a cortisol bath because some glowing rectangle told you to be furious about something in Ithaca or Massachusetts or wherever else the next “big thing” is.
Then tonight I was holding my son while he fell asleep.
His whole body went heavy the way babies do when they finally surrender to sleep. His breathing slowed. His little face relaxed. The room got quiet in that sacred way only a house with children can get.
And it hit me all at once. Not one thing in my feed today touched that room. Not the Covid story. Not the outrage cycle. Not the political fight du jour. Not the algorithm’s latest attempt to make me spiritually obese and emotionally distracted. None of it walked through the door and changed the weight of my son on my chest.
The overwhelming majority of what we consume online has a direct impact on our actual daily life of roughly zero. Meanwhile, the life in front of us is real. The wife is real. The kids are real. The work is real. The neighbor is real. The run is real. The sky over your street is real. The room you are standing in right now is real.
The feed wants you to believe the whole world is on fire. A lot of the time, your actual world is just waiting for your full attention.
That brings me to another phrase I keep coming back to:
Kill your heroes.
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Not literally. Kill the pedestal.
Human beings are unbelievably talented at turning other human beings into idols. Athletes. Musicians. Politicians. CEOs. Influencers. Podcasters. The one guy on YouTube who sounds very confident about macroeconomics. We find someone impressive and slowly start outsourcing pieces of our judgment to them.
Eventually that person stops being somebody we admire and becomes somebody we need to be right.
That is always dangerous.
The last several years have been brutal for hero worship. A lot of “trusted voices” got things wrong. Some were arrogant. Some were cowardly. Some stayed quiet when it counted. Good. Let the false pedestals crack. Let these people come back down to eye level where they belong.
Learn from people. Respect them. Study greatness wherever you find it. But do not worship human beings. They are human beings. They will be wrong. They will disappoint you. They will sin. They will die.
There is one exception.
Only one Hero walked directly into death and came back three days later.
BOOM.
The King of kings. The best to ever do it.
And no, I’m not talking about the GOAT. Wrong animal. Wrong guy. (Get behind me satan)
I’m talking about Jesus Christ.
The Alpha & Omega.
Lately, I have been running with the Bible in my ears instead of podcasts. No takes. No noise. No professional outrage merchants. Just the road, my lungs, and the words of the One person in history who looked at corrupt institutions, political power, religious hypocrisy, mob chaos, and death itself and was not remotely shaken.
He had already seen the end of the story.
That changes a man (for the better).
You stop feeling like a spectator in a collapsing world and start feeling like a participant in a world that has already been redeemed. You stop acting like every headline deserves a piece of your soul. You stop confusing awareness with wisdom.
And you remember the proper hierarchy.
Keep your earthly heroes at eye level. Learn from them. Never worship them.
Keep your mistakes and lessons behind you without forgetting them. Update your priors. Close the file. Move forward.
Guard your attention like treasure. Because it is. Not everything that knocks on the door of your mind deserves to be let in.
Look up from the screen and into the room you’re actually in. Someone there needs you to be steady.
And reserve the pedestal for the One who actually conquered death.
You do not have to fix 2021 from your couch.
You do not have to solve every public scandal before bed.
You do not have to win a comment-section war against anonymous avatars at 11:48 p.m.
You do have to be a good husband. A good father. A good worker. A good neighbor. You have to do the work in front of you with a full heart and a clear head, because there is a King on the throne and He is not worried.
As He said Himself, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
That is not wishful thinking. That is a scouting report from the only Man who has already read the final page.
So go take on the world.
Smile while you do it.
Fear not.
It’s already won.
:)
BOOM
9/29/26
Conor Jay Chepenik
