Why you should avoid Music in the morning
And the news, and people...
Hey you, What’s that sound?, everybody look what’s going down.
What’s the first thing you do as your eyes creak open to embrace another day on planet earth. That’s if you’re old enough to know where you are. Do you think of daffodils and butterflies, the Carpenters and Crosby, Stills and Nash? Or of overreaching governments’ net zero agenda, taxes, traffic calming schemes that fuel rage like Sodom with a hangover and professional performance targets divorced from any achievable reality? There’s larks and owls, although since Lockdown half the country appears to be neither: preferring an early night and a lie-in. Office blocks peer emptily down on the thoroughfares and pavements of the once carefree city. Sandwich vendors lean on counters doom scrolling awaiting customers.
It’s the larks who leap into the day like a stripper springing from of a giant cake. They skip down the stairs ready to fill the morning with life; the sort of people who suggest swimming as suitable for a first date. And we all all know what they do next. They turn the bloody kitchen radio on to play music.
Ironically it’s the sort of people who don’t know their Coldplay from their Elbow who let the radio play their music in the morning. It’s not even music, it’s background noise, they aren’t surrendering themselves to the direction the music might take them, they’re not really even listening to it, but simply making the day already needlessly busy.
Breakfast radio is the worst offender. The brain is more supple in the morning and ticks over in what’s called acquisition mode. Successful people often claim it’s their 5am waking that led to them conquering the world, and the Royal Marines awake at 6am, although not to listen to some radio DJ plodding through hackneyed inspirational morning enthusiasm in-between important news bulletins, but to do some pull ups or something.
Sometimes it feels as though the music is the bait to get you on the news hook, so you grow accustomed to having your Roxy Music reverie disturbed my calamitous disturbances in the force. And how is news even prioritised? Why does Mrs Snufflelump winning first prize in the Scones at Bussington’s yearly fete get overlooked for speculative commentary on the ‘settled science’ of manmade climate change? I know what I’d be more interested in.
Important news is something chosen by those holding the torch, to swing the beam on what they deem as paramount, whilst maintaining everything else in the dark. The news is always bad news. Bad news is disheartening and creates a displacement of the self, instead of gratitude it provokes guilt and cynicism that leads to hopelessness; if other people’s beds are burning when will yours? And what right do you even have to a non-burning bed?
When you stop watching the news you unplug from the frequency that depends upon fury, scorn and worry. The number of clients I have who report as anxious yet have BBC news updating pinging throughout the session. I stopped the news when my first child was born and the C4 news made way for endless episodes of Daddy Pig fumbling his way through parenthood like only males are allowed to be ridiculed. At first I recall being somewhat dismayed at the political analysis I was missing in the name of some well-deserved peace at the close of a marvellous day with my children, until it dawned on me that the ‘political’ analysis was effectively telling me how to think.
It creates a reality where people parrot what they are heard, and who can blame them? The news and commentary is no longer ‘German warships entered the Drøbak Sound’ but is instead ‘nasty evil German warships’. Well, they might well be, to some people, but there’s actually never unified opinion, at least before the news tells us there should be. Without the news there would be no ‘settled science’ on climate change or Covid. Beyond the news you find that ‘the’ science is as settled as the oceans are calm.
As with the recent Nashville shooting the media lens, usually so quick to call such an incident a hate crime, instead, due to the trans identity of the gunman (person?), describes them as having been driven to violence, as though society is to blame rather than the individual. That the shooter might be the victim rather than the three dead nine-year olds demonstrates how scrambled our moral compass has become. It is no longer the News, but Opinion. The 10 o’clock Opinion with Huw Edwards.
When Russia invaded Ukraine everyone, and I mean everyone, told me Putin had gone mad. Well, regardless as to your view on Ukraine, if that’s allowed, the idea that just because a world leader had taken aggressive action was a symptom of madness was lazy at best. Last time I looked at the DSM-5-TR infringement of international borders wasn’t a symptom of mental illness, in fact watching the news seems to provoke that. Besides there’s still swarths of people with Ukraine flags still blocking their living room sunlight with virtue signalling who think international borders shouldn’t exist. Are they mad?