The company you keep

The internet is going to be remembered as a giant petri dish of social contagion. Weird sex stuff Weird violence stuff One of the most chanted texts in Southern Buddhism has a line that goes something like “Not keeping company with fools…this is the highest blessing”. This is the one of the first steps in the spiritual life. The full text, in case you’re interested. While none of the groups I hang around online are anything like those mentioned in the two articles I linked to above, a lot of the loudest voices in many groups are, well, fools. I don’t mean this is some snobby sense. It’s just that even the halfway decent subreddits and the like are filled with people that I’d probably never want to be around in real life. So why spend so much time letting their thoughts become mine?