What is Falderal?

According to Worknik, one meaning of the noun falderal is “Nonsense, foolish talk”. There certainly is a lot of that going around! Just look a listen to what goes on around you, and you will see it everywhere.

For example, I saw an add today for the Apple iPhone 18 that ATT is selling. The user was portrayed as having an adventure simply because they had one. Faderal! In fact, most of the marketing that I see seems to have that same type of theme: talk a lot of nonsense and emphasize feelings to convince someone to buy their product.

It is the same thing in politics….

Why?

Only a guess on my part, but I think having everything available at the click of a button or an AI prompt has created a mindset of not analyzing what we see, hear, and feel. We are flooded with information all the time and cannot even begin to process it, yet believe we need to “know”.

So how to you “know” something if you’ve barely given it a thought?

I don’t think that we do. The idea that you really understand what you are exposed to in this flood of data is an illusion. We have no capacity to absorb all of this data, and instead, we’ve learned to fake it. Self-deception takes over when learning isn’t happening; we believe we are all right; just like an addict does when he/she has enough of their drug at that moment. (And, just like the addict, we aren’t.)

We select leaders based on how they act and sound, not on their record or morals, then complain when they don’t do what we expect.

We wonder why the world around us seems to be falling apart, but don’t understand that our own failure in this is a big part of the cause.

I would like to offer a suggestion: see how much you can stem the flood of information. Start with your news sources and social media.

I hear this all the time “but if I close my account at whatever-site, I won’t stay in touch with my friends!” But I have found that my good friends are easy to stay in touch with. I certainly don’t need those accounts to do it: try using your phone, text, meet for coffee, or whatever works without that crutch. I keep up with friends all over the world and don’t have a social media account. Social media puts out the hook and we bite, never thinking about what we are giving up to do so and how deep a relationship really is if you must use social media to stay in touch.

And as for the news sources; they have an incentive to keep you coming back. Points are often stretched or lies are told to keep you thirsty for more. It is amazing how the same set of facts, told from a different point of view, tell a completely different story. I know this from personal experience; a long time ago I had a radio that covered the shortwave bands. I would compare the stories I heard there (from stations such as Radio Havana and the BBC) with the same stories on the nightly news. It is fascinating to me how you could take the same set of facts and by changing how you present them, tell a different story. Today, the myriad of online and cable news sources do the same thing. The moral of the story here is to doubt the news you hear until you can confirm it; and ask yourself “Is this relevant to me? If not, why should I waste my time and feelings on it?”

Food for thought; we need more thinking, less surface reacting.