I like the explanation that simply explains "privacy":
When you are going to the toilet, and everybody knows that your going and what you'll do there, but you still close the door (for the most of us, most of the time).
Sure, but people close the door out of modesty not really privacy. If there was a machine that provided a written transcript of what someone did in the bathroom with no video/audio I don’t think people would mind.
Like when you’re in high-security areas and have to be monitored in the bathroom there might be a door between you and your guard but no real privacy.
Or when people loudly object to strip-searches at the airport but the scanner that sees everything but then only shows a cutout highlighting suspicious areas to pat down are mostly fine.
I think it's a pretty good workable analogy actually. People don't mind if you know they go to the toilet as an abstract thing, but once you start keeping a notebook of who is going to the toilet and when it starts getting creepy and undesirable. And that's just for collecting metadata! imagine if someone would actually intercept your sewer and analysed the makeup of your turds, folks would be up in arms.
We need this information to correctly gauge the interest on different kinds of foods we should keep available to purchase in the cafeteria.
It's also helpful as we can notify you early if you have some undiagnosed medical issue. You could unknowingly spread your illness to your children without this early detection.
We're even able to reduce your monthly health insurance premium by providing this data to the insurance company!
This also enables us to find troubled Individuals before it's too late and address building drug issues before they're full addictions. We'll be able to get them the required attention they need to get back on their feet and be productive members of our society. (Maybe not here though)
I would like to simply block irrelevant YouTube ads while my toddler indulges in ‘Land before time’ episodes. Is that possible? Last time I checked they use some randomised domains to load ads...
'In a roundabout way Google are more like Pinterest than you think. Both utilising other people’s content.'
True, which makes me wonder why Google don't just add a bit of Pinterest-style functionality and then start applying search quality guidelines against Pinterest?
I know there are copyright issues but I expect Google would do a better job of linking to the original source - something Pinterest seem unable to do at all?
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
Promoting “breathing” without thinking and not taking your thoughts too seriously has got me through a lot of emotional turmoil and “life situations”.
Incredible even 5 years later.
As you allude to, the basic idea is the same stuff you've heard if you've read anything about "mindfulness." Basically a lite Buddhism -- a lot of your unhappiness comes from a constant spigot of unbidden thought you can't shut off and you can improve your life by learning how to shut it off and be absolutely focused in the present moment, through exercises like meditation. I think this is a bit oversold but not bad.
But that's not really enough to have a media empire and series of books, so the book is larded with all kinds of ridiculous claims, including risible Biblical exegesis, an attribution of various historical atrocities live Kristallnacht to a failure to like In the Now, an extended discourse about how living In the Now can make menstruation a rapturous experience rather than a painful one, and obviously bogus claims about how living In the Now will actually cause the molecules of your body to spread out and make your body less dense.
The point with these therapeutic visualizations is to try how they work, personally, as an actual tool to solve a concrete dilemma. As such it does not matter how useless they sound in written form. Human mind has these psychlogical switches that just seem to work in specific situations. For example of a pathological "switch", the gambler is lured by an unpredictable sequence of loss and reward. Which to most people sound extremely silly, until they try it out themselves, and are totally hooked. Therapeutic switches can seem to have equal power to deal with ones emotions and pain.
For me, visualizing my pain as a separate entity that fed from my suffering allowed me to conceptualize my internal pain in a way in which I could observe and deal with it better.
It's like how some yogis speak of energy flows and whatnot - which is completely inconsequential hogwash and do not matter just as long as the movement and breathing techniques do their very physical work on the human body.
The problem with presenting functional techniques as deeply linked with an esoteric philosophy, a religious movement or (in Tolle's case) a guru is that the technique is often used as a token hook just to lure the person to follow the movement or philosophy.
