Introduction
Protecting yourself and your loved ones from surveillance is essential to your mental health as well all as improving your future life. This is intuitively true to most people and it is demonstrated in studies and published papers.
Nearly all people have an innate feeling that they behave and think more fearfully when being continually watched. But few people have thought through the long-term impact of this behavioral change, and how it impacts their future life.
Harvard and Oxford researcher Jon Penney has written extensively on the impact of persistent surveillance and data collection on people and societies. In a 2021 published paper, Penney reports that “surveillance and observation has been found to activate deeper psychological states, like emotional distress, anger, and anxiety”. Penney explains these are the same mental states as being under continual threat. Under threat, humans are evolved to produce short-term massive bodily chemistry changes in a flight or flight response. We are not designed to live under permanent threat conditions.
When we add the continuous email spam, text spam, on-line imposters, fraud and outright cyber attacks to these circumstances, it is little wonder there is a well documented global mental health crisis.
These findings begin to explain the disturbing societal behaviors all of us observe by simply going out to a public space. People now have deep-rooted anger and anxiety, in large-part from being continually surveilled on social media, in communications, emails, texts and even in the physical world. We also observe these same disturbed people are unable to recognize their ill-behaviors and they seem to think them normal. Surely they do not recognize the source of those behaviors. We have no obligation to join them !
Penney goes on to cite studies which have documented the human “…need for solitude and a place of emotional release that is free from surveillance and the observation of others.” Further, people are “…chilled from speaking or doing as they wished, and instead conforms their behavior to comply with what they perceive to be the norm.”
Penney and other researchers document fundamental human needs that if neglected clearly damage our mental health and inhibit freedom of thinking.
Creating a Brighter Future
Positive mental health and our ability to think freely is essential to creating a brighter future which is absolutely still possible. Human beings have the ability to produce and test ideas so they don’t have to live out the bad ones. When we take away to ability to think freely, generate and test ideas, then our future will be dictated by conforming to the lowest social norms. We have no obligation to conform to the lowest social norms !
All of the best things in life come from our personal ability to envision a brighter future through thinking freely then testing out our ideas mentally and in the real world then adjusting. That is exactly what entrepreneurs, business owners, physicians, executives, high performance athletes, artists, musicians, entertainers and all other higher performers do to create their future.
It is absolutely essential each of us carve out protected places of privacy, solitude and freedom from surveillance for the sake of our mental health and our future. We need to do this for ourselves and our loved ones.
The ideas above are foundational in our vision of BUNKR. We built a product and a company to provide solitude and privacy for people who envision a brighter future, https://bunkr.life
