Epitome Anatomy: NARRATIVE
EPISODE SUMMARY:
"People will believe what they want to believe and hear what they want to hear."
Let's actively dissect the concept of "Narrative" and its decisive role in shaping our perceptions and beliefs online, which translates to our daily lives. Host Wish Peacocke reveals how narratives influence our understanding of reality, often driven by the stories we consume online. Listeners are challenged to critically evaluate the narratives they encounter, urging them to balance scepticism with open-mindedness. By curating our digital experiences and questioning the stories we accept, we can navigate today's complex information landscape more effectively.
Reference from this episode:
Beauty Science ("Lab Muffin") on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/labmuffinbeautyscience/
Listen to the Episode
MAIN TOPICS:
Intro to IRL - 02:00
Social Media Influence - 29:07
Reality vs. Online Life - 57:41
Validation & Overconsumption - 02:25:38
Real Interactions & Polarization - 04:18:14
Balancing Worlds - 07:40:79
Conclusion - 10:01:18
LISTEN, RATE, REVIEW, SUBSCRIBE & SHARE WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
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Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (00:00.078)
Thinking back to my deliberation and rants from last episode's topic IRL, I think it makes me stay away from the internet more and more lately. I've been expeditiously curating my algorithm on social media, getting rid of the ads that track me or on YouTube as well.
express when there's because I don't have the premium it's quite expensive in Singapore and apparently it's cheap in the Philippines but I don't really mind the ads so I just wanted to tailor fit what I see like the ads that I see on YouTube and when I don't like it I just press the I button and then I say I don't like it or block the ad so I've been
collectively doing this because there are so many convoluted ideas and opinions and stupidity that I see out there and they are honestly driving me nuts because I feel that people are dumb and everybody would believe all of these that they see online and don't even get me started talking about AI slop but there are
A lot of slop even before that. It's just that I think AI is not helping for us to create or come up with more critical thinking and proper ideas or researched learnings. I can't really blame or judge easily though, because in this connected world, there are always content to bait you. It's all about the vibe, the tone, the believability of the narrative.
Let's navigate this further and see where we land. Welcome to Human Thesaurus Presents Epitome Anatomy. My name is Wish and I talk about some things, somehow, to dissect a word relevant from my life to yours. Ready for the epitome of narrative? Let's go.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (02:18.894)
Our keyword is narrative. It is a noun which means a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious. Like synonyms, tale, and chronicle. Or another meaning is a story that connects and explains a carefully selected set of supposedly true events, experiences, or the like, intended to support a particular viewpoint or thesis.
As an adjective, the word narrative means of or relating to narration or the telling of a story. My reference for this is dictionary.com. To add from dictionary.com, the origin of the word narrative is first recorded in 1445 to 1455 from Middle French narrative. I hope I'm saying it correctly. It's an adjective and noun from late Latin.
narrativus or narration which is a noun or suitable for a narration which is an adjective from narat that means related or told so wow okay i i really love looking at the etymology as well and see what makes sense and to expand your kind of knowledge when it comes to latin and and such
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (03:48.13)
I keep on thinking about this word because every time I scroll, I don't really scroll that much and I'm only using threads or Instagram lately. And of course Reddit and I don't have TikTok unless my brother or someone else would send me something, but I would not endlessly scroll. I would just look at what someone would share with me and then that's done for me.
But whenever I see this, you know, I would have, okay, 15 minutes, I'm just gonna look at the feed on Instagram, which I also tried to curate a little bit so I could bring back more of the, from my feeds, the people that I follow versus just random whatever shit that they're sending you. It takes a lot to find these functions, but...
If you work hard for it, you can. So lately, it's been a little bit more peaceful or funny or very sarcastic on my feed versus before I did this deliberately, it was a little bit harder because that's when I get all the irritation and the triggers from the posts because, you know, I believe what I believe.
and some of the things that I believe I'm happy to be corrected when there's a backing of a study or philosophy or something that's pretty much a fact. I'm saying pretty much a fact, not fact, fact, because sometimes in scientific, especially in the medical scientific world,
Things are improving nowadays, especially with new technologies or more powerful computers to compute all of these researches and data. I'm saying that I'm happy to be corrected. I'm happy to be proven wrong. But sometimes when you are a scrawler aimlessly, you may become sucked into the information that you're absorbing.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (06:05.068)
And what's hard when you're absorbing bite-sized information? I thought before, when we were experimenting in some of my startups, the attention span will... we know in early 2000s that attention span will get shorter and shorter because we're experimenting on bite-sized media, which is now happening. So we thought it's a good thing, but now I feel like most of these are a bad thing.
We're not that busy to explore knowledge, to explore what's worth to study for us. So what's happening right now, you think that you know everything because of your constant scrolling on social media. But what happens is that when you have a short attention span, your curiosity is shorter too, because you're like, cool, cool, that's cute.
Like you keep on scrolling endlessly and you may stop here and there, but up until what point would you stop, listen to it again and think, that's a fact, or I want to learn more about this and pull up a book. Of course you will Google it or you will ask AI about it. It's okay. I think all of these, right? It's, I think a part of me, honestly, I'm not evangelizing this, but
I'm sharing with you that I'm trying to strike a balance with all of these because you know I came from innovation that was my past career so I still embrace that but I'm embracing that more with a wisdom and earned wisdom not learned, earned wisdom that some of these are marketing and sales or money experimentation.
I needed to formulate for myself how can I sustain my old school ways of learning? How can I be fair for the facts that I see online? How can I impart my knowledge properly without passing along disinformation or misinformation? I think it's an individual responsibility and accountability for us.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (08:32.664)
to create the future that would be smarter than what it is that what we see right now. Because what we see online is quite dumb. A lot of it is so dumb. You know, on the other hand, there are lots of very interesting storytelling online that's happening in some platforms. So you just really needed to cure, to curate your own...
you know, interests, I suppose, and not just aimlessly doing everything that your platforms try to feed you because that's how they earn their money. So, you know, for me, this conscious decision has been happening over time because I see myself sometimes I get pulled in when I haven't curated my algorithms yet. It's not perfect, but it's getting there.
It cannot be perfect. It's okay as well that I get like random shit. So I could still practice my critical thinking whether I'm able to decipher whether it's a slop or it's AI or it's true what they're saying and stuff like that, or they're just rage baiting, right? But when I get myself pulled in and it affects me so much emotionally, some of them are, you know, heartwarming and I would...
cry. My tears are quite shallow anyway so I would cry. I would give in to it and then I just realized it's AI or something. But anyway, I get pulled in and then there's this extreme emotions that takes a toll on me and that's bad. It's not supposed to happen. Like having an intense relationship with your foe and looking at content. It has to have some form of
disparity, just having more self-awareness I suppose because you cannot blame everybody trying to make good or trying to make bad out of the media, the open media that they have, the open platforms that they have. Everybody's trying to get attention so either are you gonna give it to them or not. Unfortunately I'm not a troll.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (10:55.466)
If I am a troll, it could have been a different world for me. Probably it will affect me differently, but I'm really not. Sometimes I would just talk and scream on my phone, say, what a fucking idiot. so stupid. Or my brother would send me weird shit because it's full of meme and some of them are so stupid that I would say, it's so stupid. And then...
You you come to a point that all of these, going back to the word narrative, you go back. The narrative is how someone can tell a story according to their beliefs, according to their own research or most likely lack thereof. And they're trying to make it in the influencer or social media world that
They're the gurus or the experts, but there's no backing in it. And the ones who's got backing or research or it's really their, it's their line of work, it's their expertise, then that's great. What's hard for a lot of people that I could see, especially the old school generation, they believe all of them and they send it to us.
like oh look at this oh the sun is harmful oh cats can give you dementia or whatever or don't eat this eat that and this diet is better than that diet or slap 17 different skincare on your face and you're you're gonna look you're gonna battle aging and oh the narrative and
these trad wives and these beauty influencers it fucking annoys me very irritating most of them not all of them some of them are really good like who's my favorite lab muffin she's a chemical scientist her expertise with with beauty and the chemicals that
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (13:19.276)
that is harmful and non-harmful. I learned from her and her book that parabens is actually not bad. It's just we demonized it, like how we demonized MSG in the 90s. There's a certain narrative, right? And the narratives that's happening that's successful, either good or bad, has this formula. You have to remember this. The formula is they know that
People will believe what they wanted to believe and they hear what they wanted to hear especially to grab you in the first five seconds. Come dine with me. This I don't know a lot of my feed has this the influencer the influencer accent which I can't do. I'm really a bad imitator anyway. So going back to
narrative. So I think how do we combat the narrative that drives us nuts or make us negative or ruin our day or derail us from the truth? How do we combat this? What do you think? Because the way I combat it, as I told you, is I manipulate my algorithms according to
what fits me. I use social media to get entertained, to get like a really really crass jokes and stuff like that. When something pops up that's informative, at least for me, I consider it as a prompt for me to read more about it. It gives me like a prompt, you know like when you have a prompt for me to write a poetry or something like that.
I take that opportunity to learn more. And then I would try to learn more about different sides as well because it's like, okay, this is what I believe in. But you know, my baseline for all of these, for the narratives that I hear out there, my baseline is what's right for people. What would not hurt people. That's my baseline. And then I take it from there. I don't delve into the negative portion.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (15:47.212)
Some of my stories that I forward, you could tell when I'm angry, when I'm frustrated, when I'm joking with you. I'm that transparent because I really don't have any ulterior motives in terms of my narrative on my social media. I'm not there to influence you. I'm there to express my opinions and the right people would
come to me with notes, with praises or with laughter, mostly laughter anyway, or sharing their stories with me. That's great. But do I really expect for you to react to me all the time? Not really. Unless, you know, for this podcast, I do. I do. I wish. I hope that I get some
feedback from my narrative. Again, my narrative, the baseline of this is tackling words and I could give you my opinions on it. It's either can you relate to me at all or am I the only weird one who's talking about this this way? Am I the only one? But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Like I'm not evangelizing to you what I believe in.
I wanted to tell you a story so that you can self-reflect and go back to your own self and find your own baseline for you to tolerate, for you to understand the world out there. I have more of this. I have more stories for you coming and so I hope you can still join me. Coming from this, coming from...
the narratives out there. Where do you think you land in this topic? Are you still unbothered or so over the narrative out there as well? Different countries probably would have different politics and science and drama and, you know, celebrity gossips and all of that. Where do you land with all of this? Please share me your views and comment on my episode.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (18:08.566)
And also, I never ask you in a while, so please subscribe and please comment and please follow my podcast. It will be great if you can support me. We'll have a couple more episodes this year coming and more beguiling rants to come. Until next time, ciao.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (18:36.152)
Human Thesaurus Podcast is produced by me and Jeremiah Ronquillo. All rights reserved via Wishblizz Media.
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