You have to know where you stand. You,and by you I mean all of us, need to know how we fit into the big, universal, “whole-ball-a-wax” picture. We have to know, at our infinitesimal cog-in-the machine level, how we should interact with the universe.

That’s why having a Zeitgeist is important.

Now, you’ve probably heard that term. You’ve probably used it yourself. But give me a minute to explain why I believe it’s so important to have a reliable Zeitgeist.

The term Zeitgeist is usually associated with German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel but it was used first by Johann Gottfried Herder. It became a dominant platform in German Idealist philosophy, which believed that reality wasn’t just made up of physical bits and pieces, it was shaped by our collective ideas, consciousness and the beliefs we shared. Our reality is defined by what is going through our collective brains. And that is Zeitgeist – the spirit of our times and the crucible of our reality. 

Given how important that is, we should think about how each draw our own perspective of what that Zeitgeist might be. How do we each determine what is the spirit of our time?

In our lifetimes, Zeitgeist has been predominately defined by media – and lately – what we see and hear through screens. We are spoon-fed reality by the keepers of Zeitgeist, who determine what and what won’t make it to our screens. 

There used to be some commonality to that. We all watched the same news, the same shows, the same sporting events. In my lifetime, my own Zeitgeist was hugely impacted but what I saw on television. But 30 years ago, what I watched wasn’t all that different from what you watched, or what my mother watched, or what my Uncle George watched. Our Zeitgeist has some common foundations which were determined by the gatekeepers of our media channels.

Now, however, algorithmic targeting determines what I see on my screen, and that will bear almost no resemblance to what you see, or what may be in my Uncle George’s feed. We are all seeing an algorithmically defined slice of Zeitgeist, served exclusively to us.

If you could crawl inside my Facebook feed, for example, you would be surrounded by a lot of old West Wing clips, a number of reels about biking through the Balkans, a bunch of AI generated videos showing what the stars of the sitcoms I watched in the 80’s look like now (here’s a sobering fact, a big percentage are dead), a truck load of political charged messaging that agrees completely with my own belief system and – somehow – the cast of Dirty Dancing slinking along to the opening theme of the Muppet Show. It’s a custom Zeitgeist bubble, algorithmically designed just for me.

So, what’s the harm with a little tailoring of Zeitgeist? Well, I’m pretty damned sure that none of that is an accurate picture of the current reality. And if that is the spirit of our times, heaven help us all (although I would welcome a president like Jed Bartlet in a heartbeat). 

We need a reliable Zeitgeist to set our personal compass to. We need to react to some semblance of reality. And when reality looks different for everyone, depending on the media we consume – well – we end with a world that looks a lot like the one we currently have.