Garbage In, Garbage Out

Everything We Take In, Molds Us

I often hear people, especially young kids, say, “That doesn’t affect me.” The truth is, everything affects us. The only difference is in how. Some things affect us positively, and some negatively. Either way, what we listen to, look at, or experience always changes us. This is important because garbage in means garbage out. If you listen to bad things and see them constantly, the result is that bad things come out.

For instance, if a child sees a parent being emotionally or physically abused, that child grows up believing such behavior is acceptable and/or normal. This, in turn, can lead the child to become abusive, as it is accepted as common practice. It’s not a medical diagnosis or even a psychological one. It’s human nature. Actually, it is animal nature.

Animal Nature

Most animal life learns in this way. Monkey see, monkey do has solid reasoning. Not all repeat these patterns, and some break cycles, but in general, this is the cause-and-effect pattern.

The reason I bring this up is simple. In society, if we want our future generations to be better than we are, to do away with bad habits, biases, hate, and degradation, we need to stop feeding the beast. But we don’t seem to get it.

Want vs. Reality

We don’t want hate, yet we fill our senses with it all day long through the news, social media, and politics.

We don’t want racism, yet we watch and listen to it on a 24/7 cycle.

We don’t want slurs, racial or otherwise, yet we say and do nothing about the fact that they are still celebrated in music, culture, and song.

We don’t want the objectification of women, but we say nothing about our young women selling their dignity for likes or for dollars through monetization.

The very same outcome is what we see coming from pornography.

None of this is okay.

Eating Away At Beauty

We have a constant stream of incremental changes in our lives that make tiny shifts in our psyche, demeanor, actions, and ideals, without us paying attention. We become desensitized to these negatives over time because we become used to them.

They become habitual, normalized features and ideologies that manifest in our development and don’t break negative.

That is why the way we do things is so important. Let me give you an example.

Changing a Pattern

I was raised by a bigoted man. He may have developed this way from his upbringing, but no matter how it occurred, it did. He then, in turn, raised two girls with his perspectives and prejudices.

Fortunately for my sister and me, we recognized and rejected the ugliness in his belief system, and we broke that cycle.

Then came our children. We raised them differently.

My husband and I, for instance, never taught our son to look at people through different lenses. We are all the same. We never used language that degraded another person in any way, whether by nationality, race, color, religion, or otherwise.

The result is that our son does not see the world in those terms. He evaluates and judges people and situations based on merit, not preconceived bias. We did this in all aspects of life. Just as vital to this upbringing was modeling the behavior we wanted him to emulate.

We didn’t listen to any music that degraded women or perpetuated the ugliness of using words that denigrated people with darker skin, and we didn’t watch anything that did any of those things. It just wasn’t done.

It took intentionality. It was about the choices we made. We wanted better than what we had. We wanted the ignorance, judgment, and disdain to stop, and we succeeded.

Outcomes

We now have a son, a fresh start in possibly multi-generational biases. Everything we do matters. What we listen to, watch, speak, and experience matters.

We didn’t want our son to develop biases against the poor, so we took him to shelters and had him volunteer with us. This fostered compassion in him.

We didn’t want him to treat women like whores or like objects for base sexual desire. We never had pornography in our home, and we openly discussed with him how it diminishes our value as women. He saw how his father treated his mother, and he is just as respectful in his relationships with women.

Our son was never exposed to music that used the very slurs we want removed from society, even though those words are still being celebrated and used in music created by those who don’t want them used to describe them. So he chooses not to listen to it himself.

Changing the Future

This is how change, favorable change, happens. Better choices, discernment, and intentions are how we mold a more pleasant and humane humanity forward. But we have to stop thinking we can talk or legislate everything away.

It is our responsibility to raise the next generation in a more gentle manner. This responsibility takes work. We first have to live it. Walk the walk. Talk the talk. See, kids don’t learn by you saying, "This is wrong, that is right, do this, or do that.”

They listen, yes, even when you think they don’t. But that is not how they learn. They learn by observing. They do, think, and act as you do.

Kids are way more in tune with hypocrisy than anyone else. If you say one thing and do another, it gets saved in their little file: if you do it, it’s fair game.

Change comes from what we put into our ears, eyes, minds, and hearts. Garbage in means garbage out. Treasure in means treasure out. What do you want to give your children? Garbage or treasure?

Give them a treasure chest; be the gems inside. As they dig through it, they will walk away with only beautiful gems. No wormwood.

(Published on Patreon, August 2026)

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