Title: Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News
Headings: Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News
Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News
1) You feel better
2) You were never actually accomplishing anything by watching the news
3) Most current-events-related conversations are just people talking out of their asses
4) There are much better ways to “be informed”
5) “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not
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Content: The back of your shampoo bottle contains information. Today there’s much more of it out there than we can ever absorb, so we have to choose what deserves our time. The news provides information in infinite volume but very limited depth, and it’s clearly meant to agitate us more than educate us. Every minute spent watching news is a minute you are unavailable for learning about the world in other ways. Americans probably watch a hundred million hours of news coverage every day. That’s a lot of unread books, for one thing. Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world. Watch news all day for years and you have a distant, water-cooler-level awareness of thousands of stories, at least for the few weeks each is popular. If we only care about the breadth of information, and not the depth, there’s not much distinction between “staying informed” and staying misinformed. 5) “Being concerned” makes us feel like we’re doing something when we’re not
News is all about injustice and catastrophe, and naturally we feel uncomfortable ignoring stories in which people are being hurt.