I have a simple challenge that may change your life (and why else are you here, reading this if you are not looking for something–connection, entertainment, understanding?)
The challenge is this:
Consume no news for 1 month. Delete the news apps from your phone, unsubscribe from newsletters, and make a commitment to not watch news on television. If someone brings up a current event, change the subject as quickly and gracefully as possible.
Why should you? Well why not? It costs you so very little to try this; in fact, you should have more time as a result. And what has the news ever done for you? Seriously. Try to write down five ways the news has made your life better. Be specific–‘being well-informed’ is a construct not an actual life experience. I’ll wait…
If you need more convincing, I’d like to share some reflections on why this has been one of the best, most impactful decisions of my life:
- The news has a negative tilt. News companies makes money primarily through advertising and the preferred method of keeping people watching, reading, and buying is by producing strong negative reactions.
- The news degrades your mind. The news encourages rapid, shallow engagement with a topic. Story after story is shown with insufficient time to think deeply on hidden costs, edge cases, counterarguments, etc. The more you think shallowly in regards to the news, the more you think shallowly in other contexts (like relationships or your job).
- The news creates compassion fatigue. It’s good that you care about things, but if you get riled up about a new thing every day, you will find it harder and harder to care.
- 99.9% of news is not relevant to you. If you are unaware of the news, you will not miss out or be caught off guard in any meaningful way.
- The news that matters finds you. If something is relevant to your life, by definition it will find you. And when it comes, you will understand it better, less preconditioned by the opinions of those who do not care about you.
- Less news, more impact. The news implicitly promotes the idea that you have the power to change things (or why else would you be told about them?). This is largely not true, you have very little political power and your tweets and votes will likely amount to little. Changing even one thing is difficult; it requires immense, sustained, targeted effort to have a genuine hope of impact. And changing more than one thing is near impossible; a general truth is the more endeavors you do, the less effective you are. The beauty of not consuming the news is you filter out thousands of far-flung events and are left with a few local, highly relevant happenings–these are easiest to influence, these are what matter most to you, these are what you should focus on. Once you give up the beliefs that you have the power to change THE WORLD, you can focus on changing one aspect of your world (and a bunch of other worlds too).
- Less news, more joy. Making things better is a noble goal, but we should not forget to enjoy ourselves while doing it. Our greatest pleasures arise from that which is closest to us in time and space. It will serve you well to train yourself to pay the most attention to the here and now.
I hope you do yourself a kindness by trying this no news challenge and I hope it benefits you like it has me.
A few tips to make your efforts as effective as possible are use a physical sheet to track progress and define ‘news’ as broadly as possible–stock market updates, reddit, and social media can all be considered news.
Be well!