For a long time I’ve been resisting the advice to stop reading news.
The advice comes from so many different sources.
From Andrew Weil, in his book “8 Weeks to Optimum Health”.
I do not want you to become uninformed about the state of the world, but I note that paying attention to news commonly results in anxiety, rage, and other emotional states that probably impedes the healing system […] I do want you to discover and make use of the fact that you have choice as to how much news you allow into your consciousness, especially if it disturbs your mental and spiritual equilibrium.
Timothy Ferris’ The 4-hour work week“.
I hope you’re sitting down. Take that sandwich out of your mouth do you don’t choke. Cover the baby’s ears. I’m going to tell you something that upsets a lot of people. I never watch the news, and have bought one single newspaper in the last five years, in Stansted Airport in London, and only because it gave me a discount on a Diet Pepsi. I would claim to be Amish, but last time I checked Pepsi wasn’t on the menu. How obscene! I call myself a responsible and informed citizen? How do I stay up-to-date with current affairs? […]
Most infomation is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at what you read today, and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four.
And of course there’s Lao Tzu – Those who know are not learned, Those who are learned do no know.
Perhaps Steve Pavilina puts it best of all, saying news is negative, addictive, myopic, marketing, shallow, untrustworthy, thought conditioning, trivia, redundant, irrelevant, not actionable, problem-obsessed and a waste of time.
Quite scathing isn’t it?
So why then do we read it?
It’s interesting how difficult it is to stop. The addictive quality is powerful, and we feel guilty about not ‘staying informed’. Won’t we be living in our utopian bubble while the world collapses, with us ignorant and unaware, and not making a contribution?
I have found the opposite. As both Steve Pavlina and Timothy Ferris say, most news is outside of our influence, not actionable. There are many, many better ways to make a contribution. During the violence against foreigners a few months ago, the news was filled with terrible cherry-picked stories, but not much in the way of possible constructive action. All the really important and useful information that I could use to help was gained elsewhere.
It’s not much use fretting about who the US is going to elect, but we could so something about the person sleeping under the bridge down the road tonight, or our local school’s crumbling walls, neither of which ever makes the news.
I’ve been closely observing my reactions while reading news, and it has a tremendous power to depress, enrage and disempower. A headline such as an ANC leader saying “There’s no such thing as white poverty” which I saw a few days ago, is designed to cause a reaction. “What the F*@k is the ANC saying now?” you’re supposed to think, “of course there are poor whites” – you’re supposed to become angry. But the actual wording has been twisted, so what was originally a simple, and quite positive message (poverty has no colour), has been twisted to cause anger and tension.
Pavlina suggests there’s a reason for newspapers being negative. “Pessimistic news sources will attract pessimistic readers, partly because those are the best targets for advertising — negative people are more likely to believe that buying products will change their emotional state.” It’s quite obvious that a headline “beautiful weather today” will attract less readers than “horrific storm brewing”. The negative message is a call to action, promising information about an important crisis that could affect us.
Online is even worse, and the reason the news fast recently came to a head for me. In an attempt at building community, many sites allow fairly unrestricted user comment. Many comments are anonymous, and reflect the worst of human traits. Just read any of the rugby blogs over the last few weeks (perhaps they’ll let up a bit after today’s game).
It’s not just a waste of time, it’s harmful to be continually taking in this negativity.
Time to go cold turkey, and restore your motivation to do something constructive!
Interesting, I wrote an article about web information overloading the other day and it relates to this in some ways. I also often talk about local news normally being negative and that the continual reading of negative news does not motivate people! Good luck Ian!
Hi Ian,
I agree. As Jim Morrison so aptly put it “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind”. The media has immense power, which is often abused in order to sell more newspapers. I run a news website – http://www.sagoodnews.co.za – that highlights progress, positive developments and solutions (rather than concentrating on the problem.) We are well aware of the challenges facing SA, but we choose to concentrate on what is being done to address these challenges.
Most South Africans can tell you what is wrong with this country, but very few I believe can tell you what is right.
I often tell people “Don’t just come to SA Good News to find out what is happening as you will get a skewed picture, but don’t just visit the usual mass media websites either as you will ALSO only get a skewed picture.” I often suggest visiting both sites to get some much-needed balance!
So if you ever feel the need to get a news fix again in the future, I hope you consider paying our site a visit…
SE-R-I-OUS? Does that mean no more M&G, newsfeeds?
I am liking http://www.sagoodnews.co.za, its currently my only news source 🙂
I agree that the media tends to focus on exciting bad news and that it is otherwise biased. I think the answer to this is not to read no news, but to read a greater variety of news from multiple sources. The bad news thing you can compensate for to some extent by reading non-news written by people who live in the same place.
I don’t think things which happen far away are necessarily things we don’t need to know about. Things which happen elsewhere in the world affect us — either directly, or by leading by example. American politics affects how we can behave in airports during domestic flights within our own country! We can affect people who affect things further away: we elect politicians, and we theoretically have some influence over them.
(I know that many people in SA would find it laughable to attempt to change their local government representative’s mind about something by writing them a persuasive letter — something people in the US consider to be a completely reasonable idea — but how many have actually tried? How many just complained, taking it for granted that the government is useless and would never listen to them?)
Consider the extreme of your suggestion. What would happen if *nobody* read the news? We would live in isolated enclaves, unaware what was happening in places we could not directly observe. We could be ignorant of horrible things happening in a country next door — or we could be ignorant of how poorly *we* were being treated. Maybe we’d be happier for not knowing — but would it be worth it?
Finally, the absence of written news is not the absence of news. If nobody read the news, people would still gossip and spread rumours — would information received in this way be inherently more reliable or unbiased?
“We would live in isolated enclaves, unaware what was happening in places we could not directly observe.”
This might have been the case several decades ago, but advances in technology have created a far more connected world; all of the truly important news comes to me via my information network, not via “broadcast” media like newspapers, radio, TV, etc. A lot of the time, they’re sending me an article on a news website, but often the original source is someone who was directly involved in the incident, and has just looked up an article online rather than writing their own one for purposes of letting other people know.
As far as gossip and rumours go, well, I know my friends and other contacts a lot better than I know some random journalist or news agency, so I have a much better idea whether they’re likely to be spreading garbage or not.
At the end of the day, 99% of the news out there is just irrelevant to me; the tiny fraction that is of relevance will filter down naturally to me, without having to step into the firehose of mainstream media.
hi, nice blog.
I’m not sure whether information on current events, that does not directly lead to some action, is useless.
The various pieces of info enable you, with time, to build a world view, and to test it. I can’t see how you can make a political decision (such as voting) without knowing the facts, and I don’t see how you can get the facts other than from reading the news.
Of course you should be picky about your sources, and try to avoid papers that uses tricks like the one you demonstrate, with the ANC leader quote.