Rolling through a news fast…

I read Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek, a few years ago. One of the many ideas I took away from the book and that has stuck with me since then has been to limit my exposure to media and news outlets. At the time, I had been trying to consume as much news as I possibly could in the limited time I had available away from other, primarily work related, commitments. One way I justified this was by telling myself that if the quality of the news source was high, e.g. the BBC, The Financial Times, and The New York Times, that it was worthwhile to try and absorb as much of it as possible. Another justification was that I would be better rounded and in touch with the world with the benefit of the information provided by these news outlets.

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that I was cramming a lot of noise into my mind that was mostly negative and irrelevant. After reading Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, by David Rock, about a year later, I also realized that I was spending a disproportionate amount of a finite resource, brain power, on this negative and irrelevant noise.

So for the past two years, up until a few weeks ago, I had shut myself off from most media and news outlets, at least to the extent that it’s possible to do so living in NYC. I found that an immediate benefit of this was an increased focus and a sense of relaxation and simplicity, as I took the pressure off of myself to stay up to date on everything that these information sources was telling me was important. As Tim Ferriss also suggested, I found myself rarely, if ever, unable to have or hold a conversation with someone due to not being immediately up to date with the latest news.

I think at my news consumption peak, I knew something wasn’t right about how much I was consuming when the hourly updates rarely changed and the news briefs I was hearing were mostly repetitive. What I was learning by tuning out was that many stories really didn’t even change much day to day or when they did they were replaced by new stories. It also became clearer to me that because the news networks are forced to produce content for 24 hours, 365 days a year, there’s really very little chance that that content can continue to be relevant and engaging, despite the networks’ best efforts to sensationalize a lot of it. This reminds me of an early experience watching the 10 or 11 o’clock news when I was very young and noticing the hooks that the broadcasters would set just before a commercial, in hopes that the viewer wouldn’t go to bed yet and would stick around for the weather and finally sports!

I found this to be especially true when it came to financial and business news, particularly since it’s been my experience that by the time the news makes it to the mainstream, the people who are going to benefit from it most already have. Taking a peek back into the news from time to time over this period also helped convince me that, for what ever reason, the vast majority of the news that is broadcast to us is negative, with the exception of the occasional spot about the health benefits of seaweed, which the BBC broadcast this morning.

So why have I found myself experimenting over the past few weeks with letting the news slowly back into my life?