Current Events

My whole life, everyone around me was rewarded, implicitly or explicitly, for being up on the latest news. It started early; in second grade I was required to bring and share a current event with the class every Thursday. This made intuitive sense, because it appeared the smartest people I knew were keyed in to as much information about the world as they could get.

My college education focused partly on journalism. I learned to think and write like a reporter. I became an NPR junkie, listening to around two hours a day. I devoured the New York Times.

But one day I got a nudge in a different direction. A bit to my surprise, a good friend told me he didn’t read the news. “You miss it less than you think,” he said.

After that I started running across statements like this:

“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.”
—Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

And even more egregiously, this:

“…anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

As I uncovered a growing cascade of wisdom in favor of a news-free lifestyle, I realized it was time for some soul-searching about my beloved news.

The News Problem

It’s a funny thing. For a former news junkie, the shift to this new vacuum, free of the familiar flow of unending updates from the outside world, was oddly thrilling. The day I cut the cord, I already felt like I had more space in my head, more clarity, maybe even a deeper sense of purpose. It felt good, and my friend was right—I didn’t miss the news as much as I thought I would. But what was wrong with it?

I should note I had nothing against journalists. I’d been around them for years (I studied under several), and I had noticed the ethics most serious writers adhered to, and the sincerity with which they approached their work. But now when I appraised the situation again, something felt off.

The problem at its most basic, I finally realized, was that media outlets are businesses. On one level, it seems this fact alone might keep any of us from taking the news seriously, but it somehow doesn’t. I think it’s because on the whole, journalists are mostly earnest people, and they are decidedly not solicitors. Any media outlet worth its salt is generally careful to separate advertising from news content, salespeople from reporters. But I think this is a deflection of a simpler indictment, one that’s much more to the point:

Without money, a modern media outlet simply wouldn’t exist.

So what? you might ask. They have to make money. How else would we get people to report the news?

First, let’s back up. What is news, really? What would it even look like if today a newspaper was completely uncoupled from the financial constraints of a business? Would it report the same or similar stories as yesterday’s Washington Post? Of course not. Yesterday’s Washington Post was written by journalists who are paid to write, and if they do not write they are not paid. This means if there isn’t something vitally important to cover, a reporter’s livelihood depends on convincing first an editor, and then a readership, that something irrelevant is actually relevant, and worth paying him or her to write about.

The result of the modern news system, as Nassim Taleb points out in his book Antifragile, is a huge glut of data; a constant flow of stories, seemingly earnest, important and organic but yet somehow always filling the same predefined quotas—because filling pages with stories and data is necessary to sell advertising to make money and keep existing.

Consuming all this information, Taleb says, is hurting us. It’s not more data we need, it’s less. The more information we absorb, he says, the more difficult it becomes to discern the relevant from the irrelevant.

And now I began to come to terms with the real reason I had followed the news for so long—not because it was important, but because it was fun. It did feel important, but I did it because it was enjoyable. I enjoyed discussing and analyzing world events in the same way I enjoyed staying up late watching a baseball game or writing a post on Medium. But far from being a harmless pastime, my news habit had become a massive distraction, a tangled mess of data with few real benefits, and an ominous downside.

It was threatening to distract me from the big truck.

Looking back, this is an easier assessment to make than it would have been then. I can now evaluate the attention and time I once devoted to curating news, reading news, listening to news, thinking about news, discussing news and analyzing news. And if I’m honest, I can’t think of a single major way this benefited me or my family. At the same time, I can think of myriad chances I missed to take better care of myself and the ones I love because my mind was consumed with issues beyond my influence. By any objective measure, I would have been foolish not to change course.

Mind Over Matter

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and the father of behavioral economics, says media coverage influences our perception of the world in profound ways, which are largely hidden and beyond our control.

Kahneman’s observation explains, among other things, why people are generally more afraid to fly in a plane than to ride in a car, despite the incredibly (incredibly) low rate of accidents in the commercial airline industry, and the incredibly high rate of automobile accidents and deaths. Why? A car accident rarely makes international headlines, but a commercial plane crash always does. News coverage leads us to unconsciously affix an irrational level of significance to the anomaly. So, a person is likely to be more afraid of flying than driving, even though the reality is much different than the perception. (Air travel is the safest form of transportation in the world, and 95 percent of passengers involved in plane crashes between 1983 and 2000 survived.)

The modern news cycle, it turned out, was not making me more aware of the world; it was only making me aware of certain parts of it, without my input, and at a cost. It gave an incomplete glimpse of reality, but its success rested on a pretense of completion. Its actual importance, its real value, had been significantly inflated. How much of the news I consumed daily was even actionable? The answer: Almost none.

I wasn’t using the information, the information was using me.

With this observation, I quit. Four months later, I haven’t looked back. I listen to music now on my commute instead of NPR. I read books instead of newspapers. I find myself jumping to fewer conclusions, speaking less, listening more. Above all, my life is quieter. (And as an added bonus, I have no idea what’s going on with Miley Cyrus.)

What about you?

Did this strike a nerve? It turns out objectivity is hard to come by in this discussion, and you may totally disagree with my assessment. But my best advice is to attempt an experiment with your own news habit. If news is really as valuable as it seems, you should be able to see real losses once you cut it out of your life, and these should substantially outweigh the benefits of doing without it. But until you try it, you’re just guessing.

My Method

I may live under a rock now, but it’s a purposeful rock of my own design.

At the time of this writing, I have a single source for alerts about major news events: the New York Times app on my iPhone, which I never open. The app sends push notifications for only the most important headlines (usually 1 to 5 per month). When a headline pops up, I determine at a glance whether I need to invest time reading about it. On the rare day a very major world event occurs—maybe every few months or so—I turn on NPR at the top of the 5 o’clock hour, listen to the top story only, and turn the radio off. I never listen to commentary. Sometimes I still miss an event my friends consider important, in which case I just ask them to tell me about it. In this way, I filter commentary through people I personally know and respect. I follow niche publications for topics that interest me, but usually only two at a time. Keeping life quiet is now a top priority.