Why I Stopped Reading the News

For almost a decade, I started every day like this: I would wake up, open a dozen tabs on my computer, and pour the news into my head.

The details of the routine evolved over the years — the sites changed; the hour at which I woke crept ever earlier; the computers were replaced with newer, small computers — but although the specifics were different, the gist was the same. This routine was less an activity than an identity: I was just one of those people, the kind who read the news. Except I wasn’t “reading,” really, so much as consuming. I was a machine, the news filing into me as if on a conveyor belt.

I followed the script at home, at school, on vacations, after good nights and bad; sequential girlfriends got mad at me in the exact same way for ignoring them in the mornings. Once, in college, having stayed up all night for a reason that now escapes me — and which, if I could remember, I probably wouldn’t want to publicize anyway — I stumbled back to my dorm room and opened the New York Times app on my phone as the sun rose outside my plasticky window.

Then, a month or so ago, I had this moment. I was reading some political article — I don’t even remember what it was about, really, except that it was one of those political articles where the politics is a spectator sport, the kind where a candidate proposes a piece of legislation and the focus is entirely on how the proposal might affect the candidate’s electoral chances and not on how the legislation itself would affect, you know, actual citizens. And it all of a sudden became so obvious that this entire habit was a colossal waste of my time.

When you read the news, you start each morning by granting dozens of strangers unfiltered access to your brain, and most of the time they use that access to take a giant dump inside it.

I still read, ravenously, but I no longer feel compelled to keep up with what has been arbitrarily designated “the news”; instead, I just happen across things that interest me — history, philosophy, fiction, the theory that ancient humans interpreted the voices in their heads as dispatches from the Gods instead of recognizing them as their own — and learn what I can about them.

I no longer hold a belief that I never so much as questioned before, that there exists some sort of nebulous responsibility to be “informed.” I used to look down on people who didn’t follow current events, but now I see that as no different from looking down on people who have never had foie gras, or been to Europe.

And where I used to read the news every morning, I now write in my journal and meditate. I think I — and maybe even the rest of the world — are better served by seeking deeper understanding within than by trying to learn every last bit of what happened yesterday. (Granted, I’m taking some creative license here with my use of the term “every morning”; anything I claim to do every day, like flossing or showering or going to the gym, I really do maybe half that often.)

(Except reading the news, that is. That one really was every morning.)

I still have a vivid memory of the first time I ever read the news, or at least the first time I ever conceptualized it as such. It was the morning after the 2000 election, and my parents asked me to go downstairs, look at the paper and, tell them who won. When I told them the paper didn’t say, they didn’t believe me. You must have missed it, they said. Go back and double-check.

In that moment the news was a secret passageway into the world of adults, and it was one I felt I had to run down as fast as I could to become a real person. These days reading the news was having the opposite effect on me. I was starting every morning with my head so jumbled I couldn’t focus on who I was or what was important to me that day. So, I stopped.

Published in Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking

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