Less News is Good News
By Alan Dove
On a recent episode of TWiV, the news discussion at the top of the show drifted into the inevitable complaints we all have about the current US regime’s war on facts, democracy, and decency. I mentioned my current coping strategy, which I’ve refined a bit since the last time we went through this nonsense. Here’s the longer version, in case anyone else is searching for ways to survive the idiocracy.
First, understand that unless you’re a full-time politician, reading the news is not urgent. There won’t be a pack of reporters waiting in your office at nine asking for a comment on whatever just happened. If you’re around other people during the day, the news may come up, but I’ve found there’s no disadvantage in saying you haven’t seen it yet. That gives your friends an opportunity to express their outrage or excitement afresh to a sympathetic ear, which is what they want anyway. A fire alarm is urgent. The news is not.
Please note that when I say the news isn’t urgent, I don’t mean it’s irrelevant or unimportant. We all need to be informed citizens, so we can make rational choices about causes to support, protests to attend, and candidates to vote for or against. Having made a decades-long career of journalism, I believe the news matters a lot. That said, I don’t need to follow every twist, turn, and minor detail of every story, and I sure don’t need to spend hours each day doomscrolling it. That leads to some simple rules that have done wonders for my mental health and productivity.
Real dumpster fires are urgent. Metaphorical ones aren’t. Image by aeroix, courtesy Wikipedia.
Number one: no news until lunchtime. On most weekdays I get up, have my breakfast and coffee, exercise at the gym, shower, and start my work day with little or no exposure to the internet, talk radio, or television. The gym poses a special challenge. Following the fashion of exercise rooms everywhere, the management assumes we all want to watch the world burn faster than our calories; four screens of morning news and talk shows glare down at me as I shred my quads on an elliptical trainer or rowing machine.
For awhile, I pestered the staff to change one screen to show Animal Planet before I started my workout. It helped, but only a little. That channel’s morning programming is a mixed bag, and seems to be about 50% advertising. In addition, the staff got more and more annoyed with my daily requests, so I gave up. Since then, I’ve found a much better way to avoid the gym’s news assault: e-books. With a good book on my phone and white noise in my ear buds, it’s easy to ignore the other screens and focus on reading and sweating. So far, I’ve re-read Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World, and am halfway through Jack Black’s 1926 autobiography You Can’t Win. Nonfiction goes well with exercise, as it’s easy to pick up and put down.
Once I’m at my desk, I launch straight into whatever assignments I’m working on that day. If I’m not expecting any critical emails in the morning, I’ll even avoid checking my inbox until later. Anyone who needs to get in touch with me right away has my phone number. Morning is my most productive writing time, so I guard it.
News is allowed after noon; my regular news diet is online and text-based. That includes science news for work, general news from NPR and my local paper, and a few other RSS feeds related to my various hobbies. A new rule implemented this year: if a headline mentions Trump, I don’t click it. The only exceptions are stories directly related to science and therefore relevant to my work. What he craves most is attention, and the more clicks his name gets, the more coverage news outlets will lavish on him. Scrolling right past those headlines is one of my little microprotests.
Notice that I said “news is allowed” in the afternoon. It’s not mandatory. While I scroll through my news feeds most weekdays, sometimes I don’t. If I’m immersed in a project, that takes priority. The news will still be there, and will even be newer, whenever I get to it.
Evenings are for games, hobbies, and reading. Casual “reading” used to include news and random internet rabbit holes, but I’ve been pulling myself away from those algorithmic traps this year, and it feels great. Instead of scrolling whatever, I read books. Expect the Reviews category on this site to expand in the coming months, as I’m now going through about a book a week, in addition to my gym reads.
Weekends are easy. For the past few years, I’ve been taking at least one day a week offline. We get a paper copy of The New York Times every Sunday, at least when the delivery person remembers, so I do see the headlines then. Once I’ve scanned the front page, though, the only part I’ll read straight through is the Book Review.
The world is still on fire, horrible people control the major levers of power, and things will get worse before they get better, if they ever get better. I’ll continue to do whatever I can to help humanity get through this awful time. But it doesn’t do any good to stare at horrors I can’t fix, so I won’t.