Why I Don’t Read the News

The news is anti-mindcoolness. With clickbaity headlines, emotional tales, and political gossip, journalists cook junk food for the mind: easy to consume and highly inflammatory. Mental inflammation is the main effect of its dull, inactionable information. If your job makes it actionable, fine; if you have control over global affairs, great; but for the rest of us, avoiding the news is a matter of mental hygiene, intellectual discipline, and opportunity costs:

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. (Aleister Crowley)

The problem of opportunity costs was highlighted also by someone more venerated:

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Consider further the importance of mental hygiene:

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair,—the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,—to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,—an hypæthral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect. (Henry David Thoreau)

Thirdly, news avoidance is a form of intellectual, if not spiritual, discipline:

When Heraclitus withdrew into the courtyard and colonnades of the immense temple of Artemis, […] what [he] was getting away from is still the same thing we go out of our way to escape: the noise and the democratic tittle-tattle of the Ephesians, their politics, their news about the “empire” […], their market junk of “today,” – for we philosophers need peace and quiet from one thing above all: anything to do with “today.” We honor what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, in general everything at the sight of which the soul does not have to defend itself or tie itself up, – something a person can speak to without having to speak loudly. Let us hear only the sound which a spirit makes when it speaks. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Granted, such a philosophical attitude might alienate one from the reality of modern moral life. Then again, true ethical insight rests on real world knowledge, which comes from lived experience, scientific evidence, and books written by experts rather than from value-dogmatic cultural propaganda and media-hijacked availability heuristics. Hence my suggestion to go on an information diet:

Stay away from all types of news for one week! No news on television, no news online, no news on paper, no radio, no Facebook feed, nothing. See how you feel at the end of the week. You think you need to be informed about what happens everywhere in the world. But do you really? Our human instincts are still tribal. You do not need to know what is happening in every other tribe. To know what is happening around you, go outside. If you need to distract yourself with problems that are outside of your range of influence, go ahead. Be aware, though, that neither anxiety nor random outrage nor media distraction will help you stay disciplined and achieve your goals. Can you do a week without news? (Dominic Reichl)

I’ve made that a month, a year, and now almost a decade.