I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.
Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.
I did this except it was more like a month. When I got back I realised how much happier I was to be off of X and oblivious to the news. There is virtually zero utility to being "informed" of most things, and plenty of downsides.
Escaping the internet on a luxury trip doesn’t disprove political conflict… it just shows how privilege can opt out of reality and sell the experience as clickbaity insight.
Not "privilege" per se, I think that's the wrong word. Republican or Democrat, left or right, rich or very very rich - there is a lot of self-selection bias in judging the world from a pool of people who decided to go on vacation to the Galapagos...
It's definitely privileged to take a trip to the Galapagos, but I don't think it's privileged to ignore the news. A lot of poor people ignore the news. They may be too busy, or they may feel powerless to change anything. I think the real question is what exactly this entirely content-free statement means: "I’ll be focusing more on stories that actually matter instead of chasing the flash-in-the-pan ephemera that nobody remembers the next week."
The point is that 90% of the news is unimportant. Often you can read a weekly and that is enough
A politician said something and other politicians reacted. Usually unimportant unless it was backed by a law or something. If it was important then the weekly will cover it.
Main Character of the day on Social media. unimportant
A crime happened nearby. Unimportant
A celeb did something. Unimportant
Something happened to random person. Unimportant
Sport result. If you follow that team you already know, if not then not important.
Seriously go to the front page of the New York times or some other outfit and count the stories that you needed to read today.
I think OP's point is that if your life is so blessed that "90% of the news is unimportant to you" then that itself is a great, fortunate privilege.
For example, I can tell you that if you are an immigrant in the USA from one of the (now many) targeted countries, even one with legal residency, news about ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
If you were right, it wouldn't be so egregious. Unfortunately, due to lower hiring standards, expedited processes, and a general nonchalance towards the law, plenty of legal immigrants, green card holders, and even natural-born citizens have been wrongfully arrested by ICE because they fit the profile of who they're looking for. Just look up "ICE deports legal immigrant", and you'll find dozens and dozens of stories about various cases involving it.
And regardless of if it's intentional, if it's negligence, if it's just an acceptable margin of error, either way, if you're a legal immigrant, you very much do still have to worry about ICE.
Categorically false. You might need to brush up on current events regarding ICE actions being taken against legal permanent residents and even US Citizens.
> ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
Maybe the first few stories are, but what past masked goons throwing up Nazi salutes and sending people to foreign labor camps do you need to keep up on? If you're into politics, then sure, but your average Joe probably doesn't need to know that they're, yet again, terrorizing people and acting like a secret police force.
That's just it though, the "news" is not providing valuable information to the majority of people, it's mostly a series of takes designed to fit into easily digestible narratives so they can attract enough viewers to survive as a business.
German peasants in the 17th century seemed to manage just fine without 24/7 news coverage.
Almost all news that's actually important - that might actually affect your life - will find you one way or another. Most news isn't important (eg sports drama). Or it isn't urgent (eg tariff news). Or both, like celebrity gossip.
Only a vanishingly small percentage of news is both urgent and important. And there's plenty of people in my life who would tell me if - for example - we needed to evacuate the city due to a fire.
Really. You can switch off. It'll be ok. Try it, and you'll see.
99.9% of people would be better voters if they put five hours a week toward reading about and better understanding shit from an undergrad liberal arts program (history, political philosophy, statistics, media studies, basic physical science, economics) and five hours a year into catching up on the news, than vice versa.
Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore.
What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which apps can be installed, how often they can notify or distract us, and so on.
A very basic step is using an app blocker. The ideal solution would be a phone with a local AI that is aligned with my personal preferences and instructions.
For example, it could deliver news just once a week from outlets across the entire political spectrum, eliminate social media entirely, and surface only important emails and messages at the most appropriate times.
I've been trying to migrate back to command-line-only applications to get a facsimile of this.
I don't think that command-line tools are better in any kind of "objective" sense, but I find that if you live primarily within tmux + neovim (and maybe Codex/Claude if you want to be super cool), then it's much easier to not be distracted by the rest of the world.
Nowadays, when I do work I will have a full screen terminal window open. I have an utterly gigantic 85" 8K TV as my "monitor" and I will have an ungodly number of tmux splits, but importantly I don't think those splits are distracting from actually doing work. At some point I will figure out how to get the dbt Cloud `preview` functionality working locally and I think I can avoid the vast majority of any of my work requiring a browser.
Sometimes it does kind of feel like I'm just being a hipster by using a lot of tools that have existed since antiquity, but I think they do a good job at not being distracting.
Ignoring the obvious contradictory nature of the post (a trip to a place that is generally so expensive and time consuming that only the wealthy leisure class can access it yields polite people), what is the alternative to the fast news cycle?
I've been toying with different solutions over the years but haven't found anything great. Magazine subscription to something like the Economist? Weekly Sunday paper subscription?
How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?
I switched to a weekly subscription of Economist (print) and it has been great. I haven't seen then news in a year (on phone, or TV). If there's something really important happening, then people around me generally tell me. At that point I check what's happening online, but that doesn't last more than a day or 2.
It has allowed me to escape the news cycle. I am yet to find an equivalent of the Economist for India (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.
you don't need to keep up on the news. reject the premise and be free. honestly we wish we could be more ignorant. how do you stop learning about the news when it is everywhere?
It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:
- turn on grayscale
- don't use any social media
- turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)
The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.
As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.
But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.
Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.
Just keep it in the front of your mind that most of the stuff you're reading is ephemeral bullshit. If you come across something that you think is important, make a note of it. I keep a small journal of stories I find notable and that may be important in the future. Everything else is lost to the wind.
One probably needs an assistant that tells one news that said assistant knows is important to... one. What news actually is important? E.g. if Bitcoin is crashing? (Probably not just important for crypto-bros, but could affect the broader economy). If you're planning trip to Sicily and Mount Etna just erupted. Or if you have relatives there..
I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.
Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...
That's what I thought, too. Perhaps if you're as chronically online as he makes himself out to be, then not posting a tweet for a week feels like years. If he gained a new perspective, then great, but I'm deliberately leaving my phone in the hotel room when on vacation because nothing good ever comes out of it.
He is a journalist who writes a newsletter and focuses on social media, politics, and breaking news. Being away for a week in does count as disappearing in his world.
> Contrary to the national security threat machine’s picture of a country at war with itself, we all got along so swimmingly that the idea of a civil war or anything like it struck me as laughable, as did the notion that the statistically insignificant number of politically-motivated killings, though real, said anything at all about the vast majority of real-world Americans.
This line of thinking drives me crazy, especially from someone like Ken. Just because a bunch of privileged Americans were friendly with each other while enjoying an amazing time in nature doesn't immediately negate the very real problems going on in the US.
I think what he is trying to say is that if we all sit down with each other and stop requiring that people agree with our worldview before engaging in good faith, we would find that we actually get along peacefully. He is saying that it isn't as bad as he thought it was before he experienced a situation where that happened.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively researching and buying backpacking gear and soaking up tips for next spring. I am massively looking forward to being on a mountain alone for a few days with only a Garmin inReach Mini as my link to the outside world, gonna be nice to disconnect like that.
I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.
Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.
I did this except it was more like a month. When I got back I realised how much happier I was to be off of X and oblivious to the news. There is virtually zero utility to being "informed" of most things, and plenty of downsides.
Escaping the internet on a luxury trip doesn’t disprove political conflict… it just shows how privilege can opt out of reality and sell the experience as clickbaity insight.
Not "privilege" per se, I think that's the wrong word. Republican or Democrat, left or right, rich or very very rich - there is a lot of self-selection bias in judging the world from a pool of people who decided to go on vacation to the Galapagos...
Is it beneficial to be imposing a purity test before taking the meaning of any lesson?
It's definitely privileged to take a trip to the Galapagos, but I don't think it's privileged to ignore the news. A lot of poor people ignore the news. They may be too busy, or they may feel powerless to change anything. I think the real question is what exactly this entirely content-free statement means: "I’ll be focusing more on stories that actually matter instead of chasing the flash-in-the-pan ephemera that nobody remembers the next week."
Privilege isn't just about wealth. The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
The point is that 90% of the news is unimportant. Often you can read a weekly and that is enough
A politician said something and other politicians reacted. Usually unimportant unless it was backed by a law or something. If it was important then the weekly will cover it.
Main Character of the day on Social media. unimportant
A crime happened nearby. Unimportant
A celeb did something. Unimportant
Something happened to random person. Unimportant
Sport result. If you follow that team you already know, if not then not important.
Seriously go to the front page of the New York times or some other outfit and count the stories that you needed to read today.
I think OP's point is that if your life is so blessed that "90% of the news is unimportant to you" then that itself is a great, fortunate privilege.
For example, I can tell you that if you are an immigrant in the USA from one of the (now many) targeted countries, even one with legal residency, news about ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
If you are a legal immigrant you don’t have to worry about ICE.
If you were right, it wouldn't be so egregious. Unfortunately, due to lower hiring standards, expedited processes, and a general nonchalance towards the law, plenty of legal immigrants, green card holders, and even natural-born citizens have been wrongfully arrested by ICE because they fit the profile of who they're looking for. Just look up "ICE deports legal immigrant", and you'll find dozens and dozens of stories about various cases involving it.
And regardless of if it's intentional, if it's negligence, if it's just an acceptable margin of error, either way, if you're a legal immigrant, you very much do still have to worry about ICE.
Categorically false. You might need to brush up on current events regarding ICE actions being taken against legal permanent residents and even US Citizens.
and the ICE news would be that 10% that is important.
> ICE's actions is very relevant and very important to you.
Maybe the first few stories are, but what past masked goons throwing up Nazi salutes and sending people to foreign labor camps do you need to keep up on? If you're into politics, then sure, but your average Joe probably doesn't need to know that they're, yet again, terrorizing people and acting like a secret police force.
Apparently more people need to see more information about those things because they’re still happening
That's just it though, the "news" is not providing valuable information to the majority of people, it's mostly a series of takes designed to fit into easily digestible narratives so they can attract enough viewers to survive as a business.
> Privilege isn't just about wealth.
Which poor people exactly do you consider privileged, and why?
> The point is that although anyone can ignore the news, the news won't necessarily ignore them!
What can they do about the news, though? I specifically said, "they may feel powerless to change anything".
> Which poor people exactly do you consider privileged, and why?
those with insulation from genocide and displacement despite poverty.
their point is that, say, a german peasant in 17th century couldn't avoid the Thirty Years War.
German peasants in the 17th century seemed to manage just fine without 24/7 news coverage.
Almost all news that's actually important - that might actually affect your life - will find you one way or another. Most news isn't important (eg sports drama). Or it isn't urgent (eg tariff news). Or both, like celebrity gossip.
Only a vanishingly small percentage of news is both urgent and important. And there's plenty of people in my life who would tell me if - for example - we needed to evacuate the city due to a fire.
Really. You can switch off. It'll be ok. Try it, and you'll see.
We live in democracies. The price of entry is a citizenry informed enough to choose how they want many issues of state handled.
The alternative is worse, and the result of an uninformed citizenry can be disasterous and a regression towards non-democracy.
99.9% of people would be better voters if they put five hours a week toward reading about and better understanding shit from an undergrad liberal arts program (history, political philosophy, statistics, media studies, basic physical science, economics) and five hours a year into catching up on the news, than vice versa.
The price of entry is actually just being born in the country (or at least that's all that's required in most democracies).
You personally might have the expectation that when you vote, you should be informed about what you're voting on/for - but that is entirely optional.
edit: I'd love to hear about some of your proposed solutions to solving this problem ;)
Electronic devices are very effective distraction tools, especially phones. Companies and apps leverage our psychology and biology to get our attention, but we can take control of what we interact with—and if we remove the hooks, they won't be able to exploit them anymore.
What could help is taking control of how devices interact with us, rather than letting other people control that. This includes deciding which apps can be installed, how often they can notify or distract us, and so on.
A very basic step is using an app blocker. The ideal solution would be a phone with a local AI that is aligned with my personal preferences and instructions.
For example, it could deliver news just once a week from outlets across the entire political spectrum, eliminate social media entirely, and surface only important emails and messages at the most appropriate times.
I've been trying to migrate back to command-line-only applications to get a facsimile of this.
I don't think that command-line tools are better in any kind of "objective" sense, but I find that if you live primarily within tmux + neovim (and maybe Codex/Claude if you want to be super cool), then it's much easier to not be distracted by the rest of the world.
Nowadays, when I do work I will have a full screen terminal window open. I have an utterly gigantic 85" 8K TV as my "monitor" and I will have an ungodly number of tmux splits, but importantly I don't think those splits are distracting from actually doing work. At some point I will figure out how to get the dbt Cloud `preview` functionality working locally and I think I can avoid the vast majority of any of my work requiring a browser.
Sometimes it does kind of feel like I'm just being a hipster by using a lot of tools that have existed since antiquity, but I think they do a good job at not being distracting.
I'd love to see a photo of this 85" TV setup, if you're willing to share :)
Ignoring the obvious contradictory nature of the post (a trip to a place that is generally so expensive and time consuming that only the wealthy leisure class can access it yields polite people), what is the alternative to the fast news cycle?
I've been toying with different solutions over the years but haven't found anything great. Magazine subscription to something like the Economist? Weekly Sunday paper subscription?
How to keep up on the news without being jerked around by the engagement machine?
I switched to a weekly subscription of Economist (print) and it has been great. I haven't seen then news in a year (on phone, or TV). If there's something really important happening, then people around me generally tell me. At that point I check what's happening online, but that doesn't last more than a day or 2.
It has allowed me to escape the news cycle. I am yet to find an equivalent of the Economist for India (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.
you don't need to keep up on the news. reject the premise and be free. honestly we wish we could be more ignorant. how do you stop learning about the news when it is everywhere?
tl;dr - Heather Cox Richardson!
My original mini-essay (heh):
It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:
- turn on grayscale - don't use any social media - turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)
The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.
As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.
But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.
Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.
Just keep it in the front of your mind that most of the stuff you're reading is ephemeral bullshit. If you come across something that you think is important, make a note of it. I keep a small journal of stories I find notable and that may be important in the future. Everything else is lost to the wind.
One probably needs an assistant that tells one news that said assistant knows is important to... one. What news actually is important? E.g. if Bitcoin is crashing? (Probably not just important for crypto-bros, but could affect the broader economy). If you're planning trip to Sicily and Mount Etna just erupted. Or if you have relatives there..
I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.
Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...
does going on vacation for a week count as “disappearing”?
That's what I thought, too. Perhaps if you're as chronically online as he makes himself out to be, then not posting a tweet for a week feels like years. If he gained a new perspective, then great, but I'm deliberately leaving my phone in the hotel room when on vacation because nothing good ever comes out of it.
He is a journalist who writes a newsletter and focuses on social media, politics, and breaking news. Being away for a week in does count as disappearing in his world.
I just got rid of my smartphone, which forces me to spend a lot more time thinking when I am not at home. Would highly recommend.
You could also go to jail for a week. No internet access there (at least there isn't supposed to be ....)
> Contrary to the national security threat machine’s picture of a country at war with itself, we all got along so swimmingly that the idea of a civil war or anything like it struck me as laughable, as did the notion that the statistically insignificant number of politically-motivated killings, though real, said anything at all about the vast majority of real-world Americans.
This line of thinking drives me crazy, especially from someone like Ken. Just because a bunch of privileged Americans were friendly with each other while enjoying an amazing time in nature doesn't immediately negate the very real problems going on in the US.
I think what he is trying to say is that if we all sit down with each other and stop requiring that people agree with our worldview before engaging in good faith, we would find that we actually get along peacefully. He is saying that it isn't as bad as he thought it was before he experienced a situation where that happened.
I bet everything will get partisan right after if they got stuck on that island. Or stay for a year. This is delusional.
The article doesn't deliver on the headline of why the author disappeared. At no point is the motivation for going to the Galapagos disclosed.
I have to wonder why the author bought a round-trip ticket?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively researching and buying backpacking gear and soaking up tips for next spring. I am massively looking forward to being on a mountain alone for a few days with only a Garmin inReach Mini as my link to the outside world, gonna be nice to disconnect like that.