This feels dangerous. Being obsessed with reading the news, watching endless cable news, getting steams of push notifications… yeah, unhealthy.
But completely ignorance of what’s going on in the world is not something to be lauded. It’s how we’ve ended up in the situation we find ourselves in today, a fact free environment where politicians get away with murder (sometimes literally!) because so many people aren’t paying attention.
If you're consuming the news like you consume social media, then yes, you'll be affected like you are on social media. There are different kinds of news feeds that don't focus on trivial things like what outrageous things some president is doing.
I quit news from around 2015 to around 2019 and it was the best period of my life in terms of productivity, clarity of mind. Of course, other things also were a factor, like I routinely would go offline for days or even weeks, only using my computer.
Covid broke me because it was so captivating to read about a thing that will directly affect me. It even felt mildly intellectual in the moment, all the analytics and prognoses.
And now with the war raging in my country (Ukraine) my system is completely broken. Going offline for long periods of time is not much of an option anymore, and keeping out of smartphone by sheer willpower doesn't really work.
I remember back many years ago I would only think about politics and all that when I read The Economist once every few days. Or I would read NewsWeek once a week.
Aside from that I wouldn’t think about the news at all.
Nowadays with smartphones the constant bombardment of news….thats what the new smoking. Not the news in of itself.
Actually if you look at the negative cognitive effects of constant news reading….I would say that reading the news is the new drinking rather than the new smoking.
The purpose of "the news" is to confuse and delude. There's an argument to be made less-frequent use, but staying away on Mon - Fru doesn't do much good if you open a paper on Sunday morning and believe what you're being told.
In the same vein as this article, the best thing I've ever done might just be leaving my phone by the front door when I get home, and getting rid of our TV. All I do is read books, paint, fix-up the house, tend to the garden, play boardgames, and generally do things that require me to be present when at home with my wife and child, rather than in someone else's version of the world.
We go stir crazy at home now, a sensation I have forgotten since my childhood, and feel almost obliged to go out to do things lest we go crazy from boredom. It's wonderful, and I can't recommend it enough.
>All I do is read books, paint, fix-up the house, tend to the garden, play boardgames, and generally do things that require me to be present when at home with my wife and child, rather than in someone else's version of the world
I think news apps like Groundnews can provide a summary news service so that people aren't afraid of missing things. Breaking news is generally premature, only after a particular amount of time has passed, do we get a better picture.
The entire point is that being "informed" is of negative value. Trying to find a different avenue through which to be informed defeats the purpose. Ask your friends and family how they are doing and you will be much better informed than listening to the ravings of publicists.
I quit all news shows since before 2000. I quit all TV for over a year now. Robert Heinlein knew this in the 1960's.
"Remind me... to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers."— Stranger in a Strange Land
John Prine sang the Spanish Pipedream chorus in the 70s:
Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own
For the majority of people, it seems to me that news are background noise to which they tune in occasionally, but otherwise they are just going about in their lives and it does not affect them much.
However, for the few details-oriented analytic people among us, the news are a *mental pit hole*. This is what I saw on myself since 2020. The mind works under an illusion that there is a possibly to synthesize some positive a change in your personal life based on information from the news - but it's wrong. It didn't keep me from browsing though, and getting addicted to those information streams, just like sugar.
So occasionally I do a 'news detox' like the OP describes.
Surely social developments can affect you and your neighborhood, your city, or your country on the long term, but in that case it is better to consume a monthly or yearly digest.
Or a daily digest. I vibe-coded a daemon that sends me the Wikipedia's daily summaries, once a day. It's a one page of 'this is what happened' without interpretation (but with left-leaning bias, because Wikipedia).
From the 50s to the mid 90s, people saw the news as a dull obligation. You watched the news because it was important, to be a good citizen.
Then came the Iraq War, and CNN made that duty a 24 hour operation. When the war ended, they had to keep filling up a 24 hour news cycle even though it was no longer a crisis. So they found ways to make the news fun, especially when Fox News realized that it was fun to be angry all the time.
There's still this lingering idea that you're a better person for watching the news, but it has long since ceased to be true. At most, you need the 12 daily minute news segment (before the sports, weather, lifestyle, and "here's a bunny on a surfboard" closer). You don't even need that much, but it's a hell of a lot better than a drug with an unlimited supply.
Smoking is not the best metaphor, because staying informed on the issues and events of society and community is essential to a well lived life. News in some form is more like food - and the author makes a good point that too many of us are suffering adverse health effects of consuming vast quantities of poor quality content, myself included.
Our society is under attack and changing rapidly in dangerous ways. Staying informed might not be the same as enlisting and heading overseas to fight the good fight, but we owe our current pax americana to those who did. So I stay informed so I can occasionally enter the fray in our contest of ideas. The worst of what is happening now is because too many people are under and ill-informed.
I was exactly like this and did exactly the same thing in 2024 and it has been a great weight lifted off of me. I allow news about stuff reported here, Polygon, or my local small-town paper but nothing like NYT (of which I used to read daily).
The biggest criticism I've received is that I am in a privileged position and so I can afford to do so. I think this is probably true but my mental health isn't worth the alternative.
Local news is pretty much dead, approximately nobody is reading local newspapers or watching the local news at 6.
The only news that's still viable / widely consumed are national and international news, and they generally don't cover crime less severe than mass murder.
So I suggest that the main evidence in the article, the disconnect between crime perception and reality is not caused by news consumption. People were more aware of local murders, muggings etc in the past when local media was a regular part of people's lives.
It's not the news that's the problem, but the news providers. The way things are presented, the frequency which the news is presented are designed to mess with your emotions.
For me, removing myself from Facebook (2010) and Twitter (2023) was the best thing I have ever done for my mental health.
For example, he mentions reading about genocide and not doing anything about it. In a democratic state the thing you do about it - aside from giving money to NGOs and other groups who are actually helping on the ground, protesting, sending letters to politicians and editors, boycotting businesses that align themselves with it - is to vote against the people who enable it. If you do nothing about genocide, you don't care about genocide. You always have levers to pull. Our role in a democracy is not to be a passive consumer; we have to use our votes, our voices, and apply pressure about the things we care about.
The idea that the news doesn't tell you about the historical context of a particular event is also an important tell. That's a pretty good indication that you're reading the wrong news, not that news as a whole is bad. There is plenty of really good, smart, long-form, deeply reported, contextually revealing journalism out there. I agree that there's a lot of news that doesn't fit that description. But it's out there.
But most importantly, this is a barometer of how people are actually feeling. The news industry is doing a terrible job of meeting people where they're actually at.
Part of the problem is that we are genuinely in a tough spot in history: rising authoritarianism, climate change, oligarchy, and many other factors are joining together to squeeze the most vulnerable communities. I don't know that looking away is the right thing to do, but the fire alarm analogy is almost good: it's true that if you're subjected to continuous peril you'll stop paying attention, but the peril is real and not akin to a broken alarm.
Perhaps what we need is a newsroom that only takes a step back and reports on the underlying trends, removing a dependence on the individual stories of today. For example, we should be worrying a lot more about the integrity of midterm elections here in the US, but the individual stories get lost in the mix.
This feels dangerous. Being obsessed with reading the news, watching endless cable news, getting steams of push notifications… yeah, unhealthy.
But completely ignorance of what’s going on in the world is not something to be lauded. It’s how we’ve ended up in the situation we find ourselves in today, a fact free environment where politicians get away with murder (sometimes literally!) because so many people aren’t paying attention.
If you're consuming the news like you consume social media, then yes, you'll be affected like you are on social media. There are different kinds of news feeds that don't focus on trivial things like what outrageous things some president is doing.
When I'm not following the latest conversation topics, I have no shame in telling people that I only read hacker news.
I quit news from around 2015 to around 2019 and it was the best period of my life in terms of productivity, clarity of mind. Of course, other things also were a factor, like I routinely would go offline for days or even weeks, only using my computer. Covid broke me because it was so captivating to read about a thing that will directly affect me. It even felt mildly intellectual in the moment, all the analytics and prognoses. And now with the war raging in my country (Ukraine) my system is completely broken. Going offline for long periods of time is not much of an option anymore, and keeping out of smartphone by sheer willpower doesn't really work.
> And now with the war raging in my country (Ukraine) my system is completely broken.
Stay safe, and I wish you all the luck I can that you all manage to drive out the Russian invaders.
Why not just read the news once a week?
I remember back many years ago I would only think about politics and all that when I read The Economist once every few days. Or I would read NewsWeek once a week.
Aside from that I wouldn’t think about the news at all.
Nowadays with smartphones the constant bombardment of news….thats what the new smoking. Not the news in of itself.
Actually if you look at the negative cognitive effects of constant news reading….I would say that reading the news is the new drinking rather than the new smoking.
The purpose of "the news" is to confuse and delude. There's an argument to be made less-frequent use, but staying away on Mon - Fru doesn't do much good if you open a paper on Sunday morning and believe what you're being told.
In the same vein as this article, the best thing I've ever done might just be leaving my phone by the front door when I get home, and getting rid of our TV. All I do is read books, paint, fix-up the house, tend to the garden, play boardgames, and generally do things that require me to be present when at home with my wife and child, rather than in someone else's version of the world.
We go stir crazy at home now, a sensation I have forgotten since my childhood, and feel almost obliged to go out to do things lest we go crazy from boredom. It's wonderful, and I can't recommend it enough.
>All I do is read books, paint, fix-up the house, tend to the garden, play boardgames, and generally do things that require me to be present when at home with my wife and child, rather than in someone else's version of the world
And post on HN? :)
I Agree with a lot of what this article says, except it doesn't provide a better solution for being informed. Seems to suggest ingornance is bliss.
I think news apps like Groundnews can provide a summary news service so that people aren't afraid of missing things. Breaking news is generally premature, only after a particular amount of time has passed, do we get a better picture.
I would argue that reading the news leaves you less informed.
The entire point is that being "informed" is of negative value. Trying to find a different avenue through which to be informed defeats the purpose. Ask your friends and family how they are doing and you will be much better informed than listening to the ravings of publicists.
It is nonsense, considering that such uninformed people end up voting for a felon in public office.
Exactly my thoughts. I thought it was going to suggest something better, but it was really just suggesting ignorance is bliss.
I don't know about you but Know Nothing November has been going extremely well for me this year.
I quit all news shows since before 2000. I quit all TV for over a year now. Robert Heinlein knew this in the 1960's.
"Remind me... to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers."— Stranger in a Strange Land
John Prine sang the Spanish Pipedream chorus in the 70s: Blow up your TV, throw away your paper Go to the country, build you a home Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches Try and find Jesus on your own
For the majority of people, it seems to me that news are background noise to which they tune in occasionally, but otherwise they are just going about in their lives and it does not affect them much.
However, for the few details-oriented analytic people among us, the news are a *mental pit hole*. This is what I saw on myself since 2020. The mind works under an illusion that there is a possibly to synthesize some positive a change in your personal life based on information from the news - but it's wrong. It didn't keep me from browsing though, and getting addicted to those information streams, just like sugar.
So occasionally I do a 'news detox' like the OP describes.
Surely social developments can affect you and your neighborhood, your city, or your country on the long term, but in that case it is better to consume a monthly or yearly digest.
Or a daily digest. I vibe-coded a daemon that sends me the Wikipedia's daily summaries, once a day. It's a one page of 'this is what happened' without interpretation (but with left-leaning bias, because Wikipedia).
I got to this and laughed.
I know SO many people that feel the exact opposite way about Wikipedia
> but with left-leaning bias, because Wikipedia).
At least nobody thinks smoking is good for you.
From the 50s to the mid 90s, people saw the news as a dull obligation. You watched the news because it was important, to be a good citizen.
Then came the Iraq War, and CNN made that duty a 24 hour operation. When the war ended, they had to keep filling up a 24 hour news cycle even though it was no longer a crisis. So they found ways to make the news fun, especially when Fox News realized that it was fun to be angry all the time.
There's still this lingering idea that you're a better person for watching the news, but it has long since ceased to be true. At most, you need the 12 daily minute news segment (before the sports, weather, lifestyle, and "here's a bunny on a surfboard" closer). You don't even need that much, but it's a hell of a lot better than a drug with an unlimited supply.
Smoking is not the best metaphor, because staying informed on the issues and events of society and community is essential to a well lived life. News in some form is more like food - and the author makes a good point that too many of us are suffering adverse health effects of consuming vast quantities of poor quality content, myself included.
Our society is under attack and changing rapidly in dangerous ways. Staying informed might not be the same as enlisting and heading overseas to fight the good fight, but we owe our current pax americana to those who did. So I stay informed so I can occasionally enter the fray in our contest of ideas. The worst of what is happening now is because too many people are under and ill-informed.
I was exactly like this and did exactly the same thing in 2024 and it has been a great weight lifted off of me. I allow news about stuff reported here, Polygon, or my local small-town paper but nothing like NYT (of which I used to read daily).
The biggest criticism I've received is that I am in a privileged position and so I can afford to do so. I think this is probably true but my mental health isn't worth the alternative.
(2022)
(... which explains, among other things, the multiple references to a singular Trump presidency)
Local news is pretty much dead, approximately nobody is reading local newspapers or watching the local news at 6.
The only news that's still viable / widely consumed are national and international news, and they generally don't cover crime less severe than mass murder.
So I suggest that the main evidence in the article, the disconnect between crime perception and reality is not caused by news consumption. People were more aware of local murders, muggings etc in the past when local media was a regular part of people's lives.
IMO it's caused by social media consumption.
It's not the news that's the problem, but the news providers. The way things are presented, the frequency which the news is presented are designed to mess with your emotions.
For me, removing myself from Facebook (2010) and Twitter (2023) was the best thing I have ever done for my mental health.
Oof, this was a tough read for me.
For example, he mentions reading about genocide and not doing anything about it. In a democratic state the thing you do about it - aside from giving money to NGOs and other groups who are actually helping on the ground, protesting, sending letters to politicians and editors, boycotting businesses that align themselves with it - is to vote against the people who enable it. If you do nothing about genocide, you don't care about genocide. You always have levers to pull. Our role in a democracy is not to be a passive consumer; we have to use our votes, our voices, and apply pressure about the things we care about.
The idea that the news doesn't tell you about the historical context of a particular event is also an important tell. That's a pretty good indication that you're reading the wrong news, not that news as a whole is bad. There is plenty of really good, smart, long-form, deeply reported, contextually revealing journalism out there. I agree that there's a lot of news that doesn't fit that description. But it's out there.
But most importantly, this is a barometer of how people are actually feeling. The news industry is doing a terrible job of meeting people where they're actually at.
Part of the problem is that we are genuinely in a tough spot in history: rising authoritarianism, climate change, oligarchy, and many other factors are joining together to squeeze the most vulnerable communities. I don't know that looking away is the right thing to do, but the fire alarm analogy is almost good: it's true that if you're subjected to continuous peril you'll stop paying attention, but the peril is real and not akin to a broken alarm.
Perhaps what we need is a newsroom that only takes a step back and reports on the underlying trends, removing a dependence on the individual stories of today. For example, we should be worrying a lot more about the integrity of midterm elections here in the US, but the individual stories get lost in the mix.