I’ve been listening to the 80,000 hours podcast a lot recently*. On the podcast they had a discussion of why you should stop reading the news with Brian Caplan, which pointed to Rolf Dobelli’s book Stop Reading the News. I picked up the book, also read it, and promptly stopped reading (and watching or listening) to the news myself, taking it one step further and abstaining from social media feeds as well. I won’t repeat the arguments in the podcast or book (pick up the book if you have time; the podcast if you don’t) because that won’t add new information. As anecdata however, here I’ll go through my the journey to saying goodbye to the news, and the positive benefits I’ve seen since to hopefully inspire more to do so or to at least consider the tradeoffs carefully.
My relationship to the news started as paper delivery girl in middle school, dropping off papers to a local street lined with apartment blocks, and having to collect the money myself to pay the newspaper for the papers, and keep the rest as profit. My hands turned black from the ink, and my sleep was disrupted as I woke up at 5am and hoped to deliver quickly enough to catch a catnap before I started school. As for watching the news, I didn’t grow up with cable, but we had the news on TV occasionally. When I lived in Denmark with a host family as a 19 year old, we’d sit down with coffee nightly to watch the evening news. It was a great way to learn Danish, bond with my family, and I remarked that a lot of the stories were fairly boring in a delightful way. Since Denmark didn’t have much crime, and the crime it did have it didn’t seem to have a culture of sensationalizing, the evening news would have stories interviewing elderly ladies about their retirement, for example.
In college, I kept up with the news and began to add social media—news from my friends—to my news diet. The daily feed from Livejournal or Facebook (MIT was one of the first places Facebook was available, after it started at Harvard), was on my todo list each day. Later I added Hacker News and Google News to places I’d check each day, along with Twitter. The feed was never ending, the information constant. When I moved to Switzerland I began reading the news in German as a way to learn, and when I lived in Antarctica for a year even at the ends of the earth I kept up with my feeds and the news. Folks would print out the one-page version of the New York Times, and I’d use the low bandwidth version of Facebook to keep up. Even at the end of the Earth, the actual Geographic South Pole, the news found me.
In the pandemic, my news habit came to its crescendo. I’d open Apple News at all hours, with click baiting headlines giving me anxiety. Here I took my first steps to parting from the news. I subscribed to a paper version of the Wall Street Journal (thinking I’d dovetail this with a budding interest in investment), only to switch over to the LA Times when I came to the disappointing realization that the Wall Street Journal taught me nothing about investment. These were my two options for print news in my location. I felt I should read the news each morning to be “educated”, but also had come to the realization that doing so on the modern internet (with click-bait more prevalent than ever) was harmful. A printed newspaper was my compromise, and I’d devour the paper with my breakfast, fitting in snippets of news between caring for young kids.
At the same time, I was experimenting with stepping back from my social news feeds. I left Facebook. With each child’s birth, I took a social media hiatus lasting months. With Twitter’s ownership changing hands and me finding fewer benefits over time, I left twitter and my 10k+ followers behind (Twitter is in great hands with my husband Casey Handmer, who avows he derives benefit). I dipped in and out of Instagram, enjoying the stories as a last way to keep in touch with some distant friends. I tried on TikTok for size, and found myself easily addicted to short video formats, so cut myself off from that after 15 minutes a day (the Opal app is a great tool).
After a few years of this, I headed off for a summer trip and put my news subscription on hold. The hold turned out to be permanent. I listed to why you should stop reading the news in early September 2024 and I read the book in mid-September, so that was good timing with the 2024 election season ramping up to its peak. I stopped! I took “News” to mean something even more extensive than the podcast or book, namely social media feeds as well. Anything high-frequency—which included both breaking news, news to fill the need for constant information, and social media feeds—I felt to have a lack of information and depth so as to not be worth being the integrator and synthesizer myself. In effect, I had long been functioning as a kidney, trying to filter the entire internet itself. There are so many others that volunteer for this task, resigning from it was a relief.
Did I hear about stuff? Yes, a few things. My coworkers told me about floods and hurricanes as they were experiencing them. My husband told me about the election results. Every once in awhile, interesting things come up as part of conversation. Without the constant to do list, and the toxicity of being a filter of the entire internet, I’ve found more energy to blog and to read and to consume long form synthesized pieces of knowledge from others. I don’t feel a constant need to keep up, or a todo list formed of feeds and news to tackle each day. I’d venture a guess I’ve gotten back hours per week in time on the clock, and hours more of peace as I simply don’t try to watch a pot of water try to boil. For example, election night in previous years I’ve had out screen after screen, obsessively following results down to the county. Coming from Ohio, a swing state, it can often come in handy to know the distribution of votes by geography if you are trying to calibrate your anxiety to the minute. Not trying to do that this year, I went out with my book club, and woke up the next morning to the results. Time saved: 8 hours there alone.
Having a gaggle of young kids, a full-time job, and tons of hobbies, means making some hard tradeoffs. I do feel like I can do everything worth doing, but I have to decide that some things just aren’t. The news just isn’t.
To close, there’s so much negative impact at the societal level which is caused by obsessive consumption of news (and the requisite production of 24/7 content), outside of simply the time and anxiety sunk into doing so by individuals. As one example, the ever shrinking radius kids can walk from home over time can be directly traced to the effect it has on the brain to constantly receive statistical outliers as inputs. Since events do not occur in proportion to their news air time, it’s hard to resist this cognitive error across a wide variety of domains.
Should the news go out of business? I’m not sure. I do know that like sugar, it could be part of a balanced diet if integrated in moderation, but the way we’ve structure the 24 hour news cycle, and the constant access, is harmful to society in a similar way to sugar. I’d recommend you give the book and or podcast a read, and decide for yourself. Did you give it a try? What are your thoughts?
*Aside: The 80,000 Hours Podcast is part of the effective altruism movement. I don’t consider myself an Effective Altruist but most of the causes they champion and intellectual investigations they undertake I’m highly sympathetic to. On the critical side, Michael Nielsen’s notes on effective altruism also resonate with me.