One of My Best Decisions Ever: Avoiding News
In 2011, Bryan Caplan introduced me to Rolf Dobelli's essay "Avoid News." It's especially worth reading in a world of endless doom-scrolling and conversations about digital detox. News is like candy: OK in moderation, but it will do to your brain what a steady diet of Jolly Ranchers will do to your body. A choice passage:
News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty.
The inevitable controversy surrounding the College Football Playoff makes perfect sense when you realize that the controversy is an important part of the product. College football, perhaps more than most sports, is not about discovering and rewarding the best team. It's about making you watch.
News is like that. It doesn't want to inform you or improve your mental model of how the world works. It wants to hold your attention, which means it has to serve up a constant diet of horror stories about the improbable. Dobelli again:
We are not rational enough to be exposed to the news-mongering press. It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from consuming news is entirely different from the actual risks that we face. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real probability, no matter your intellectual sophistication. If you think you can compensate for this bias with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for newsborne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.
Resist FOMO ("Fear Of Missing Out"):
Afraid you will miss “something important”? From my experience, if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you live in a cocoon that protects you from the news. Friends and colleagues will tell you about relevant events far more reliably than any news organization. They will fill you in with the added benefit of metainformation, since they know your priorities and you know how they think. You will learn far more about really important events and societal shifts by reading about them in specialized journals, indepth magazines or good books and by talking to the people who know.
So what do you do instead? Read great books. You can get the complete Harvard Classics for $0.99. Dobelli's book The Art of Thinking Clearly is very good. Take long walks. Listen to non-news podcasts. Watch movies or assemble LEGO sets with your kids.
In the long run, you will likely be a better person living a better life. I'm pretty sure it has worked for me.