Just Never Read News
I used to have a dedicated monitor for Bloomberg terminal headlines.
I now read approximately zero news.
By "read news" I mean the push-based version: feeds, notifications, homepages, someone else deciding what I should know today.
I don't want to know that fast
I can't remember the last time I needed to know news that happened less than a week ago. What's the value in knowing things so soon? Hunter-gatherers got news when it mattered. If somebody died you saw it, or you were told face to face. Humans aren't equipped for a world where things keep changing at us. I don't really care about living slower or being a Luddite. I want to feel the beat of my own heart and not the pulse of an overbearing planet.
There are exceptions - certain occupations do require knowing the news now. A market-facing role needs to know why prices are moving. Tautologically a journalist must be on top of the news. Politicians need to know what's going on. Anyone whose job it is to react to events that are happening now needs the trigger stimulus. I rely on these news-adjacent people in my life as a form of social insurance; they know all the news and if something is truly important they will tell me right away.
I don't want to know that much
Am I reading news because the information is useful or because I want to look engaged? I want to decouple information seeking from signaling I am informed. I don't think appearing "up to date" or talking about globally relevant events that have happened recently can help me connect with people. I want to learn about people as people - their intense thoughts considered and mulled over until they bloom.
News has barely any explanatory power. The tiny information loss from deleting an algorithmic feed is easily repaid in happiness1 and touching grass - that knowledge is shallow, decaying, and hardly relevant to decisions I make. Why should a framing of an event I encounter today for the first time help me live? I want to build generalized frameworks for thought and apply them to a steady drip feed of the macro occurrences that matter. Summaries of summaries on multiweek timescales contain all I need.
I don't want to know at all
News is an adversarial information environment. Follow the money: negativity drives clicks2, clicks drive cash. This is common knowledge but default behavior is to consume as if the infopipe is neutral.
The half-life of cortisol is an hour to an hour and a half; it takes up to six hours to fully clear after a stressor3. Every news check is a stressor with a caffeine-like physiological toll. My subsystems literally decohere when I switch focus and take 25 minutes to re-cohere4. I don't want to be distracted. I don't need to be thinking about more things than I already am.
I have no feeds. I don't touch newspapers. I skim summaries for an hour a week.
I just never read news.
Allcott H, Braghieri L, Eichmeyer S, Gentzkow M. The Welfare Effects of Social Media. American Economic Review. 2020;110(3):629-676. Facebook deactivation RCT (N=2,743): deactivation reduced factual news knowledge but increased subjective well-being and reduced polarization. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658↩
Robertson CE, Pröllochs N, Schwarzenegger K, Pärnamets P, Van Bavel JJ, Rahwan I. Negativity drives online news consumption. Nature Human Behaviour. 2023;7:812-822. Each additional negative word increased click-through rate by 2.3%. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4↩
Plasma half-life of cortisol is ~66 min at normal levels, extending to ~120 min under large hormonal loads. Pharmacokinetics of Corticosteroids. Holland-Frei Cancer Medicine, 6th ed. 2003. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK13300/↩
Mark G, Gonzalez VM, Harris J. No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work. Proceedings of CHI '05. 2005. Workers took ~25 min on average to resume an interrupted task. https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf↩