No News is Good News...

The Universe is doing it again...

So you know how I go back and forth on wanting to be informed and wanting to not feel like the world is a cesspool of misery? Last week Brent and I were talking about being overwhelmed with news and specifically how not news most news is now. They are media companies not journalists. A company is out to make a profit. To get a profit you need to be sensational. You need to drive those clicks. You need to have a narrative. Us vs. Them! Good vs. Evil! Can you believe this shit?!?  So the headlines are click bait. The articles tend to be less informative than opinionated and the world keeps spinning further and further off kilter. 

But at the same time there are important things happening. There is a political party that is trying to end democracy. Not exaggerating, they are trying to change rules so our representative democracy is not that. They have moved away from just restricting voters and access to dismissing election results they don't agree with. That's about as big of a threat as you can get. And there are a slew of transphobic bills that are being pushed as their next step in the culture wars. See too many people know gay and lesbian folks now, too many people have homosexual friends who got married and the world didn't explode so they've moved on to trans people. Not as many people know someone who is trans so they make a better target. We've gone from worrying about who should be able to get married to where people pee to what about the integrity of women's sports? 

So I feel like I need to keep current on what crazy ass legislation is being pushed. 

So it's always trying to find the balance.

Anyway...

After Brent and I talked about it he decided to move all of his news feed stories to Twitter and treat that like a good old fashioned RSS feed. He gets them in chronological order that way and only has to sift through them once, instead of the Facebook feed way of showing you things right away or 5 days later depending on its mood. And he said that it had the bonus effect of now his feed is mainly real people he wants to see, not news stories. More control over his news intake. 

Then I was reading Humankind: A Hopeful History and the author is making the argument that people are not as selfish and shitty as we all think they are. And not only that but one of the reasons why we all think the other guy is an asshole is because our news consumption leads us down that path. The whole reason why there is a group of conservative who think that elections are being stolen is because they are reading it and hearing it in the news they consume, after all. But basically one of the ways to think better of your fellow humans is to stop watching the news. Find a source you believe is just giving you news stories as much as possible and check in with that source once or twice a week. Like the Sunday Newspaper used to be. A recap of the week's stories, a few current headlines if something major is going on. But don't read EVERYTHING out there ALL the time. Just stop watching the nightly news, stop listening to news on the radio. Stop subjecting yourself to all of it. 

Hunh...

Well. Maybe. I mean, I have always felt that the people who are usually pushing the "you don't need to be informed" narrative are those with the least to lose. The higher your privilege the easier it is to say that everything is fine. It's like those that rail the hardest against safe spaces are those that feel safe everywhere they go. But I have other resources for voting issues and when I need to contact my congress people so what is the news actually providing for me?

So I decided to give it a try and see how I feel about it all. 

I cleared all of the news and political people from my Facebook feed and I will clear all but a couple from my Instagram as well. I am going to skip watching the nightly news for awhile as well and just get the headlines in the morning recap from Alexa for now. If it makes me crazy and makes me feel like I don't know enough I'll change, but until I try it out I don't know.

So there you go...a new June goal after all...

Consume less news. 

BOOM!