Save Your Sanity, Read Less News
A new piece argues our brains aren't adapted for reading this much bad news, and offers some tips for navigating the deluge.
I’ll be off next week for a short summer break. The following week, I’ll be back to it. Happy holidays and World Cup watching, friends.
Before I became a book editor in March, I was a full-time freelance writer. It was my job to read the news and to write about it. I still write, but less often. I still read the news, but less often. I don’t miss having to write that much and I definitely don’t miss reading the news that much.
Every so often, I cover this topic because it’s important and the value of a reminder to keep your sanity is evergreen. And when it comes to reading less news, the research is on my side.
On June 16, a piece republished in Science Daily shouted the headline “Your brain was never designed for this much bad news.” The upshot of the article is that we face a disconnect between our contemporary news information systems — and the world that shapes and informs them — and our brain. When it comes to news consumption, the distance between the flow of the latest-and-worst from around the world and our ability to manage it leads to negative effects of the sort you’re almost certainly familiar with, including becoming tired of processing all that wretched information.
As developmental psychologist Ali Jasemi writes
news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.
Jasemi offers a few tips for managing news consumption, each of which we’d be wise to follow, including: limit the time you spend reading; go narrow and deep instead of shallow and wide; and skip the “rage bait.” This is easier said that done, yes, but it’s equally worth trying.
We ought to read the news, but we ought to consider why we’re reading it, and to what end and effect. Being informed is one thing; being fatigued, depressed, and demoralized is another. News consumption ought to serve the ends of navigating shared social, political, and cultural life, keeping us connected and more or less on the same page. In a democracy, these connections are non-negotiable. No free, self-governing people can remain as such in the long run if those connections are severed.
Shared points of reference and knowledge bases are a common language and public goods that we are struggling to preserve in a digital media ecosystem increasingly dominated by clickbait, ragebait, AI slop, and mis/disinformation. The internet lowered the cost of sharing or publishing information and opened space to pluralize voices, which was a desperately needed departure from systems that shut out so many for so long, and still tries to.
An expansion of voices, perspectives, and arguments in the news and public sphere is not only valuable, but just. However, the same transformations in the media ecosystem provided space for bad actors who set to work eroding our commitments to shared facts while polluting that same environment. Governments and platforms have subsequently been unable or unwilling to tackle the problem. In parallel, years of affordability crises, war, pandemic, growing inequality, reactionary backlashes to social progress, and the increasingly frenetic pace of life have left good faith readers and writers drowning in a sea of bad news and bad news.
That’s no way to live, and no way to read. In the long run, it’s no good for you or your mental health, nor is it any good for those around you or for political life in your city, province, country, or planet.
Roughly 2,300 years ago, Aristotle wrote about a good life lived within the mean between extremes. He was on to something.
A balanced approach to news consumption of the sort recommended by Jasemi and in these pages from time to time emphasizes balance and deliberateness, a strategy premised on reading the right amount of news, for the right amount of time, for the right reasons, and from the right sources. You can think of this program as a sort of newsy phronesis, a practical wisdom adapted to keep you sane, happy-ish, and useful to yourself and your community. Give it a try. It could save your summer, and plenty more.
Excellent piece. I am always interested in the why not the what, so columnist that help make sense of what is happening allows for going deep without the rage bait news. eg Heather Cox Richardson. I agree, we do need those cultural moments like when the last episode of MASH was broadcast.
Book editor! A classic "man of letters" job. Good. Have you ever read the series of novels by Anthony Powell called A Dance to the Music of Time? The narrator held a position editing some obscure journal. Seemed to leave him a lot of time to pursue other interests! And seriously, while you're on vacation, you might like Powell's The Afternoon Men (not in the series). It has a desert-dry sense of humor you might enjoy.