A couple weeks ago, I stopped reading the news. This was precipitated by a bunch of things: stress from the end of the semester, the desire to read more books (and write more books), and an interview I heard on the 80,000 Hours podcast with Bryan Caplan.
For me, this meant unsubscribing from daily news briefings and breaking news alerts, stopping going to the home pages of newspapers, and unfollowing news sites on Twitter, which I still look at for ten to twenty minutes a day (now mainly for running, cross-country skiing, and bioethics updates). I still have print magazine subscriptions, some newsletter subscriptions, and I still get Google news alerts for bioethics topics. I also still listen to podcasts, but no news ones (which I wasn’t listening to anyways).
I’m calling the experiment No News November. Sure, it’s technically the latter part of mid-December, and my approach isn’t exactly no news, but the marketing team at Value Judgments couldn’t waste the opportunity for alliteration. We’ll get on schedule next year.
My case for the experiment is threefold. Fold one is that the news stresses me out. This is partly because there are bad things going on in the world and the news focuses on bad things. It almost never feels good to read it. The news’ negativity bias makes people believe things are worse than they are, especially for things that don’t fit nicely into the daily news cycle, such as climate change. The same is true of assisted dying. There are tens of thousands of unremarkable assisted deaths in Canada but did you read that one story about that guy? Even when the news gets the facts right, it’s more likely to mislead than Wikipedia, Our World in Data, or Statistics Canada reports.
But the news is also stressful because there is a lot of news, and as much as I try to treat my to-read pile like a river instead of a bucket, skipping over the New York Times daily briefing makes me feel stressed. I’ve noticed that I haven’t had that feeling since I stopped getting them sent to my inbox.
The second fold is that the news almost never provides me with information that impacts how I live. Even stuff like “there is a listeria outbreak in spinach” has never prevented me from buying spinach. Other recent events, like the SBF trial, the drama at OpenAI, or free speech issues on American college campuses, are interesting but inconsequential to me. And since I can’t do anything about wars and other tragedies, reading about them on a daily basis isn’t a good use of my time. Combined with the hit to well-being, the return on investment is low. I used to read every issue of The Economist in its entirety, and boy was I up to date on stuff, but besides shorting oil futures, it didn’t affect how I lived. (And, if we’re being honest, I just made up that part about oil futures.)
The final fold is about getting things done. I was recently reminded of this quote by Donald Knuth, the Stanford computer scientist. Knuth has a lovely article that begins, “I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.” He makes his anti-email case as follows: “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”
I consider quitting the news pretty soft compared to quitting email, but the spirit is similar. Almost everything else I could read is higher value than daily news, and the time savings mean I can focus more on the stuff I want to get done.
In any case, it’s an experiment. I’ll let you know if I get listeria.