Daily news watchers now seem like such ineffective people to me, and I’m reminded of the know-nothings from my teenage years rambling about conspiracy theories. The entire time they’re talking about whatever is happening in the news, I’m just thinking: “Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”
I have family members that can’t pay their rent on time or remember to feed their kids breakfast, but they’ve got the geopolitical dynamics of the US and Russia all figured out. They solved it.
Others talk endlessly about their opinions about all subjects deemed important by the news. They speak with passion as if the opinions and convictions are their own, yet every single stance they take conveniently mirrors whatever was favored in whatever media they consumed.
None of them ever express an original thought. Every single one of them just chooses a selection of things they heard and repeats it.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I think I can see how this is going to turn out for me long-term. Name anything that happened 5 years ago. If it’s significant, I remember it. If it isn’t, I never heard about it at all, and nobody else remembers it either.
I’m by farrrrrrrr the happiest person I know, to the point that I literally feel guilty about it sometimes. I just have so much time for my career that I’ve zipped past everybody, so much time for family.
It might be the single best decision I’ve ever made in my life. I’m really thankful that I figured it out this young.
For example, the Twitter hack has made its rounds here but, say, Kanye having a political meltdown hasn’t necessarily (or at least I haven’t seen it) despite it being a prominent trend on Twitter.
About 5 years ago it just started to fade.. probably as I started to click less on the new JS libraries etc, and more on the obscure interesting learnings (but also could be due to the content that makes the front page.
Every once and a while I jump on, look at a few links, read a few articles, and feel a bit disappointed that I don't have my rush anymore... I think its healthier, less addictive, but what happened to my good ol' junkie-hit days? :)
I’m actually glad the engagement is minimal. It helps me disengage. It feels like a FPS game against all the youngsters.
The moral of the story is to never read the comments. So what does that really mean? It means, be the article, not a comment.
We are just grist in the wind.
I've had good discussions, but I can feel the pull of the karma counter ticking up.
I don't know if it was worth the trade.
Also great insights on comments.
90% I go for the comments and skip the link. That's where te pearls are
Looking at the front page right now, I count maybe 4 items that are attempts at journalism. The rest are interesting subjects resurrected from 6+ years ago, tech guides, user-submitted questions/content, etc. The ones that seem like news items don’t really pertain to today’s hot news, they’re press releases from NASA etc.
HN is a discussion board, and the topics are almost always relevant to my career and interests. I mostly read the comments though. HN informs discussions I have with people at work and tech-related decisions in and out of work. I think it’s worthwhile.
From my perspective, giving in to this desire is part of the problem. When I start my day consuming content, the whole day becomes a lot less productive (concentrating becomes very hard). But if I start the day engaging my brain in a concentrated mode, the first few hours become very productive.
So my solution for avoiding to constantly visit HN in the search for something new, is that I have a new tab page in my browser, that lists, the top 3 HN news from the best list, if I haven't read them already. That way I fight the fear of missing out.
Maybe I should add that it always shows an empty list for the first 12 hours of the day ;-)
How do these square? How is it that you become informed?
This opens up a lot more time and effort to explore the 2% that does matter.
To me, it seems that was lies strong opinions and without context.
I'm doubting that a person could be well-informed by what's going on recently with the Trump adminstration, or BLM protests, or recent Covid news, from reading books alone.
I'm guessing that people who don't read the news might respond that the latest scandal from the government isn't important, and why they stopped reading the news.
At which point, "informed" might simply mean "the things I know about, because I think they're important."
I don't agree in your main argument, which seems to be based on the idea that whatever makes you feel better is good. I, for one, prefer to read the news and watch the occasional clip online. It makes you better informed, which is essential for many things, including business and informed voting.
Trying to be happy all the time is overrated.
Completely agree.
“[B]y restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.
I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.”
—Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
I loved that the Onion article, thanks for sharing it!
I love this, thanks.
However, it is possible to have a view contrarian to whatever is being published. For the life of me, I cannot seem to find any news source that I feel comfortable with or even trust.
Also - it's actually important that some people pay attention. The 'real news' is in the details, and it takes attention. Right now, there's a minor scandal in the Canadian government, but really it cuts very deep, to the point where the PM and the Minister of Finance are compromised, the later possibly in point blank illegal graft. These are the kinds of things that rot democratic institutions, and the manner in which they are conceived is usually quite subtle. The government sponsored news in Canada, is somewhat compromised by the fact that their source of funding comes from the source - and very unfortunately, some of the most detailed reporting is coming from the otherwise, low-grade daily tabloids. The only way to parse through the scandal is to read it all - and the only way for the electorate to solve the problem is to put enough political pressure, or, to vote them out. This is an unfortunate paradox, it does take quite a lot of attention on the part of the plebes to make sure things work well.
It's really surprising how vague sometimes corruption can be: if the oversight board doesn't raise a huge fuss, and neither do the mainstream press - then it's simply 'not corruption'. It's weirdly a matter of interpretation and spin, sadly. 'Friends doing business with friends' is normal, the line that gets crossed is sometimes very grey.
That said, it's 95% rubbish.
Thank you for that comment... I'm now going to turn on my news blackhole hosts file, which I disabled long ago. I remember being far more content back then so I'm not sure why I reverted back.
I also subscribe to https://hackernewsletter.com/ which is a list of all the interesting articles from hacker news from that week. (it comes out on Friday, thus I unblock on the site on my computer on Fridays)
Ha! That's awesome. That's an in-your-face "hey you, focus!"
As soon as I entered the workforce @ 21 I cut out 2 things from my diet, sugar and news.
This habit has compounded so much, not saying its been 100% perfect because I still read reddit, twitter (very selective following and blocking all outlets that end up on my TL) and HN (this place is a total bubble of smart, high IQ people, I enjoy the comments here, I don't get to interact with such smart people on a day to day).
Any interesting developments will filter through my social circle, someone will bring it up.
I stopped watching TV altogether, I stream the occasional show though.
And if there's an upcoming election, you can always just read the candidate's stated policies and record of voting.
Oh--wait--MiniTruth is saying something about Eastasia...
(All seriousness aside, you do have a point.)
OP has heard of COVID. It would be impossible not to. I follow a similar approach (avoiding news as much as possible) and I still am exposed to much more information about COVID than is useful.
What you've discovered and described is called "NPC" by meme culture.
It convinces people that something that has enough truthiness and is funny enough is true.
I am unsure if you are saying not watching the news makes him an NPC, or if the people who just parrot the news are the NPCs.
I am leaning toward the latter, but based on your wording and the wording of the parent post, that's not what I initially expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Internet...
>> "A very basic description of the topic. Can be well-written, but may also have significant content issues."
That means someone wrote it up on a whim and no one's come to address prior art in a way that suits the standards of Wikipedia.
The truth of the matter is that the story (and "updates") are all crafted specifically to be addictive, to be click bait. It isn't about sharing information or exposing the truth. All that matters is ad revenue. I do get it that we need to pay journalists. It has become clear we need a new system. I guess NPR kinda has a solution via patronage. If only we could now get more different viewpoints this way. God knows we have enough multi-billionares to fund it.
It is designed to be addictive. Either by accident or deliberate is up for debate. I have my opinion on it but it is just that. They use your own feelings to manipulate you into watching/clicking for more. Facts matter little, feelings do in this segment of our world. Mr. Bernays should be proud of the monster he set loose upon us. Even the vaunted NPR does this. I noticed it years ago after a drive across the country and realizing they try to make it look like they were investigating things and not just reading something of one of the 4 or 5 news wires.
I recently upped my monthly donation to my local NPR station, and I feel like if anything it's made me more critical of them. Probably most of it is that I lean politically Right, and they lean Left. But it feels like sometimes they just go out of their way to try to check all the boxes of "woke" culture, whatever the hell that is.
The example that sticks out in my mind is they did a piece on immigration detention centers a few weeks back (no qualms there). The person they chose to interview was a transgender Guatamalen.
It's basically the most on-brand thing the reporter could have done. Talking about immigration? Better throw in some LGBT issues as well.
It's too much I guess to expect a news organization to just report on the news.
When I get feeling really irritated about it, I calm myself down by rationalizing that I like the music they play in the evenings.
Like I said, it's perfectly on-brand for them.
My wife and I have a running joke (which I think I've seen pop up elsewhere too) about how Terry Gross picks her interview guests based on how many items the guest ticks on the "diversity checklist"
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/871625210/you-can-either-be-a...
> that long-sought serenity
But i don't think changing your input is related to gaining that long-sought serenity - in a sense of being immune to those inputs if required.
I my opinion it boils down to being human and being to some degree a puppet of your brain chemistry, meaning we can search for said serenity but are propably doomed to never find it.
A genuine question: is it access to news or content of the news that messes with our sense of wellbeing? Does “the media” upset me, or knowledge, for example that climate models appear to be more conservative than reality, upset me?
In not reading the news, are we simply happy in the way ostriches are happy when they place their heads in the sand?
Those with political power in the US could conveniently turn a blind eye to the problem with plausible deniability with a he said she said excuse, but now they have to face the problem.
I think that’s an important development in the progress of my country.
You should be having an emotional response to the huge undercurrent of racism and classism pervading society.
I've read this sentence multiple times and still not sure what it means. Would you please expound?
The poster is saying that global climate change is probably even worse than people think. Often, the reporting around climate change focuses on the best case, the average case, or what could be achieved with an immediate strong response. But the actual paths we are on seems to track some of the worse, more pessimistic cases.
Unless you're reading the entirety of academic research yourself and able to critically judge the validity of that research (by being a climate scientist yourself) it seems like you're always depending on someone else's biased interpretation.
To clarify: not disputing climate change. Only the ability for someone to make judgement calls on whether the reporting is accurate.
Where can you find up-to-date temperature readings (as up-to-date as possible)? Are there public datasets available?
I.e., things are even worse than we thought.
This is what I do, in addition to no social media except for certain personal alerts.
I ask my partner to relay any significant news/events to me.
I do support my local media group The Colorado Sun with a membership and sometimes read through their articles, which don't have advertisements so they are not incentivised to produce click-bait headlines and sponsored/addictive/entertainment content.
It sounds like you've partly outsourced the problem to your partner then. What does your partner do?
Many people refresh HN multiple times per day and spend hours arguing about the same things over and over (seriously, I've seen the same arguments for 5+ years). I'm sure all of us have caught ourselves closing HN and then opening it again a few mins later.
This goes for all forums ever, so it's more of a personal change than anything 'wrong' with HN or others.
2 ways that I've found some refuge in the chaos that is the hyper-modern world:
1) More news. Flood your brain. Find all the news sources you can in your chosen language. Most big-time newspapers have an English-language resource. Look at those. Once, I put the online English version of the top 100 newspapers in the world (by circulation and if they had an English version) in my morning readings. I'd have to open them all at once and then go through each of the 100 tabs and skim them and close each one. You get really good skimming the world's news that way and really seeing what is important internationally: US politics, cyclones/hurricanes/weather, sports, etc.
2) Read a book. Books tend to draw you in much better than the news. At least the better-ish books. Though it's not as easy as chewing the candy that is Twitter, the 'classics' are a great jumping in point. Struggling to read and grok a few pages of Dante's Inferno does become preferable after a time. Lists of classic literature abound and nearly any of them are top-notch.
Non-fiction books have driven my world opinions more than any other source (besides I suppose lived experience).
One sad thing about the past few months is I no longer find time to read. My wife does ebooks, but I just can't get into them.
On the plus side, I'm getting a lot of projects done around that house.
Later, these two paragraphs capture Simic's mood more completely and that mood cuts into the "bliss" of being unencumbered by news:
> I mustn’t forget, either, that I was surrounded by political exiles in my youth, many of whom, after having lived either under Stalin or Hitler, or in some cases both, never lost their vigilance. Even after twenty or thirty years in the United States, they gave the impression of keeping a suitcase packed under their beds, ready to flee at a moment’s notice should hippies or some variety of American fascists come power.
> Lucky for them, they are all long dead, so they can’t read some opinion piece or hear a congressman or a senator today clamor for the very same police state measures they barely escaped from. Watching the government of the country they grew to love curtailing liberties, spying on its citizens, militarizing its police forces, imprisoning both foreigners and Americans indefinitely without having to prove their guilt, and coming to admire the mindset of authoritarian regimes it used to despise, would have been both terrifying and depressing. They could not help but note that some of their fellow Americans who cheer for the death penalty and for torture, and call the people demonstrating against Wall Street lice-infested misfits and degenerates, are no better than the ones they knew back home and are as eager to persecute, imprison, and even commit murder should they be called upon (I think people who clap for death, love war without end, and adore guns are perfectly capable of it). My mother, who never recalled anything but trouble, and was sure the worst was yet to come, would be saying, I told you so, all day long.
"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/
Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life..."