On A Break

At 8pm on Tuesday, November 3rd, I decided it was a good time to take a break from the news. Up to that point, I had been staring at my phone, burrowing through reportage rabbit holes large and small, the internet seemingly getting evermore expansive. I couldn't wait for the next dopamine hit of information. Looking at the reflexive twitching of my thumb, I thought: Enough.

Lifestyle designer Tim Ferriss spoke of a media fast years ago in his book The Four Hour Workweek:

The world doesn't even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord. To realize this, it's best to use the Band-Aid approach and do it quickly: a one-week media fast. Information is too much like ice cream to do otherwise.

I had always wanted to do a news diet but never could quite pull one off. There was always something interesting happening. But there would always be something interesting happening. That's just the nature of the media: To find all the cool and interesting things going on and point them to you and you to them.

Folks don't even own themselves/Payin' mental rent to corporate presidents.

"He Got Game" - Public Enemy.

To be clear, I have nothing against the media, news, social, or otherwise. As they say, game recognizes game, and I acknowledge the dissonance in someone authoring a note that will be added to the media ecosystem talking about taking a breather from that same airspace. It's simply that my head was aswirl with too much information, like a shaken glass of soil-tipped water, particulates twisting and turning and obscuring any clarity. What I needed was some time to let the sediments settle, the glass of water to clear some. As the psychologist Herbert A. Simon wrote: "The wealth of information means a dearth of something else... a poverty of attention." And there have been terabytes of information lately. It was critical for me to get an accounting of what that accretion of information was costing me, to get a handle on which headlines held a tenancy in my grey matter.

As the formula goes, Event + Response = Outcome, and before my media diet, it seemed like the gap between an event and my response kept narrowing. It's like how they tell you to take some time (preferably a day) before responding to an e-mail that gets your amygdala fired up. Too stay on the e-mail metaphor, I was starting to feel like I was sending a "Reply-All" all-caps response before the e-mail notification chime had even finished sounding. That's when I figured I needed to step away for a bit.

One part of the solution is simply discipline -- the discipline to unplug, to make oneself inaccessible, cleanly and without peeking--which takes moral courage, too, since these days that defies convention. -- Raymond M. Kethledge.

The first time I truly unplugged was over a decade ago. My wife and I took a trip to the Chilean side of Patagonia to hike the "W" trail. We were cut off from the world as there was no cell coverage in Torres del Paine. Then I had a small and inexperienced team and I worked up to the last minute to get through all that was due and ensure that that contingencies were in place. At the park I had no choice but to unplug, which was unnerving in its own right, and I spent the first few nights dreaming about the work that I had finished just before the trip, contracts flying by like on an I Love Lucy assembly line. Midway through the hike the papers morphed into rocks flying by (colored in the topography of the day) and then one night, my mind just shut off. After that night, there were no more dreams about work and for the remainder of the trip, the space between event and response seemed wide enough to drive a big-rig through. (In fact, I was just immersed in a continuous stream of events). At that point I doubt a double red exclamation point e-mail laden with ad hominem zingers would have stirred anything much in me.

You have to structure in time for solitude. Otherwise you're just reacting to other people's thoughts, rather than driving the direction yourself. -- Nate Fick.

So far I've kept to the news diet, including any news I might get from my social media feeds. My lack of currency as to the day's events haven't hurt me too much on Zoom and my colleagues have been more than willing to fill me in as to what's going on. It's been interesting to actually not know what's happening and to just listen to someone's telling of the news without bringing in my preconceived interpretation of the events into the conversation. I find that my thumb is still looking for apps to press and content to flick through and I must say that the internet is not as interesting once you exclude the information sites. The diet has also given me back a little bit of time which I've spent revisiting old music. Just yesterday while playing an old Oasis album I kept wondering why on earth the band never reached the heights of popularity that were projected upon them when they arrived. (I believe the media proclaimed them "The Next Beatles.") I was surprised that I still knew all the words to Wonderwall and that I really still loved Live Forever. I played Don't Look Back in Anger a half-dozen times. It seemed as good a theme song as any for these anxious days. Or so I've heard.

Postscript: I folded like a cheap suit this weekend and was back into the news. Diets are definitely tough!

Please note that the opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone and do not represent the opinions of and are definitely not endorsed by my employer Raymond James. Thanks!