MINIMIZE YOUR APPETITE FOR NEWS

This article is an antidote to news. It is long, and you probably won’t be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost the reading habit and struggle to absorb more than four pages straight. I will show you how to get out of this trap – if you are not already too deeply in it.

News Is To the Mind What Sugar Is To the Body

We are so well informed and yet we know so little. Why??We are in this sad condition because 200 years ago we invented a toxic form of knowledge called “news.” The time has come to recognize the detrimental effects that news has on individuals and societies, and to take the necessary steps to shield yourself from its dangers.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food and have started to shift our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long and deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes like bright-colored candies for the mind.

Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information overload that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food intake. We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be and we are learning to take the first steps toward an information diet. ?This is my attempt to clarify the toxic dangers of news – and to recommend some ways to deal with it.

News misleads us systematically

News reports do not represent the real world. ?Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people related, story-formatted, fast changing, and loud graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias.

News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty. ?The highly visible misleads us.

News is irrelevant

Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life; your career or your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant. ?Assume that, against all odds, you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life – compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn’t read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? Even that question is a hindsight analysis. Looking forward, we can’t possibly identify the value of a piece of news before we see it, so we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worthwhile? Probably not.

Afraid you will miss “something important?” From my experience, if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you live in a cocoon that protects you from the news. Friends and colleagues will tell you about relevant events far more reliably than any news organization. They will fill you in with the added benefit of information, since they know your priorities and you know how they think. You will learn far more about really important events and societal shifts by reading about them in specialized journals, in-depth magazines or good books and by talking to the people who know.

News limits understanding

News has no explanatory power. News items are little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes. Both news organizations and news consumers mistake knowing a litany of facts for understanding the world.

It’s not “news facts” that are important, but the threads that connect them. What we really want is to understand the underlying processes, how things happen. Unfortunately, precariously few news organizations manage to explain causation because the underlying processes that govern significant social, political and environmental movements mostly are invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our (and the journalists’) brains to digest. Why do news organizations go for the light stuff, the anecdotes, scandals, people-stories and pictures? The answer is simple: because they are cheap to produce.

The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below the journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. Most people believe that having more information helps them make better decisions. News organizations support this belief, but will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is actually inverted. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.?No evidence exists to indicate that information junkies are better decision makers. If more information leads to higher economic success, we would expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case. Quite the contrary. I may not know what makes people successful, but amassing news tidbits is certainly not it.

News inhibits thinking

Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. This is not about stealing time. This is about the inability to think clearly because you have opened yourself up to the disruptive factoid stream.?

News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a minimum amount of slippery data (try repeating a 10-digit phone number after you hear it for the first time). The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must past through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing passes through.

Because news disrupts concentration, it actively weakens comprehension. Coming to Uganda for the first time and visiting for just one hour or speed through Kampala road won’t make you understand the city. Why not? Because the brain needs spool up time. Building up concentration takes a minimum of a 10-minute read. Given less time, your brain will process the information superficially and barely store it. News pieces are like wind hitting your cheek. Ask yourself: What are the top ten news items from a month ago (that are no longer in the news today)? If you have a hard time remembering, you are not alone. Why would you want to consume something that doesn’t add to your body of knowledge?

News is costly

News wastes time. It exacts exorbitant costs. News taxes productivity three ways. First, count the consumption-time that news demands. That’s the time you actually waste reading, listening to or watching the news.?Second, tally up the refocusing time – or switching cost. That’s the time you waste trying to get back to what you were doing before the news interrupted you. You have to collect your thoughts. What were you about to do? Every time you disrupt your work to check the news, reorienting yourself wastes more time.?Third, news distracts us even hours after we’ve digested today’s hot items. News stories and images may pop into your mind hours, sometimes days later, constantly interrupting your train of thought. Why would you want to do that to yourself?

If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch on Afro News App and 15 minutes before you go to bed, you’re eating substantial time. Then, add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, plus distraction and refocusing time. You will lose productive hours totaling at least half a day every week.

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Why give it away so easily? You are not that irresponsible with your money, your reputation or your health. Why give away your mind?

News is manipulative

Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good detector for face-to-face interactions. We automatically use many clues to detect manipulation, clues that go beyond the verbal message and include gesture, facial expression, and signs of nervousness such as sweaty palms, blushing and body odor. Living in small bands of people, we almost always knew the background of the messenger. Information always came with a rich set of meta-data. Today, even conscientious readers find that distinguishing even-handed news stories from ones that have a private agenda is difficult and energy consuming.

Why go through that??Stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers or the owners of the media, and each media outlet has a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone.

Journalism shapes a common picture of the world and a common set of narratives for discussing it. It sets the public agenda. Hold on: do we really want news reporters to set the public agenda? I believe that agenda setting by the media is just bad democracy.

News kills creativity

Things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, writers, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. They are oblivious to much that has been tried before. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas.

I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.

The creativity-killing effect of news might also be due to something simpler we’ve discussed before: distraction. I just can’t imagine producing novel ideas with the distraction that news always delivers. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t read news.

What to Do Instead

Go without news. Cut it out completely.

Make news as inaccessible as possible. Delete the news apps from your iPhone. Shift your TV from the living room. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions. Do not pick up newspapers and magazines that lie around at front office. Do not set your browser default to a news site. Pick a site that never changes. The more stale the better.

Read magazines and books which explain the world – Science, Nature, History. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life – or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and we can do nothing about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a month. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you.

Have fun reading. ?The first week will be the hardest. Deciding not to check the news while you are thinking, writing or reading takes discipline. You are fighting your brain’s built-in tendency. Initially, you will feel out of touch or even socially isolated. Every day you will be tempted to check your favorite newspaper. Don’t do it. Go 30 days without news. After 30 days, you will have a more relaxed attitude toward the news. You will find that you have more time, more concentration and a better understanding of the world. After a while, you will realize that despite your personal news blackout, you have not missed – and you’re not going to miss – any important facts. If some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community, you will hear it in time – from your friends, or whomever you talk to or see. When you are with your friends, ask them if anything important is happening in the world. The question is a great conversation starter. Most of the time, the answer will be: “not really.”?

Are you afraid that living a news-free existence will make you an outcast at parties and outings? Well, you might not know that Linda Dane has a new BMW, but you will have more intelligent facts to share – about the cultural meaning of the food you are eating or what economists recommend during this economic turmoil. Never be shy about discussing your news diet. People will be fascinated.

Good News

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. ?Investigative journalism is relevant in any society. ?We need more hard-core journalists digging into meaningful stories. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth. Long journal articles and in-depth books are fine forums for investigative journalism – and now that you’ve cut on time for news, you’ll have time to read them.

Reading news to understand the world is worse than not reading anything. What’s best: cut yourself off from daily news consumption entirely. Read books and thoughtful journals instead of gulping down flashing headlines.

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About the writer:

Andrew Ssaazi is a Life Coach, Speaker & Author.

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