Don't read global news

In early 2020 I watched with the rest of the world as the global COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. Every morning I woke up, reached for my phone, and checked the latest developments online. Growing numbers of deaths, air travel restrictions, and global lockdowns; I was up to date on every development before I was even out of bed.

A few weeks into this routine and I was a mess. My anxiety levels increased as I was constantly anticipating the next bombshell to be delivered via our global news network. I was terrified of where the world was going to end up and for the health of the people around me.

After a few weeks, however, I realised that life wasn't actually causing the anxiety. Things mostly went on as normal. We worked from home, we didn't go out, we didn't see people so much, but none of these things could account for the apocalyptic levels of anxiety that I was feeling. I pretty quickly figured out that the news was the actual cause of my anxiety.

After this realisation I cut out any news to do with COVID-19, and as this was the only thing any news outlet was reporting, I cut out all news. Any information I really needed to know was relayed to me multiple times by friends and family.

My anxiety levels reduced significantly, and even improved over pre-pandemic levels. I also found that not reading the news made no difference to my day-to-day life. At no point did I walk into a shop without a mask on when I should have, I got all my vaccinations on time and I even knew why everyone on my street was standing outside at 8 pm on Thursday clapping. In short, not reading the global news made no difference in my life except for the massive reduction in anxiety. This was all anecdotal but became clarified for me when I read the book The Information Diet.

In The Information Diet, the author puts forward thoughts on how to achieve healthy information consumption. One key idea that the author puts forward is to avoid reading too much global news for two reasons:

1. Global news is not actionable in your everyday life.
2. Global news is sensationalised to garner the most clicks, and as a result cause the most anxiety.

This all made total sense with what I had experienced so far; by cutting out global news I had reduced the amount of anxiety-causing information in my day. The author goes on to outline that you should replace the global information you cut out with local information for the following reasons:

1. Local news is directly actionable to your everyday life.
2. There is less profit in local news, and therefore less sensationalism.

So I had cut out the global news, but I needed to replace it with some local news to complete the experiment.

I started picking up a few of the local papers of various sizes for my area. As predicted, reading these did provide much more actionable information and as a result, I attended local events and kept up to date on a story about the status of the VOI scooter contract for the city, which as a technologist I was particularly interested in. The local news also provided talking points that people were much more interested in; it turns out people will become much more engaged when you talk about a story in their locality rather than half way around the world.

So my information intake took a massive diet, and I really felt the benefits. However there was one fly in the ointment that was raised by a family member at Christmas (what better time is there to discuss philosophical and political differences!).

It was on Christmas Day that I recited the (controversial) Mark Zuckerberg quote that sums up the local over global news philosophy.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

On hearing this my sister raised a point that set me back in my new found philosophy, which was it was only because of my privilege as white middle-class male that I was able to put the blinders on to the global news. I was essentially ignoring a huge amount of the suffering in the world that was being felt at least in some part to maintain a comfortable life for people like myself. Is it OK to ignore news stories about children being forced to work in clothing factories half way around the world when they are producing the hoodie that I am wearing as I write this article? It certainly felt unethical.

I stewed on this for a few days, and eventually came to the following conclusion. The fact that I had the blinders on to all global news made no difference whatsoever to the world than if I was reading every single story in excruciating detail, because whether I was reading the stories or not, I was doing nothing about any of them.

Although this conclusion initially gave me justification for my global ignorance, it felt morally wrong to keep on doing nothing for any cause whatsoever. My proposal therefore to counteract this was to pick one, or several global or local issues that I felt passionately about, and to become an activist to try and solve those issues.

It became blindingly clear that just being aware of an issue does not go anyway to solving that issue, and that is exactly what reading global news does, it makes you aware of hundreds of issues that you do absolutely nothing about. So my New Years resolution is to continue substituting global news for local news, and to become an activist for a few issues that I feel strongly about.