I stopped consuming 'News' in 2018. Startups news, business news, geo-political news, neighbourhood or city news, AI news… any news. It's been eight years. Anything worthy enough, luckily, surfaces to me through my dad, colleagues, or friends. One of the happiest decisions I've taken. You see, news is designed to be consumed at a rate that exceeds your capacity to feel anything about it.
The news has been engineered to outrun your nervous system. If you're noticing the speed, you're actually realising what consuming news, content has done to you.
There has never, in the history of human beings, been a person whose job it was to absorb the suffering of the entire planet in real time. You have not been built for this. Nobody has.
You are allowed to know less than you currently know. You will not become a worse person by reading the news once a week instead of seven times a day. Your dadi did not know about every disaster on every continent. She knew about her village, her town, the country in broad outline. She lived a full life and was not less moral than you.
The friend who reads the news for you and tells you the one or two things that matter is the most generous figure of this decade. Find one. Be one for somebody else. The chain of two friends is the original news network and it works.
Watching news brings up a lot of negative emotions from inside you. Outrage is one. Outrage that does not become an action is a small private erosion of your character. You are training yourself to feel without doing. After enough years, you become a person who can feel without doing.
AI models have summarised the news for you, and the summary is faster than reading, and the summary is also leaving something undone in you that the slow reading used to do. The slow reading was not just about information. It was about the small inner work of meeting a hard fact at the speed at which a hard fact is meant to be met.
In a few years, the news will be largely model-generated, model-summarised, and model-targeted. The chain from event to your eye will pass through three layers of optimisation, each of which has interests that are not yours. Slow down before you respond. The thing you are responding to has been shaped to make you respond.
The news will be there tomorrow. The Sunday afternoon will not.