It’s been 9 months since I came to China and went on a low-news diet. It was very involuntary at first, I assure you – I made the wrong choice of VPN providers. But it all worked out because it’s been very good for my mental health and productivity. I have no idea what’s going on outside my sphere of influence and it is awesome.
Summary at the bottom for lessons I’m taking away from this experience.
The major change came from 1) the quality of news, and b) the quantity of news.
Quality of news
Growing up, my parents subscribed to National Geographic, The Economist, and Maclean’s. I didn’t keep up with the subscriptions since I started university and moving around for my work. Instead, I switched to reading news through Facebook by liking various outlets and having them propagate my feed. You’ve already caught on to why this is a bad idea. My feed is a landmine of ads and click-bait articles designed to suck up my time and energy.
The stuff that news outlets put on Facebook is also not their best. They’re churning it out quickly to compete with videos of puppies for your attention! And man, videos of puppies hard to beat. The speed and number of articles they have to put out often mean the articles are recycled and generic.
The only thing I’m reading now is EurekAlert!, a weekly curated list of science news delivered to my inbox. Here’s a list of other options out there you can pick to suit your needs. They are a lot better in terms of curating the content you see and reducing the volume of news you get, which leads us to the next point…
Quantity of news
It’s fairly straightforward to get around the great firewall of China these days with a VPN. However, if you picked a bad one you’re out of luck. The amount of news I could get access to decreased by 90% simply because most of them were blocked.
Another point, just because you’re thirsty for news doesn’t mean you want a firehose when a cup will do. After I quit Facebook/Reddit news I did try subscribing to those email lists, but I often skip them entirely. Now I’m down to one – that I also barely read haha…
It turns out I just don’t care.
I think a part of why I read the news a lot was because I wanted to project an image that I was someone who kept updated on world events. I’ve come to find that’s quite backwards because I’m honestly not interested (for now…) AND it was making my life worse.
I do foresee myself changing this in the future. When I have a more stable routine I’d love to add National Geographic and maybe another monthly publication back to the reading list. The news is just much lower on my priorities list than other projects and hobbies right now.
What if I miss something important?
You will definitely miss some trivially important stuff like a fun event that only happens this weekend or a restaurant opening special. But I promise you will not miss out on the really big events because:
- Other people still read the news, and they’ll filter it so the big stuff reaches your ears either way.
- Direct messaging is a thing.
Point #2 is super important. If it’s a life-changing piece of news from someone you deeply care about, or who cares for you, you won’t miss it because you missed a status update/tweet/insta story.
The FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kept me glued to the newsfeed for a long time. After 9 months of forced ‘missing out’, I won’t be going back. The low-news diet is being upgraded into the low-news lifestyle! If big news reaches me and I truly cared about it I would take action. If I don’t or can’t do anything about it what’s the point of dedicating time + brain space to it?
News is fundamentally different from other types of reading because it feels like it will have a big impact on my life. The tone is urgent and there’s a huge bias towards the negatives. In reality, unless I’m the person making the headlines it rare matters. Read something else instead.
You also cannot do anything about a lot of events in the news. It’s terrible that there are wars in the world and humanitarian crises taking place. But I’m a Canadian. In China. I’ve accepted that at this point in my life the best I can do is donate money to reputable organizations – which I have. You pick what you think will actually have a measurable impact and ignore the rest.
Takeaways
- Stop getting my news through middlemen like Facebook or Reddit. I’ll subscribe to the ones I want directly.
- Let other people filter the noise. They’ll tell me anything really big.
- Read more books, less news. Either do something or ignore it.
- Less news = more mental energy to devote to other more fun things
So, here you go. I hope you consider your own low-news diet and let me know how it goes 🙂