Stop Reading the News summary

Let’s try a little experiment. Think back to five years ago. See if you can remember the most important news stories of that time. Chances are, you’ll only be able to recall one or two big things, if that.

So, where did all those breaking news stories go? Why can’t you recall all of those major headlines that seemed so important at the time?

Let’s consider the human brain. For a long time, we thought that the brain was fully developed by the time we reached adulthood. But scientists now know that the brain is continually reshaping. Nerve cells break off old connections and create new ones. This ever-developing process of renewal depends on our habits and choices.

Take London taxi drivers who every day rely on memorization of the sprawling map of London. An experiment conducted by University College, London, showed that these taxi drivers had many more nerve cells in their hippocampus – which is important for long-term memory – than bus drivers, who didn’t have to memorize that map. Their day job had rewired their brains.

If you look at the front page of a newspaper or browse a news site, you’ll notice that most of the headlines will be bad news. You’ll surely read about a murder spree somewhere, or a spate of forest fires, or perhaps the death of a famous soccer player. Good news, like the introduction of a new law that protects workers from carcinogens, will almost never get the front-page treatment.

This is because good news doesn’t sell newspapers or earn clicks. But all of that bad news isn’t doing us any good.

Imagine an earthquake ripping through a faraway country.

The tremors begin to rock tall, brittle buildings. Ceilings collapse in a puff of brick dust. Huge fissures open in the middle of busy streets, swallowing cars, buses, and walkers. Schools and hospitals are reduced to rubble.

You’ve now learned how an addiction to the news can be bad for you. It drags your attention toward things that are largely irrelevant to your life. It rewires your brain in a way that makes you a shallow, distracted thinker. It causes stress that reduces your physical health. And it gives you the illusion that you’re somehow empathizing with the suffering of others, while actually rendering you impassive and useless.

So what can be done to break this addictive, harmful habit? The best way is the most dramatic. It involves cutting yourself off from the news media entirely.

In the last blink, we saw how, by giving up the news, you’d be able to engage with the world on a deeper level than before. When you stop reading the simplified information you get from news articles, you can reflect better on the world and all of its complexity. You can go deep, rather than shallow.

If you’re always reading the news, you’ll be learning about hundreds of different topics, but only in a fleeting way. You’ll never have the ability to focus on something properly.

So, you’re on the cusp of giving up the news, but then a persistent doubt comes to you. If you don’t read the news, how are you meant to understand current affairs? And then, more worryingly, if you don’t read the news, how can you still be an informed citizen and take part in democracy?

Well, quite simply, just like many other people did before the advent of mass media. How did active citizens manage to stay informed during the early democracy of Ancient Greece? They thought deeply and debated one another.