Stop Following The News: Cultivate Selective Ignorance

Your attention is the most valuable thing you possess. The quality of the inputs matters. What you choose to give your attention to will have an enormous impact on your view of the world and how you feel about it.

We live in a time where our attention has become a currency. Money is made off clicks, views and time spent on a page or app. Billions are made every year based on how much of your attention someone can steal away from you.

We think a lot about the quality of the food we put into our body, but the inputs to our mind are just as important. Much of the information we consume on a daily basis is the mental equivalent of eating McDonalds all day, every day.

People pride themselves on being in the know. All day we’re asked, “Did you hear about?” “Did you see?” It’s easy to feel pressure to keep up. To not come across as uninformed.

“If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters” - Epictetus

But what is this being informed actually leading to?

Watching the news, scrolling endlessly through twitter and following every twist and turn in politics feels like doing something, but it’s not. It’s actually doing nothing.  

Your following of the news and keeping up with every current event has no impact on the world. It contributes and changes nothing.

American adults spend about half their day interacting with the media. 95% of those adults claim to follow the news regularly. Think about that – the majority of adults in our country spend half their time giving their attention away to something they have no control over.

If you don’t know the names of your local and state elected officials– whose decisions have more of an impact on your day-to-day life than anything happening in Congress – you don’t need to worry about Russia.

What to Do

This is where the low-information diet comes in. We need filters.

Watching and talking about the happenings in the world feels like you’re doing something. But you’re not.

Learn to not care. I don’t know anyone who follows the news 24/7 and is happy. I’ve worked in newsrooms and spent a lot of time around journalists, they’re not happy either. I’ve seen first-hand how they start with a headline, then go find the story.

The news is a business. And its goal isn’t to keep you informed, it’s to keep you scared and pissed off.

Cultivate selective ignorance. Ignorance might be bliss, but it’s also useful. Most news is useless.

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Would being ignorant of any of the headlines you’ve read in the last week have negatively impacted your actual life? Would not knowing any of these things have impacted any decisions you made?

For the next week, every time you read a news alert, article or watch a segment on TV, ask yourself if it’s going affect any actions you take for the rest of the day.

The more you find yourself answering no, the more evidence you have of not needing to know about it.