No-News News Fast Renewal

...finding newness by letting go of the news.

Photo Cliff Scholz

I never liked the news as a child, and neither did any of my friends. To me the news registered as ugly, yucky, scary and boring. Yet I confess in the last few years in particular, I started following the news with the same mixture of passionate focus and sublime horror one might expect in any cycle of addiction.

Here’s how the pattern goes: I see or read something scary and in my anxiety I want to know more — maybe I can make some sense of things. I then consume more — I want to be “informed” — and of course it just keeps getting scarier, with the fear fueling further consumption in a destructive feedback loop. And just as those who drink the most alcohol eventually have the least to celebrate in life but typically keep right on doing it anyway, so too with the news. My experience suggests that the more that’s consumed, the worse the prognosis, and the worse the prognosis, the more that’s compulsively consumed.

For me, this became a morning ritual that went on for many years, starting with radio and moving into internet-based outlets. Morning, of all times. It’s a sacred time, setting the tone for the whole day. I knew that. And I now see that for me, consuming news in the morning, especially, functioned as a kind of “anti-prayer”.

Still, I felt this nagging compulsion to know: “What’s the latest development?”

Here’s a hint: if it’s on the news, the latest development is not good.

So for me, the question became, since it’s been this way my whole life: Can I just leave it at that and move on?

Part of what kept me at it no doubt was the intimation built into the social foundations of news messaging that consumption of it makes one a good citizen, and thus a better, more responsible person. Not to consume it is to be “ignorant”.  From my current perspective, that’s a bit like saying that people who don’t choose to watch maggots crawling through stinking roadkill are “ignoring reality”.  If it’s actual roadkill and I want to actually do something about it, all right — I’ll drag it off and bury it or something. But I’m no longer going to try to convince myself that I’m doing some kind of public service by closely observing its putrefaction and intimately monitoring its decay.

Instead, I have a new morning pattern in place and I’ll write about it in an upcoming post. But I started this only in recent weeks. I’m now coming to the end of my second month after shifting my morning news consumption pattern toward something decidedly less destructive of my person and more productive generally. But it’s predicated on this, first of all: zero consumption of any and all news products, at any time.

Surprisingly, I do not feel less well informed. Quite the contrary. And yes I still feel the waves of horror going through the population, and I get dribs and drabs from folks I talk with, but I’m not fixated on the "latest developments” as presented by the masters of social engineering who construct news products. Right now, the latest developments I’m interested in are my own.

And I am starting to see that as children, we had it right all along. And the reason is simple: in a world of “grown-ups” who consume news, the children know better. They see the oldness in the news. They don’t like the smell of it. But more importantly, deep down, on a biological level, they know that they are the news. And doggone it, they’re right — and that goes for people of any age, as long as we can live in that newness and find it in ourselves, again and again and again. Chances are, we won’t find that kind of newness by following the news.