Really enjoyed this piece. And definitely giggled my way through the guide to the newspaper bit :-) and found the AI depolarisation thing genuinely fascinating.
The bit about the overall purpose of news really resonated. Dramatically reducing my phone use and replacing it with meditation has hard the slightly weird effect that I've completely lost interest in the news, whether online or offline. I didn't intend it but have become completely clueless, and am now thinking hard about the morality of ignorance. Don't mean to sound pious, but have ended up doubling down on volunteering... Kind of buying my right not to care.
For most of my life, I was a news addict, and would have said that was crucial.
Then this year, radical pivot to believing informing myself is a bit of a lie, it’s just a doomscroll. Don’t kid yourself, it’s just the phone doing its thing, making you check something which is way beyond your control. Volunteer and do active good rather than imaginary passive good.
But I’m definitely not unshakeable on that. It really got me when you quoted the Washington Post about democracy dying in darkness… I’ve been total darkness for a few weeks. Am I a baddie now?
Really enjoyed this piece. And definitely giggled my way through the guide to the newspaper bit :-) and found the AI depolarisation thing genuinely fascinating.
The bit about the overall purpose of news really resonated. Dramatically reducing my phone use and replacing it with meditation has hard the slightly weird effect that I've completely lost interest in the news, whether online or offline. I didn't intend it but have become completely clueless, and am now thinking hard about the morality of ignorance. Don't mean to sound pious, but have ended up doubling down on volunteering... Kind of buying my right not to care.
totally! I feel this moral need to stay informed, but I need to remind myself to what end... why... otherwise it's no different from a doomscroll...
I’m really caught on this one.
For most of my life, I was a news addict, and would have said that was crucial.
Then this year, radical pivot to believing informing myself is a bit of a lie, it’s just a doomscroll. Don’t kid yourself, it’s just the phone doing its thing, making you check something which is way beyond your control. Volunteer and do active good rather than imaginary passive good.
But I’m definitely not unshakeable on that. It really got me when you quoted the Washington Post about democracy dying in darkness… I’ve been total darkness for a few weeks. Am I a baddie now?
Really hard.