i don’t drive often, maybe once or twice a week, and the car always has NPR on. other than that, i’ll skim headlines, but don’t tend to read them unless it’s something positive or local.

i do read up on the candidates nearing election day.

Detaching yourself from the reality of what’s happening in the world is certainly one way of coping, but IMO unless you’re doing it to protect your mental health (in which case I highly recommend reducing your news consumption), it is just a form of isolationism at best, and an abdication of our shared human responsibility to protect and help each other at worst.

Let me reiterate: if you are seeing your mental health decline as a result of news consumption, you should reduce that consumption, or at least make changes to which news sources you consume.

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

I strongly disagree with the person in this article’s recommendation of detachment for the average person. This is akin to advocating for political non-participation, because how can you intelligently assess who is best to represent you in the world if you don’t know the state of the world?

We on the Left (rightfully) criticize people who cannot seem to care about an issue unless or until it personally affects them… well guess how they got there; not being informed about anything external to their own immediate lives.

It’s quite the privilege to be able to cut off externalities and be happy; many people do not have the luxury of being able to do that, because those externalities will intrude into their lives whether they like it or not, like Roe being overturned.

/rant

Since you asked for recommendations, I only really have one that worked for me, which was to cut off social media news (i.e. ditching Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit).

All 3 of those were news… combined with some of the worst takes on that news by the horrible people on those sites. I don’t need to hear a bunch of conservatives and white nationalists and misogynists and racists (apologies for the redundancy) give their takes on the news, especially because we know that they gain an outsize representation on social media due to ‘interaction’ being rewarded, good or bad.

I had to teach myself last year that you can be an informed voter and also not constantly not watch the news. With Ukraine I realized I was constantly in a rolling panic attack and I couldn’t get out of it. The news was sensationalized so much. (Not downplaying the events, but they also rolled out experts who talked about how likely nuclear annihilation was and I was not handling that well). I realized it was all to keep me glued to my screen and clicking, and that made me kind of disgusted with them. Here’s a war going on with actual people affected, and they’re worried about how many clicks they’re getting.

I stay informed, I know the issues, but that doesn’t mean I need to be subscribed to /c/news and have a constant feed. I vote in every election, and if there’s something I don’t know I look it up. But I don’t need it daily.

This op/ed is heavy with claims and light on proof. Is it anything more than an advert for the author’s book? It seems reactionary for no reason.

A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.

Yes. Humans are fragile and we need to make sure they are not in danger before we then – later – investigate the engineering components. Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events? The same goes for earthquakes, floods, and the like. First we worry about survivability, and later we look at what engineering worked and which failed.

I also see no need for news to be consumed as unquestionable gospel. The state of U.S. politics has led me to believe that yes, in fact, there are people who DO take it that way, but I know enough people who question beyond the sound bites to think that the author here is overstating the idea that consuming news reduces critical thinking. I do, however, suspect that it is harder to concentrate on heavily linked article than ones that save references for the end.

Anyone try to click the link to the study on how ‘links are bad’ – the link is BAD. I got a 404 (perhaps it is a regional issue?). By cutting out the chunk, ‘magazine/’, I got a working link: https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/