No Offense, Wolf

We have a friend named Sarah that my wife used to hike the dogs with a few mornings a week. Whenever my wife brought up anything related to the news, Sarah would look at her blankly. She never had any idea what was going on in the world. At the time, neither of us understood how a smart woman could get through the day without knowing anything about what was going on. Instead, Sarah was far more concerned with her dogs than with war and famine and disease. I’ll be honest: I thought less of Sarah because of her ignorance. Lately, though, I have revised my opinion entirely. because, lately, I have become Sarah.

Basically, I’ve stopped paying attention to the news. I say this as a former consumer of cable news, print media, and hourly NPR updates. To me, the value in knowing what is going every minute of every day is more than offset by knowing what is going on every goddamned minute of every day. What I’ve finally learned is, not only do I not need to know, I also don’t care to know.

I’m not saying news avoidance is a good or bad thing. Moreover, I’m not even claiming ignorance about the news of the day; for the most part, I feel like the headlines still pass through me by osmosis. By way of example to illustrate my own literacy: I am aware of Hunter Biden’s dick, but I have not seen Hunter Biden’s dick. There are those among you who, no doubt, pay much closer attention to Hunter Biden’s dick than me, and I do not judge. For all I know, he may have a gorgeous thicc hog. I’m just saying that, as a personal preference, I no longer feel the need to know everybody else’s ‘bidness.

Not interested, pal.

Nor am I a critic of the media. For the most part, I think journalists are doing the best they can. The ones I know are good at their jobs, passionate about getting stories right, and have high ethical standards. Like most people, they’re doing the best that they can. The problem isn’t the quality of the news I was consuming; it was the quantity. Like everything else in this goddamned culture, the news has become commodified, chopped-up, repackaged, and sold as some kind of exotic financial instrument.

Instead of a two-minute summary of a presidential address on the nightly news, we now have breathless coverage beginning hours before and continuing long into the night. There’s too much “analysis,” which is what they call staged debates. There’s too much hand-wringing and tea leaf reading. Too much of everything. The news has been super-sized to gluttonous levels. It was making me sick. So I stopped putting it into my brain.

The fact of the matter is, on a day-to-day level, there’s rarely anything going on in the world about which I need to know. When one nation invades another, yeah, I want to know. But I don’t need to know the minutiae of how Nation A is ramping up production of artillery shells to sell to Nation C. This stuff is, no doubt, interesting and important to the soldiers and the artillery manufacturers. Not so much for me. I no longer have opinions on world matters beyond the most superficial: war is bad, hunger is bad, guns are killing too many people in America. I have wrung shallowness from sophistication, and I love it.

Like everybody else, there’s still topics that interest me and I pay close attention to those. The progress of Olivier Rioux, for example, “the world’s tallest teenager.” I’ve been paying attention to him. And UFOs, of course. I also read a fascinating article on how much matcha tea is healthful. Beyond that, I can’t tell you shit about shit.

Look how tall this teenager is!!!

This was all predicted. When the internet exploded thirtyish years ago, I remember listening to commentators (on the news, ‘natch) predicting a future in which the culture becomes so segmented that national populations would soon grow in danger of losing their cohesion. So much of what sustains a nation is a shared history. But what happens when we are sharing different histories based on different sets of facts provided by different media outlets that cater to our selection biases? Nothing good, as we are now seeing. Two families living side by side in a neighborhood might have a totally different understanding of any given event. January 6^th, for example, might be viewed as a violent insurrection by one household, and a patriotic protest by another. I’m not sure we ever had as much comity as we sometimes lament, but I feel confident that the problem is worse now than at any time in the last hundred and sixty years.

What’s to be done, if anything? For me, the answer has been simple and cleansing. Turn it off. My day is not improved when I know the news; my mood certainly is not. There will continue to be an audience for nightly news analysis and debate. I simply choose not to be a part of it. The news machine thrives on FOMO, the worry that if you stop paying attention – EVEN FOR A MINUTE – something will happen and YOU WON’T KNOW ABOUT IT. Old me cared very much about knowing, new me is happier remaining in ignorance for as long as possible. I figure any information I need to have will eventually reach me by smoke signal or teletype. I don’t need my news delivered any faster than that.

There are better things to do with my time. Sitting and staring at the afternoon light traveling across the ceiling, for example. Eating a (Joe Biden approved – why do I need to know about Joe Biden’s snacking preferences?) ice cream cone. Or I can be like Sarah – throw on a pair of muddy boots and take the dogs for a walk in the woods. Whatever’s going on out there among the squirrels is far more appealing to me than whatever CNN’s talking about. Life is short and fucked. Do you really want to spend the limited time you have on this planet with Wolf Blitzer?