Thinking of not reading the news for a while.
It’s all a bit shit and depressing really, innit? I know I have to follow some events for the column every Friday, but I’m thinking about how I can titrate that down to a minimum. US politics, global politics, local politics, it’s all super dark and fugly, and I know that the bastards actually want you to disengage, but, you know, ugh.
I had a moment today where I realised there’s only two things I can really control. My body composition and pre-tax income. Everything else is contingent.
So I dunno. I have an insane writing schedule next year. I’ve been wondering what might happen if I just leaned into that and ignored the world as much as possible.
Most likely I’ll fail after about two days of white-knuckling it. I default to checking newsfeeds the way some people zombie stumble through hours of scrolling social media. Even as I was sitting here waiting for an AI to generate the image for this blog post about not reading news unless absolutely necessary, my fingers started wandering across the trackpad looking for my news sites to browse while I waited.
Now that we have a couple of small humans in the house, it’s all “feed me” and then please fuck off to bed, at news time, so I feel a little out of the loop. If it wasn’t for the Guardian I’d know nothing at all, and even they are restricting access unless I cough up some dollarydoos. There must be people constantly in the non news cycle. Is that good or bad? I’m leaning to bad.
Anyway, perhaps after Christmas you could have some cold turkey.
Jeebers, that turned into a rant.
I understand this urge to Apple News the hours away. I think it's partially responsible for my piled up book stack. There's more than a few cool books I'd like to read, but haven't.