News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier (2013)
So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.<p>Yes, the news - national and international- shows trends that an ordinary person could act on; but not in the rapid cycles that define modern news presentation. I believe Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.<p>As an experiment in mental health, I gave up tracking the news nearly three months ago; in my n=1 highly biased unblinded study, it works. Yes, I know that a janky submarine sank near the Titanic and I heard there was some thwarted military coup in Russia. But every performative utterance of political types, current and past is lost on me. I don’t go around tweaked into mild cyclical agitation or outrage.