At the market on Saturday, my 15 year old daughter came running up to me at the book table. “Mum! This is a bit of you.” She handed me a little hardcover book, titled Stop Reading the News: A manifesto for a happier, calmer and wiser life by Swiss author Rolf Dobelli.
What happened when I quit the news
I quit the news two years ago, as I wrote about here:
Alicia McKay
In that Friday Flurry, I described four shifts I've noticed in my life without news:
- Small talk changed as I lost reference points - and people raised eyebrows at me for not fulfilling my moral or civic duty to stay informed.
- News headlines and social media comment sections started looking like satire for their bias and hypocrisy.
- I became more able to listen and empathise with people that have very different social or political views
- Politicians began to seem less villainous and more like social avatars.
The first shift only took a few months, but the last few took over a year to really kick in. With this in mind (and undisguised delight that my kids listen to me,) I chewed through Stop Reading the News on a flight to Tassie on Monday.
Here's a book review.
Short-form news is bad for us
Overall, Dobelli makes all the arguments you'd expect: the news is biased, constant and distracting. It makes us anxious and wastes our time. It's inflammatory, sensationalist, and designed to outrage and upset us, not inform us.
Dobelli makes the case that a steady diet of short-form news will rewire our brains over time, making it harder for us to stick to nuanced, deeper content like books and long-form journalism.
Breaking news is irrelevant and harmful
Dobell is firm: a hot-take delivered as things are happening offers us no better understanding of the world. Instead, it pushes us toward shallow, fleeting views and warped perspectives.
Because news disproportionately focuses on low-probability, high-impact risks like terrorism and plane crashes, consuming it exacerbates our existing cognitive biases and makes it harder for us to make good decisions.
He also argues that the news gives us the illusion of meaning, but because it's short, written quickly and never followed up on, ends up making us shallow, reactive thinkers. We're better to wait months or years for the book if we really want to understand what happened.
I agree vehemently with this. Less news, more books has been my mantra for years now. I've made peace with not being 'up-to-date' and released the social guilt that comes with that. Me knowing the latest developments in global conflict was never making a jot of difference. On that:
You are not a bad person for skipping the news
The most compelling argument in Stop Reading the News was buried at the end.
Many of my peers and colleagues consume the news because of a sense of moral or civic duty. Dobelli tackles this bluntly: consuming media is a poor proxy for empathy or humanity. It helps nobody but news outlets and advertisers. If you want to help, you have to take action. In short: donate.
"If you really care about the fate of earthquake victims, war refugees or famine victims, give money. Not attention. Not work. Not prayers. Money." - Rolf Dobelli
This point deserved a lot more space, and is something I've thought a lot about as I grapple my liberal guilt since quitting the news.
In our marketing-heavy world, we worship at the alter of "awareness" as though it's inherently useful. If more people know, we reason, something will have to get done.
Except it doesn't, does it? News consumption and online virtue-signalling does nothing more than make you angry and fuel sanctimony. It has never stopped a war or created climate action. Real life action is the only thing that will do that. News will drive you to siloed and intolerant political beliefs on the one hand, and overall futility on the other. It's not the way to create social change.
Alicia McKay
Quality information is becoming an elite good again
Stop Reading the News includes a brief history of news information. Before broadsheets were widely circulated, there was a thriving industry of private newsletters filled with trade and shipping data. These newsletters, targeted to merchants and bankers, charged handsome subscription fees for their relevance (while the rest of the market was dominated by religious pamphlets and political propaganda.)
That was over 500 years ago, but feels eerily prescient. Newsrooms are tanking. The internet is filled with fake news, slop, and algorithmic clickbait. New Zealand's NBR has made a successful switch to a subscriber-only model - Todd Scott claims to have over 14,000 people paying $499 a year. Independent journalism and paywalled creators are on the rise. Will accurate or quality information become a luxury good again? I think it might, because:
News doesn't give you an advantage anymore
News, Dobelli claims, no longer gives people an information advantage of their peers and colleagues. Not just because over half of what we read online is now fake, but because it's too shallow to be helpful.
For an information advantage, you'll need depth and context - so skip the headlines, read long-for, and pay for quality.
People with the resources (time, money, or both) to read deeply and widely will be the ones with an advantage. I suppose that's no different to any other time in history, but given how much information the average person now inhales a day, it's a worry.
A note on the book
Before I go, here's a couple of notes about this book that stuck out to me:
- First you get the prescription, then the diagnosis. This is weird. Books don't usually start by telling you what to do. Stop Reading the News is unequivocal in its recommendations (quit news, now, and replace it with high-quality long-form information about things in your circle of competence. ) Reasons are offered later.
- The sourcing is terrible. Dobelli does a comprehensive job of spelling out reasons to quit the news and tackles relevant objections. But his sourcing is woeful and his claims overinflated. That's a big shame (and kind of ironic) because it detracts from the credibility of the work.
- It's still good. Despite these downsides, it's a worthy read.
A collection of snippets and quotes I liked
- "Psychological nutrition" - information junk-food is bad for your health.
- On re-reading: if a book is teaching you something new, re-read it as soon as you're finished it. You'll get 10x (not 2x) as much out of it the second time.
- Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything published is utter crap - always has been, always will be.
Til next week,
AM
