Turning Off the “News”

Yes, It’s Really Okay to Reduce Our Exposure to the Global Info Onslaught

Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash

Thanks to recent flooding in my part of the country, I’ve been too busy digging myself and my neighbors out of the mud to watch the news or scroll through Twitter. Not surprisingly, I am better for it.

Somehow, even without the benefit of either Glenn Greenwald’s tweets or Rachel Maddow’s rants, I’m still aware of what’s going on in the world. I get the newspaper on my doorstep, and email headlines in my inbox. I know about climate change, the California governor recall election, and the new citizen-informant system in Texas for people to turn in neighbors who try to get abortions after five weeks. But, having “dropped out” just after Joe Rogan recovered from Covid, I don’t know who is winning the argument over whether it was the expensive monoclonal antibodies that saved him, or the much maligned ivermectin. I don’t know whether Obama, Trump, or Biden is currently being blamed for misreading the Taliban the worst. I don’t even know who was canceled last week, if Bitcoin is up, or if Newsmax ever figured out that the guy they’ve been putting on their air as Paul Wolfowitz is really one of the YesMen.

Instead, I’ve been part of an ad hoc crew of locals and volunteer firefighters bailing out each other’s basements, shoveling mud from…