Reading the News is a Stupid Thing To Do
Here’s a thing I believe that most people don’t: reading or watching the news is a pretty stupid thing to do.
Here’s why:
1) The news almost never informs any action in your life that actually matters.
Yes, sometimes it’s important to know what’s going on in the world.
Yes, if you’re going to vote you might need to read the news.
Yes, if your job is in providing market intelligence to an organisation to inform it’s day-to-day strategy then reading the news might be valuable.
But is it for you?
And if it is, how often is it? And how often do you read the news?
If you’re like me and almost everyone else, there is almost never any material impact on the actions that count in your life that comes from reading the news.
I have read the news less and less over the last 15 years or so and my life has only got better. There have been almost no times when that has been anything other than a good thing.
Reading the news doesn’t affect how you manage your staff.
It doesn’t affect how you strategise for your organisation.
It doesn’t affect your parenting decisions.
2) The news doesn’t reflect reality.
Bad news sells.
Good news doesn’t.
The headline is (almost) never, ‘a teacher in Norfolk changed the life of a child today.’ And yet, it happens every day.
The headline is (almost) never, ‘an NGO did work that helped a village in Sudan today’. And yet it happens every day.
The headline is (almost) never, ‘the strange complexities of our global system led quite a lot of people to no longer being in extreme poverty today’. And yet it happens every day.
What you read on the news does not give you an accurate picture of what is happening in the world.
And it’s worse.
I used to use the BBC News as the most fact-based news I could get. And, honestly, I think it probably still is.
And yet even there, when I go on that site, all the stories seem to be about rape and murder and war.
And yes, there is more war today than there was a few years ago.
And there may be more rape and murder than before (although I doubt it).
But there certainly isn’t proportionally as much more rape and murder as the BBC News seems to show me.
And what impact does it have on someone’s psyche to be fed the doom of the news every day: the rape and murder and war with no balancing act of acts of love and growth and inspiration?
Does it give us an accurate picture of the world? No.
Does it feed our psyche in a way that helps us do the work that really matters in the world? Helps us do the work that changes the world for the better?
No.
It moves us closer to being anxious, angry, fear-based creatures.
3) The daily news is mostly static (not signal) and repetative.
The 24-hours a day news of the internet makes all this worse. Media outlets have to continue to create NEW stories all the time. So we get the same terrible events retold over and over and over again in different ways. Again, creating the idea that everywhere in the world is flames and misery.
And look: I know there are flames in the world. And I know there is misery.
But paying attention to the strange, distorted view of the world that the news creates will just give you a strange, distorted view of the world. And mostly, it will hold you back from doing things that actually change the world for the better.
Most of what you are seeing is static, not signal.
Even for people whose day-to-day decisions could be affected by the news, who want to get the signal of what is happening in the world, almost no news any longer fulfils that function. My gut feel is that for pretty much everyone (other than the intelligence operative mentioned above), the optimum news reading would be at most an old-school newspaper read about once a week. It’s possible it would actually be reading, once a year ‘the most important stories of this year’. Then you’d know what is happening in the world without having your view of the world distorted by static, repetition of the worst stories and more.
It’s not about hiding your head in the sand.
It’s about doing what it takes so that you can get on with changing things in your corner of the world: doing what you can do to live a good life and make the world better.
It’s about not getting distracted by the doom-laden distortions of news of what is happening elsewhere, things you have no influence over at all, but that still make you scared, anxious and distracted from doing things that count.
We need you to get to work.
So stop watching the news and start.
—
PS DON’T MISS: The Meaningful Productivity Blueprint - my new FREE model for taking action, reducing overwhelm and getting the things that really matter done. In it, you’ll learn about:
The Time Management Trap: why you need to STOP trying to manage your time and what to do instead.
The Six Pillars of Meaningful Productivity.
The secret to peak productivity, which I have seen used again and again by productive leaders and productivity experts.
Get the Meaningful Productivity Blueprint here.
PPS Subscribe to this blog and get a FREE EBOOK containing the first 7 chapters of my book, How to Start When You’re Stuck.
PPPS STOP PROCRASTINATING, START CREATING: buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.