Most of My Friends Have Just Started Ignoring The News.
How do we do this?
About a year ago, I chided my friend Todd for not paying for a New York Times subscription. I like to send him articles from their Real Estate section because they so often feature ridiculously unrelatable homeowners. One particular home I wanted to show him was close to my own LA rental, owned by a 25-year-old with a low level (read: low paying) production job whose parents decided they not only needed to buy her a multi-million dollar house but also that she needed an interior designer. Listen, I’m all for rich people buying shit for their kids. As we fall into a time where economic inequality feels inevitable and everyone is just trying to grab as much for themselves and their families before A.I. takes all our jobs, I kinda get it. We all just want the best for our families. But if you buy your kid a house, please make them design it themselves. Everyone should have to do that at least once and it gives you a better understanding of the design process and the importance of being mindful in setting up your space.
I pay for a New York Times subscription that includes the Sunday paper edition (which I have delivered to my parents’ house because I know I wouldn’t actually read it and my dad reads literally everything from cover to cover), an unlimited digital subscription, and allows me to send ten articles per month to my friends as a gift. I send most of my articles to Todd and Kelly. A lot of my friends aren’t paying for New York Times subscriptions right now. Some of them say they can’t afford it, but more of them say they just don’t feel like reading the news. Which fucking terrifies me.
When I asked Todd why he didn’t pay for his Times subscription, he said “I just don’t feel like reading that shit anymore, everything is depressing and overwhelming.”
Todd makes $300,000 a year and can afford a Times subscription. He went to Yale and, knowing him, he probably got straight A’s. Todd isn’t a dumb person. He’s also not an uninterested person. He’s the type of person who is curious and worldly, who seeks out information about art, film, dance, and culture. But he has no interest in reading the news right now.
I’m using The New York Times as a stand-in for all subscription-based, paid media. News sources that pay reporters to investigate and report on news issues. The alternative to that is ad-based news and influencers. It’s kind of an either/or thing. Either you pay for news, or you relegate yourself to getting your news from sources that care more about getting ad dollars than facts, or just random idiots on the internet (Hi, that’s me!) telling you whatever they feel like telling you that day. To me, that’s scary. I believe in expertisism. I believe that there should be vetting processes for who and how news is told because there is so much falseness out there. Who gets to be the judge, I have no idea. But it seems like eighty years ago there were news anchors that people trusted, that allowed us to have a common understanding of reality and truth. And it feels like that’s gone which just feels scary and chaotic to me. If there is no common sense of what truth or reality is, we are all living in our own little realities with our own little sets of facts. That’s fucking anarchy.
If I come down with an illness, I want to go to a doctor. Someone who has been vetted, studied in medical school, and has a high level of expertise in the area I need them to. I feel the same way about news. We have to have news organizations whose sole purpose is to find out the truth about the world so we can actually know what’s going on. While it’s been kind of exciting to see how social media has invited new people to the media world and democratized information in a certain sense, I think we can agree it’s been mostly bad. Like January 6th bad. We need real news, written and reported by real news reporters, not bought and paid for by giant corporations.
There are a million reasons people are feeling less inclined to pay for news these days. First and foremost, we’ve been taught to expect things to be free. My generation, Millennials, were the Napster generation. We thought it was fine to just not pay for music for a time (I pay for Spotify and Soundcloud now). News feels similar. At the beginning of internet times, news sources didn’t really know what to do and all their revenue came from print so they made their online versions free. So we got conditioned not to pay for it. Now that news organizations are realizing, “Hey, we still need money to do quality news reporting,” more and more are charging higher and higher rates for content. And understandably people feel like they can’t afford it because it hasn’t previously been part of their budgets.
Many people will use money as their excuse for not paying for news subscriptions. But will think nothing of spending hundreds of dollars for the combined costs of Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Peacock, Max, and so on. It’s not that paying for content is out of budget for most people, it’s that it’s just not a priority. And I’m not judging this - I don’t read as much as I’d like and I watch way more streaming TV than I should. I’m no better than anyone else when it comes to reading.
But I think there’s also something more going on. I think people are just feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. Todd, for example, lost his mother unexpectedly and at a young age in 2020. It was horrible and he’s still not really healed from the trauma of that combined with everything else that year. Soon after her death, he logged off Facebook forever and canceled his Times subscription. I can’t help but think his heart just couldn’t handle any more darkness - he’d seen enough in just the first month of 2020 to last him for years to come.
A lot of us are in similar grief-stricken situations, if perhaps not as life-changing and final as losing a parent. People have lost jobs. People have struggled financially. People have watched as loved ones battled cancer. People have lost friends, multiple friends, to suicide. People have looked on as the political, societal structure of our nation have become increasingly chaotic and nonsensical. I’ve dealt with all the aforementioned and I’m just one person - think about what that means for society at large. The amount of struggle everyone has been under has felt insurmountable. I can understand why people are feeling the need to shut off from the pain of the world.
This morning I opened up The Times on my laptop and the headline was about Aleksei Navalny’s death. Clearly he’s been murdered by Vladimir Putin. Thinking about Putin and the war in Ukraine definitely didn’t bring me joy. It just made me think about another conflict - the Israel-Hamas war. It made me think about Trump supporters saying they support Russia. It just took me to a dark place I didn’t feel like going.
In January, I kind of woke up and realized the last four years were the worst of my life and that they were over. That sounds negative, but it’s really happy feeling to feel the worst behind you (at least for now). Knowing that, however, has propelled me into self-preservation mode. I am doing everything in my power to express joy, to be healthy, to get my physical health back, and to spend time with people I care about. I’m simply not willing to not be happy anymore.
So I’ve stopped paying as much attention to the news. Previously, I’d spend most of my time at the gym listening to podcasts (my favorite is Left, Right, and Center from KCRW). But now I just listen to brainless pop music for my entire workout and I am feeling so much better. Typically, I listen to NPR all day. I have speakers all over both my LA bungalow and my Yosemite cabin that play KPCC all day long (sometimes I’ll turn on WNYC to switch things up - it feels kind of chic to be in the middle of the woods listening to a New York broadcast). But lately I’ve been shutting NPR off more and more. Listening to the news is A) depressing and B) distracting while I do creative work.
I still check out The Times every morning. And I’m still paying for a subscription. But I’m much happier knowing much less about what’s going on. The more I hear about wars, guns in America, conservatives going after trans kids and Latinos, the more powerless and irritated I feel. Knowing more just makes me feel shittier about the world. And right now the goal is joy above all else. Living it and sharing it.
But there’s a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. Plugging our ears and ignoring what’s going on can’t be the answer. It’s not going to end well - an uneducated society is not a civil society. And I do feel that we all have a civic responsibility to know what’s going on in our country and around the world. I consider myself a patriotic person. I am very proud of my country and all the incredible places and people within. And part of being a good American is knowing what’s happening in our communities, in our country generally, and around the world.
But at this point I just don’t want to. I just don’t want to know what’s going on because it all sucks. It’s all wars and people staring at the same information seeing something completely different (like a “stolen election”). How do we do this? How do we do what is right, educate ourselves, and act as good citizens? How do we do that while not falling into despair?
This is more a question than treatise on the current state of news. I’d like your ideas and your help. How do you deal with protecting your emotional state while also doing your civic duty of knowing what the fuck is happening out there? How do you observe the sorrows of the entire world without absorbing them?
How do we do this?
Orlando - what you and Todd and so many others feel is totally understandable. And you ask an excellent and really important question.
Here's my response (for what it's worth) - I'm pushing 60 and growing up in the S.F. Bay Area since the early 70s, I've seen and been through some sh*t: the Patty Hearst kidnapping and subsequent Stockholm Syndrome Terrorism; back-to-back - Jonestown AND the Milk/Moscone assassination (and subsequent rightful fury and horror at the Dan White verdict); assassination attempts on Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan; the assassination of John Lennon - and so on, and so on, and so on (I won't bore you any further with the entire list).
Things often seemed equally confusing, infuriating, terrifying, and dark (if not more so - we're far more inured to strange new sh*t these days than back then) . . . the difference is that it also wasn't raining down on you via the internet and/or social media - which is essentially "push" technology - like an information highway mudslide. You could "pull" down the news and information at a rate which worked best for your needs and ability to process the resulting feelings.
So that is how I deal with the current challenging times we continue to find ourselves in. I have sharply throttled back my Facebook; I quit Twitter cold turkey when Bond-villain-in-training, Elon Musk took it over; I eschew TikTok, Snapchat and pretty much all other social media platforms. Even when I am on Facebook - it's really only to catch up with the people in my life whom I already know and care about. I just can't go down the rabbit hole of doomscrolling any more.
BUT - I also am pleased to be a paid online subscriber to the NYT, Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and our local little paper up here in the Sierra foothills . . . because you're EXACTLY correct in that it's not just important, but CRUCIAL that we stay informed - and informed by experts (not by BS heresay and rumor-mongering on the socials).
I just pull down the news/information at a rate which allows me to take it in, process it, then formulate a response (vs. a kneejerk REACTION) and/or action plan. I find that this enables and empowers me to be in some semblance of control over this and not feel like this news onslaught is controlling me - AND I'm still getting vital information.
But, this may not meet everyone's individual needs and ability to absorb/process. IMMV and you gotta find what works for you . . . I just hope that smart, capable, caring people like Todd and yourself are able to at least tiptoe back into the fold of news recipients (if not junkies).
I think sometimes it’s easy to equate “feeling bad” with “doing something.” Reading about all the bad shit that’s happening and being upset about it feels virtuous, in the same way that telling everybody about your big plan to do X makes you feel prematurely accomplished. But if you’re not actually doing anything with that information, it just kind of turns into misery for misery’s sake, with a side helping of guilt that you’re not doing anything or helplessness because you don’t know what to do.
The news is so unrelentingly terrible right now that I think a lot of people have decided to hop off the misery train. It’s hard to know what to do—we can all go to city council meetings, but that’s not going to re-legalize abortion in Texas. I think it’s okay to evaluate your resources (material, emotional, or otherwise) and decide whether you’re able to take some kind of action or not. If you’re not, it’s okay to take a break from everything. Just find a progressive group whose ideals align with yours and follow their voting guide every election.