Becoming news-resilient
Becoming news-resilient
History, apparently, doesn’t believe in pacing itself these days. No sooner had it seemed as though Covid was finally beginning to slip into the past than Vladimir Putin began his invasion of Ukraine, killing thousands, displacing hundreds of thousands, and threatening the entire planet with his terrifying nuclear rhetoric.
I’ve no idea how any of this will unfold, of course. But there’s one prediction I feel confident in making: even if the pandemic and Putinism were to fade to nothing within weeks, the news cycle isn’t about to become less panic-inducing, less filled with existential threat. Which means that figuring out how to consume news sanely – how to keep your head, when everyone on social media is losing theirs – is only going to become an even more critical skill for living a composed and purposeful life.
As I’ve written before, alarming news is nothing new, but the central place the news has come to occupy in many people’s psychological worlds is certainly novel. Because of how digital media works – though also because the news developments themselves are legitimately huge – these global dramas start to feel like life’s centre of gravity, with the immediate worlds of family, job and neighborhood relegated to the periphery.
People sometimes misinterpret the point, so just to be clear: the global dramas obviously affect our daily lives – acutely and horrifyingly, if you’re in Kyiv today, but even if you live in Leeds or Louisville. And how we live our daily lives has an impact in the opposite direction, too, climate change being only the most prominent example.
But assuming you’re not reading this in an active war zone, it doesn’t follow that you need to mentally inhabit those stories, all day long. It doesn’t make you a better person – and it doesn’t make life any easier for Ukrainian refugees – to spend hour upon hour marinating in precisely those narratives over which you can exert the least influence.
In short: I think it really is OK to shift your centre of psychological gravity back from the news cycle to the world around you. The question is… how?
One response, popular in self-development circles, is renunication: just stop reading the news! But apart from being ethically dubious (is it really OK to check out entirely, just because a given crisis hasn’t reached your doorstep yet?) I’ve found this doesn’t work in practice as an antidote to anxiety. Unless you’re also going to renounce all contact with people who do follow the news, you’re inevitably going to pick up on developments like Putin’s nuclear order. And then you’ll probably end up with the additional worry that your self-imposed isolation means you’ll be the last to hear that World War Three has begun.
The opposite tactic is what you might call the self-care approach, typified by those articles offering lists of ways to be kind to yourself when the news is freaking you out. But these make an assumption I’m unwilling to buy into, and which smacks of emotional self-indulgence: that in the modern era, it’s just inevitable that otherwise extremely fortunate and comfortable people are going to spend large chunks of time wallowing in despair about world events – and that the best we can hope for is to remember to treat ourselves to hot baths and walks in the park.
I think there’s a third option, more realistic than renunciation and more ambitious than self-care: adjusting your default state, so that the news once again becomes something you dip into for a short while, then out of again – as opposed to a realm in which you spend most of your day, only sometimes managing to wrench back enough concentration to live your actual life.
The blogger David Cain has written eloquently of his longing to put the internet “back in a box in the basement”: not quitting it in some ostentatious act of techno-rejection, but using it, on his own terms, then stepping away from it afterwards, preferably by means of “a big mechanical switch to shut it all off when I’m done with it.” This, I’d say, should be our aspiration with the news as well: to check in on it a couple of times a day. To take any relevant concrete actions you can, such as donating to Ukraine. And then to step away and move on.
Some may argue that even this is too ambitious, in the age of the attention economy, but I disagree. Formulating a handful of not-too-rigid personal rules can make a big difference here. (In the last few weeks, I’ve had success with leaving my laptop plugged in in my home office, and my phone in the hallway when I’m home; only checking Twitter during a predetermined two-hour period each day; and deciding in advance how I’ll spend work breaks, so I don’t just slide back into news-checking.) Such tactics don’t make it effortless to avoid doom-scrolling. But they provide enough of a framework that at any given moment I’m either following them, or conscious of the fact that I’m failing to do so, which makes it easier to get back on the wagon.
It’s been common in recent days to see people complaining that it’s hard to get any work done, or to get on with ordinary life in general. But this may be the moment for a judicious measure of tough love. Perhaps you just need to get on with things anyway! If you wait, instead, for all the existential threats to pass, all the desperate human suffering to subside, you’ll be waiting forever.
So don’t wait. Not just because marinating in the news helps no-one, but because what you’ll be doing instead – meaningful work, keeping your community functioning, being a good-enough parent or a decent friend – that stuff actively does help. There’s something you’re here to do. And I highly doubt that it’s doomscrolling.
Πηγή: oliverburkeman.com
