How much news is too much news?
Navigating our temporarily optional dystopia.
1.
Ours is a very peculiar slide into authoritarianism.
On the one hand, the current regime’s offenses against humanity, democracy, and civilized society itself are grievous, real, and set to worsen. To take but one example of hundreds, as you read these words, at least 56,000 people are in ICE detention, the vast majority of whom have either no criminal convictions (30%) or only minor criminal offenses like speeding tickets or, in one case, fishing without a license (40%). And ICE’s budget is set to grow over 300% next year.
On the other hand, perhaps a majority of Americans are doing just fine — for now, anyway. Life goes on more or less as normal. The ICE raids aren’t targeting me, right? I’m not in danger of losing Medicaid. True, the impacts aren’t zero: in my case, close colleagues at Emory and Harvard have lost funding, and I’ve been caught up in that too. I’ve also had some invitations rescinded by cowardly organizations. But that’s hardly the acute suffering others are experiencing. If I tune out the news, I can ignore what’s happening. Most of my anxiety is optional.
This is extremely weird.
Obviously, it’s also extremely (1) privileged/lucky/self-centered and (2) temporary. It’s morally repugnant to only care about one’s own well-being when others are suffering to such an extent. It’s also imprudent: I’m one antisemitic or homophobic incident away from tragedy, and one weather pattern away from being like my friends in L.A. or Asheville. And who knows, maybe the government will start coming for queer liberal rabbis who write anti-Trump Substacks. Stuff can get real very, very quickly. As bad as things are right now, this may be the calm before the storm.
But at this exact moment, I’m guessing at least half of America is in a similar position to mine. We can tune out the horrors if we want to. Do we want to? How ought we balance self-care and civic responsibility (or self-interested prudence)? Too much news consumption, we go mad; too little, we are complicit. So how much news is too much news, and how much is too little?
2.
While I do have some answers to that question, I’m most interested in how we answer it, which in my case has more to do with subjective emotional intuitions than objective moral reasoning.
On the More News side, I think it’s gross to be so self-centered and devoid of empathy as to simply “tune out” the suffering of others, particularly those who are marginalized, demonized, or invisibilized by the dominant groups in our society. Whether it impacts me directly or not is secondary; the point, as pretty much every religion on the planet teaches, is to care about other people.
On the Less News side, however, I also know from experience that too much marinating in the soup of the polycrisis renders me less able, not more able, to help. More is not more, and increasing my misery is not helping anyone. There have been days in the past few weeks when I’ve felt despair, when I’ve regretted my decision to bring a child into this century. On those days, wisdom has looked like unplugging from the internet.
Both of these impulses — toward the news and away from it — are felt senses, not reasoned conclusions. Yes, there are articulable reasons why democratic societies need an informed, engaged citizenry. And I believe that to be true. But if I look inward, I see that my motivations are more emotive. I feel itchy if I’m not aware of what’s going on in the world, and gross, to repeat that word, if I’m knowingly turning away from injustice. And I feel overwhelmed and despondent if I'm doomscrolling too much. All of these are embodied emotions, not cognitive principles.
Again,I know full well that what the Stephen Millers of the world want is for us to turn away. Here’s a great interview excerpt with Sandor Lederer, founder of K-Monitor, a pro-democracy NGO based in Hungary:
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As Lederer notes, there are great restaurants and cultural events in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. If you don’t pay too much attention to politics, you can lead a pretty good life. Which is exactly what the authoritarians want you to do.
I agree with that analysis, but my real response to the dynamic it described is based on emotion. Fuck those bastards, I say to myself. I’m not going to do what they want. I have no moral high ground here; these things just piss me off. And I know people who are just as pissed off by the latest pop culture drama of who dissed who, or the latest sports news, or the injustice of a wrong vote on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Obviously, while I’m not here to judge anyone’s choices about where to devote their attention, I do think there’s more at stake in the fate of American democracy than in these other topics. But I can see the other side, too. Politics is always a mess, after all, and has been for millennia. Is staying informed a matter of wisdom, or folly? Maybe following the “affairs of kings and princes,” as the Buddha disparagingly put it, is a waste of time that would be better spent on spiritual practice, art practice, relationships, food, or (not according to the Buddha) culture. Maybe, instead of high-minded civic duty, I’m acting out of habit, outrage, offense, revulsion, and a little bit of hope and love.
Sure, moral reasoning and moral intuition are not wholly separate from one another. But if marinating in the news is just a matter of personal preference, then I should definitely do less of it, because it does often make me miserable, or at least recognize the mixture of motivations that exist in any particular moment. That’s the first step, anyway.
3.
The easiest news consumption to cut out is the part that’s due to habit. Probably a hundred times this week, I’ve noticed an itch to click on a news site out of boredom, or resistance to work, or avoidance. Those itches, I’m trying to leave unscratched. There are plenty of alternatives to the rage-inducing, time-wasting distractions of online news: getting up and stretching, reading a book, literally anything is better. Here, the delusion that “I must find out what is happening” is at its most transparent.
It’s also possible to triage one’s attention. As I wrote about a few months ago, “articulation helps.” The overwhelm is, itself, overwhelming; I’ve noticed an almost frantic drive to keep up with the insanity, which itself wastes time and energy. So it can be wise to choose two or three issues to focus on, and mostly ignore the rest. There are plenty to choose from: the war on liberal society (science, academia, the media, the legal establishment) on the part of post-liberals, theocrats, nationalists, and gravely mistaken futurists; the ICE gestapo that is arresting innocent people, jailing, torturing, and deporting them without due process, with children my daughter’s age being zip-tied on the street and forced to defend themselves in court; the sheer quantity of lies, conspiracy theorizing, and misinformation about everything from immigration (immigrants commit crimes at half the rate of citizens) to election results, crowd sizes to Covid; the horrors in Gaza and the insane ‘discourse’ around Israel, Israel/Palestine, and antisemitism; the Supreme Court; the sneaky attacks on voting rights, election security (the real kind), school funding, and other subjects that don’t make the news that much; the RFK sideshow, soon to kill hundreds of thousands of people by gutting research, inventing fake statistics, firing experts and replacing them with charlatans; climate suicide, with a side-dish of glee on the part of the bad guys; killing millions of people by pulling the plug on foreign aid and US health programs (including Medicaid); and all of it with a level of vulgarity, stupidity, meanness, and abject corruption never before seen in American government.
What is the point of that exercise? There are two of them. First, I always feel better when I write these lists, as if articulating and disaggregating the evil makes it somehow more finite. If I’ve tidied the mind, I feel better, and there’s less of a temptation to get updated all the time, which is literally crazy-making. And second, I can pick two or three issues to continue to follow, and leave the rest to other informed citizens.
Lastly, over the years, I’ve written several guides to sane news consumption with titles like “How to Survive the News” and even, back in November, “How to Survive the Next Week.” In fact, googling these pieces to get the link, I have just discovered that Google’s AI has conveniently summarized my advice:
That’s weird (there’s a longer version available too) though also not inaccurate. Paying attention to your mood, body, and mind is really helpful in deciding whether it’s really wise to click that link or post that comment. I do it sometimes, fail other times. Allowing the range of your emotions to exist without the need to repress or express them — also helpful. And Finding the Others — also good. Thanks, Google.
But I want to conclude with where I am right now, not where I was when I wrote those things a couple of years ago. And where I am is a lot darker.
4.
There is almost no good news right now, other than the possibility that this period of extremely bad news might somehow come to an end in sixteen months. Things are bad, they’re set to get much worse, and at least a third of the country loves it. While I appreciate the work of journalists emphasizing the positive developments that are taking place, that enterprise, for me, is a slippery slope toward toxic positivity. I would rather feel the shittiness.
At the same time, are things worse now than during the War of 1812, the Chmielnicki Massacres, or the Black Plague? Probably not. Are the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion any different now than in the period of warring states in which the Buddha lived, when sixteen Mahajanapadas were in near constant battle with one another? They are not. This is just how human beings are, and, like Frodo Baggins, we’re unlucky to be living through this period of regression and repression.
Pop culture associates religion, spiritual practice, and mindfulness with feeling good — with happiness in its ordinary meaning. But in fact, these practices are oriented around a very different kind of happiness, which often coexists with profound sadness, and which is primarily about a fundamental acceptance of the extreme shittiness intrinsic to the human condition. That is the “happiness that does not depend on conditions.” That, as Whitney Houston sang, it’s not right but it’s okay — or at least, I’m basically okay, even if things are dark.
What did you expect, human? You thought things were going to work out for the best? There’s plenty of goodness, joy, love, holiness, and delight in the world — but things are often quite horrible. This is how life is.
I’ve also taken comfort in the knowledge of un-knowledge. Maybe AI will kill us (or, if Elon Musk has his way, turn us into holocaust deniers), or maybe it will save us. Ditto with psychedelics. Maybe geoengineering will save us from climate disaster. Maybe this horrifying paroxysm of white Christian Nationalism, and the immense catastrophe it is soon to bring about, will be a cathartic last gasp of old ways of thinking and being. Maybe the dialectic is working itself out right now in some inscrutable way that will eventually come to some kind of synthesis.
Or maybe the world my daughter will live in will be an unremitting hellscape. I’m talking about radical epistemic humility here. The stakes are high, and so is the uncertainty.
Finally, I take a kind of comfort in knowing that how I act is more important than how I feel. It’s okay to feel like shit under these circumstances. More poetically, the wonderful teacher Joanna Macy, who incidentally has just entered hospice care, once said:
This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.
That is such a relief to remember. It’s okay to feel this pain. It’s only not okay to pour it out on other human beings. We only have to be kind, to ourselves and to others. When my despair spills out into bad partnering or bad parenting, it’s time to snap the hell out of it and remember that, whatever happens, the right thing to do is show up with love and presence and not be a dick. As Ram Dass said (in a passage frequently misquoted):
I’ve been asked many times whether this is the Aquarian age and it’s all just beginning, or if this is Armageddon and this is the end, and I have to admit I don’t know. The way I’ve usually copped out in dealing with it is saying, “Whichever way it goes, my work is the same. My work is to quiet my mind and open my heart and relieve suffering wherever I find it.” That seems to be what my life is about, and it doesn’t matter which it is — it’s the beginning of everything or the end of everything — regardless, that’s still what I gotta do.
In times like these, the point of life is not to be happy; it’s to be compassionate.
And from that standpoint, it’s easy to know when I’m consuming too much news. It’s when I’m being unkind to others. That’s a surprisingly simple answer, and in the face of so much cruelty and ignorance, it’s even a maxim of resistance.
Two provocative pieces on petro-masculinity this week, one by Paul Krugman entitled “Real Men Burn Stuff” and another by Annabelle Lukin. This is fascinating and one of the better explanations of our fossil-fuel-fueled mass suicide I know of.
If you’re ready for more horrible news, please read The Status Kuo ‘s horrific summary of what inmates in the El Salvador concentration camp/death camp are experiencing right now. It may just be my moral intuition, but I think we all need to wake the hell up to what is going on.
Thank you sincerely for your support. I hope this week’s newsletter prompts a bit of reflection and sanity-making for you, as it did for me.
Thank you for once again articulating so well how to deal with the political and personal issues facing us now. Much appreciated.
Sooooo helpful!