Cold Turkey: Quitting the 24 News Cycle
Or how to add an hour to your day
Like a movie so bad you get up and walk out of the theater in the middle of it, after the election a month ago I vowed to stop reading the news. A little to my surprise, I have actually followed through and haven't read the news since then. The change this has brought about in my psyche has been every bit as profound as quitting smoking was a few years ago.
I had been a news junkie for a long time. My delivery form for news in recent years was primarily reading a long list of websites that would start with "newspapers" but then follow the ever-flowing trail of links to dozens of other sites, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, magazines, etc. The all-time height of my media consumption may have been during the Mueller investigation years of 2017-2019 or so, which now feel so distant and quaint. It's been a long time since "the news" was a paper-based product, something that you read once and then tossed in the garbage or maybe used to get the fireplace going. Reading the news never took very long because once you had read the front page, there wasn't much more to it. Of course, news has evolved from the newspaper to the digital doomscroll, no longer a finite bundle of paper delivered to your doorstep; it is an infinite and ever-present thing.
I know that on some level this abstaining from the news is a form of cowardice. Perhaps. However, when I weigh in the balance the quality of my own life which I have a lot of control over, and the rise of authoritarianism in America, which I have very little control over, it seems fair to me, to choose to live my best life. Maybe doomscrolling is like alcohol, and some people can handle it just fine while others will find that any amount of booze inevitably leads into a ditch?
When you are a smoker, the next cigarette is always there at the back of your mind. Your nervous system has a built-in alarm clock that is constantly counting how many minutes since your last drag, and slowly ratcheting up the signal from body to brain that soon it will be mandatory to have your next cigarette. This relentless pendulum of desire that can only be reset but never quenched becomes the all-pervading background music to every waking moment. If you told me when I was a heavy smoker that I could one day be completely free of the desire of to smoke, it would seem hard to imagine. But here I am, I haven't smoked in a couple years, and I doubt I ever will be foolish enough to start again. Saying that makes me feel lucky, fortunate, thankful—because having experienced both sides of the tracks, I can say with absolute clarity that I am now in the better of the two camps.
I haven't read the news in about a month. For the first couple weeks, it felt like a struggle. At first I kept having moments in the evenings where I found I didn't know what to do with myself. (Anyone who has quit smoking will recognize that feeling.) There were stretches of 5-10 minutes here and there where a natural curiosity would have normally motivated me to check the news. It simply felt weird not to. It turns out that maybe the biggest piece of addiction is simply force of habit; there are moments, times, situations, where you have to re-learn what to do with yourself.
For me, and I suspect for many people, there is just a time of day, and a state of mind, where we have trained ourselves to check the news. I even found myself, a few different times, sitting down at my laptop and starting to enter the address of a news site and then stopping myself. Instead, I stuck with it, and after a few weeks, new habits started to form. I wish I could say that some super healthy habits took the place of the news, but it really hasn't been anything so specific, a few walks, some Netflix, some paperback books, nothing in particular. I do plan to invest some of the time that I formerly would have spent on reading the news on learning Spanish as a second language.
The really interesting thing is what I don't feel. The daily news had become a constant, never-ending, fascinating, addictive anxiety. I feel lighter, as though a tremendous oppressive weight has dropped from my shoulders. Life has become more spacious. It's only now, having gotten enough space from it, that I can see it for what it was. While I was addicted to the 24-hour news cycle, it felt important, necessary. Much like my next cigarette it was impossible to imagine life without it.
Since giving up on the news I simply have less anxiety. I feel palpably lighter and more at ease. I guess I had become so used to the ever-present worry about what was happening politically that I had gotten used to it. It was constantly weighing on me, giving me something to worry about, the next outrage, the chronic calamity. And now, I feel free of it, in a way that while I was following the daily news cycle, I think would have been pretty hard for me to even imagine, because it is not anything really, it is an absence. It is the empty, spacious, absence of anxiety— that ultimately is closer to the way I want to live.