HOORAY! I HAVE REACHED THE ninetieth post! Thrilled. Ten more and then I'll reach "100 days of writing." Wow. I don't know what to say. It was supposed to be a three-and-a-half month writing project. Now, since the first post it has been more than three and a half years. Well, anyway, that's a good sign. In this post, I want to write about one scientifically-proven secret to make your life better: Stop reading news -- all of the regular ones.
Honestly, I disdain regular news even before I learned about why they're so bad for all of us. It all began, simply, when I realized two things from reading a feed on my Facebook feed (yes, I used to have a Facebook page but I closed it almost a year ago). First, I realized that most of the news are not relevant to me at all.
Not only did they make me feel angry, but they also made me feel as though I knew more about the world than I actually did. This was quite dangerous. News often made me want to have a heated debate with another dilettante. The world is very a complex place, and reading a post or two, needless to say, won't make me an expert on that subject. Second, I realized, also, that not all my Facebook "friends" were living the life they posted on their walls.
No, Danny didn't drink pink campaign on ice for lunch. Chen did not attend an expensive horse- riding lessons every other day as the frequently of the posts tended to suggest. And, no, no, Peter wasn't traveling to Europe every weekend. All those photos from Venice were actually taken a while back.
These were, as I wrote about before, all highly "curated mythologies" that, for one, made me feel like my life sucked big time compared to these guys', and, next, really, did any of these really made me feel good about anything at all? And, yes, so, for the past year, I have neither watched nor read any of them. By regular news, I mean uncurated news that come to you in forms of news report or newspapers.
I still read about stuff I like (i.e., curated news), such as, technology (especially gadget), innovation and design, literary world, environment, health science, and so on. But none of these are "urgent" in the sense of regular news.
For instance, I didn't have to know that the Japanese author Haruki Murakami just published a new book Man Without Women (as I probably wouldn't have time to read it until a year from now any way) and the urgency of this news would probably not, in any way, affect or have any impact on my livelihood. P.S.
Truth be told: I didn't know about the boys in the cave until they had already gotten out, after my mother had told me while I was driving her to do a grocery shopping. I knew who won the World Cup because I hung out with a group of good friends to watch the game; otherwise I probably still would not have any idea that France took back the trophy.
The best-selling author and psychology professor Steven Pinker has made this very point in two of his great works: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and recently, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker argues that the view we see the world is manipulated by the media. As Pinker puts it, and I am paraphrasing here, "a plane that is safely landing doesn't make an exciting news, whereas a plane that is crashing does." That's true.
And as t he American literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall also argues in Storytelling Animals: How Stories Make Us Humans that we are wired to want more than just a happy-ending story. We're wired to hear about troubles, difficulties, and calamities of others. As and news deliver these in forms of stories, they feed right into both the conscious and subconscious of our being.
[gallery ids="4771,4772" type="rectangular"] Using Daniel Kanehman and Amos Tversky's study of heuristics, Pinker argues that we see the world through a particular lens that the media gives us. Many of us think that flying is unsafe because the media reports only about plane crashes, when flying is actually the safest form of traveling.
It may have been faith that after reading both of Pinker's books, I almost immediately encountered Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly, which is a gem of a book in which he provides a series of concise and powerful tools and tricks on how to be much more clearer in the way we think. Make no mistake: Thinking clearly is important!
[gallery ids="4773,4774" type="rectangular"] For instance, Rolf Dobelli quotes Kanehman and Tversky's theory of heuristics to remind us of how easy it is for us to think that something is abundant when it is actually a one-of-a- kind just because the way that the story is told -- in other words, how we mistake "representativeness" for statistics.
Dobelli argues that news are to be avoided because: Psychologically speaking, our brain reacts disproportionately to "sensational information" (e.g., plane crash, accident, shooting, death) and therefore tend to generalize illogically; Most of the time, reported news are irrelevant (i.e., how many times what we learn from television or newspaper really change your life for the better?); and, finally, News are meant to be consumed by those who do not have anything else better to do, and for this very reason the media are making it very addictive to them so that they would waste even more time on the news.
In The Art of Thinking Clearly, he wrote the following challenge: Three years ago, I began an experiment. I stopped reading and listening to the news. I canceled all newspaper and magazine subscriptions. Television and radio were disposed of. I deleted the news apps from my iPhone. I didn't touch a single free newspaper and deliberately looked the other way when someone on a plane tried to offer me any such reading material. The first weeks were hard. Very hard. I was constantly afraid of missing something.
But after a while, I had a new outlook. The result after three years: clearer thoughts, more valuable insights, better decisions, and much more time. And the best thing? I haven't missed anything important. My social network—not Facebook, the one that exists in the real world consisting of flesh-and-blood friends and acquaintances—works as a news filter and keeps me in the loop. Also, in my own experience, I have also learned (the hard way) that not all journalists are responsible.
Once upon a time, I naively thought that journalists were experts (in reporting), who only wanted to write about something that would benefit the public -- whether that be facts or opinions. I was totally wrong. Not all journalists are responsible. Irresponsible journalists jump at any "news" that they could find.
They take gossips, scandals, rumors as "gold." When asked, they would respond, "these are smoke that would lead to fire." Only if they knew anything at all about ethics, they'd realize that such a saying is wrong in many counts. First, by reporting, they are likely to the one who fan the smoke. "Self fulfilling prophecy" for one, is common, in news reporting. Researches have shown that stock market don't do well when pundits predict that the market is likely to slow down. Why? Because the pundits are right? No.
It's because those who buy and sell in the stock market read the news and then decide not to invest! That's crazy, isn't it? Many times, too. public opinion leads to the public's thinking that someone is right or wrong -- the media's playing the role of a courthouse itself. These irresponsible journalists did not care about how their reportage may hurt the reputation of the innocent. These irresponsible journalists have torn families apart.
These irresponsible journalists are responsible for deaths of many whose small communities prejudged them based on the news and not the facts. They only care about having some "juicy" news to report so that they can cash their monthly salary cheque. There was no sense of human decency and these irresponsible journalists clearly do not have any sense of empathy let alone karma -- that one day someone may do the same thing to them.
All of us have learned from how the infamous irresponsible and untrue Rolling Stone reports had almost brought down the entire University of Virginia. The report was sensationally written but not true. Luckily, responsible journalists helped to point out countless holes in that report and saved the innocent from being victims of irresponsible journalism.
The magazine Rolling Stone had to issued a note to its readers, in which it apologized for the "flawed story." At the end, Rolling Stone had to pay US$1.65 million for its bad journalism that caused a lot of people a lot of trouble. There're countless examples of this kind of irresponsible journalism. Just because you can write and post, with a platform to reach more people than usual, you should not call yourself a journalist.
So, here are my own results after a year without reading, watching, consuming any uncurated news. I didn't realize how time- consuming reading news were. Once I began to read one, I would want to go on to the next, and then the next, and then the next. Until I realized that the pot at the stove was burning. It's addictive. So, by shutting myself completely off from social media and regular news, I have gained approximately 3 hours a day of my time back.
How have I been using these extra hours a day? I have been using them to do what I enjoy, such as reading things I have always wanted to read but hadn't have time, writing (this blog include), listening to audiobooks, and, even, simply sleeping; I feel much more clam. I also didn't realize how anxious it was, once upon a time, when knowing the talk of the town was a marker of intelligence.
Being able to unchain myself completely from this myth that intelligent people know what's going on in the world, I have gained the freedom to focus the attention on myself. On what I would like to spend my time on. And on how I want my emotional health to be; As Pinker writes, I see the world differently. The world isn't such a bad place as I thought it was before #deletefacebook and ditching all regular news.
The word is actually quite safe -- and it really is, we're living in the most peaceful time in the history of mankind. I mean, I wouldn't just go out at night and walk around anywhere just to test this hypothesis. Let's say that the world is a safe place for those who is conscious of its possible flaws.
I think the media had, for the longest time, given me the impression that, yes we're going to die, but we're all going to die in a epic painful manner because "we're all monsters and animals." Pinker also writes about how media and journalism love to project deaths, rapes, pains -- pretty much all forms of human indecencies. Actually, not reading the news has allowed me to see the world differently. I pet cats and dogs when I see them on the street. Greet my neighbors. Smile at passersby.
I could think of them as one of those criminals-in-disguised, but, no, that's not how I'd like to see them, and see the world; As Dobelli writes, I have not missed anything important: My "real world" social network" works as a perfect news filter and keeps me in the loop." My mother (who also doesn't like to consume a lot of news), for instance, would tell me about what's going on in the neighborhood, such as an opening of a new restaurant, and so on.
Any posts about scheduled maintenance of my building would be posted in the elevator (so I know when to move my car from the car park). There're always ways of knowing things. I do feel regret that I didn't know about the boys in the cave until they got out. It would be nice to know about them. It's, perhaps, I was in a non-English speaking country during that time; so, all news were just noise to me.
But, seriously, would knowing or not knowing about them make my life any better or worse?
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