Giving up reading news will make us happier

Typically, direct action isn't what the people advocating that I watch the news as a form of checking my privilege seem to be advocating, but that might be my own personal bias and merely anecdotal.

Maybe for the HN crowd, but my observation about the populace at large does not agree with this.

A lot of what upsets people is a narrative they have in their minds about the world, and mostly that narrative is shaped by the media in some form or other (pundits, talk shows, etc). People react to news events, but it is the underlying narrative that defines their reactions. Once a narrative is stuck in you head, you become partially blind. News items that don't fit the narrative often are not processed and forgotten quickly. News items that do fit are remembered and repeated for years.

Rarely do I find someone who has formed relatively independent opinions about the stuff they read/see in the news. Rarely do they perform any kind of critical thinking. These holes in their knowledge are easily exposed when they talk to a neutral party who does not follow the news and knows little about the subject. That party doesn't have a narrative, so he will quickly come up with clarifying questions that throw the average news reader off.

So while on the surface political policy seems what people are upset about, it really isn't.

>Further, resistance to propaganda and misinformation is not an attribute of mentality. It's a combination of learned skills and _context_.

I agree that it takes a lot of learned skills and context. I disagree with the next statement:

>By yielding all current contextual information, you are severely damaging your ability to process current events.

I find the moderately informed are always the most misinformed. I find the ones who actively do not read the news, while still uninformed, are generally not misinformed.

Now some people will develop the skills to analyze the news well. They will always be a small minority. Encouraging people to read the news and to try to think critically may fail more than simply disengaging. I often tell my friends that the one lesson I learned while being a news junkie was that unless your goal is to understand as much of the news as possible (including how it is curated, etc), you're better off enjoying life instead. Just trying to stay up to date with the news so you don't feel out of touch will position you poorly.

If you do nothing, you did nothing. There is no strategic advantage to waiting forever for the perfect opportunity. Nor is that really how politics in my government works. It's by design an incremental process.

and it's reasonable to want to keep your ears perked up for the longer-term, slow moving and large threats via news (as you do with the economist & hn).

by my estimation, the more immediate existential threat (to americans at least) is not terrorism or foreign governments or even guns or climate change (although we shouldn't lose sight of those things), but rather the economic destabilization brought on by the aggregation of power in large institutions.

the smaller the person is relative to the institution, the more disempowered that individual will feel. let's favor smaller organizations, whether government or business. let's let what's happening immediately around us be the meaning we make of our lives. celebrate local achievements but leave celebrity to entertainment.

we can engage in the local while monitoring the global, without pulling our hair out over it.

Up to date reports about hurricane Irma's path.

Did I do it? Did I just when the internet?