Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

My biggest issue with 'not reading the news/social media', as so many have suggested, is that:

1) It feels irresponsible as a US Citizen. Especially with Trump as president. The corruption committed by the FCC chairman alone, that he nominated, feels like I should keep ahead of as a citizen. I got into politics after Microsoft tried to lobby the California government to ban copyleft software licenses like the GNU GPL.

2) There is good information valuable to me as a person or to my profession. It is easy to ignore CNN-a lot of it is click bait. Phoronix and Slashdot is another story. This post on 'Hacker News' is another good example. Yet it triggers the same dopamine release that gambling does-a random chance of getting something that may benefit you. But you are spending your time, instead of money, and instead of getting a lot of money, you get information you need to spend more time to act on in the future.

I wholeheartedly 100% agree with this.

As soon as I entered the workforce @ 21 I cut out 2 things from my diet, sugar and news.

This habit has compounded so much, not saying its been 100% perfect because I still read reddit, twitter (very selective following and blocking all outlets that end up on my TL) and HN (this place is a total bubble of smart, high IQ people, I enjoy the comments here, I don't get to interact with such smart people on a day to day).

Any interesting developments will filter through my social circle, someone will bring it up.

I stopped watching TV altogether, I stream the occasional show though.

Yeah I've definitely thought about this and share the concern. I think there is a distinction between news that addresses immediate issues, like the ones you mentioned, vs unfocused news consumption, which amounts to a distracting form of entertainment that masquerades as productivity or civic responsibility.

The former is largely necessary, but probably far less frequent than we think on average. The latter is what we ought to reconsider; it's the addictive version of news that we should probably swap for slower/deeper versions of information.

I know Schwartz argues for a hardline "no news" position. I think that any amount of reflection and discipline to minimize mindless news consumption under the guise of "staying informed" and replacing that with deeper thought is a net benefit, and one that people from any walk of life are capable of.

I guess the question of how to filter out the noise and only pay attention to salient issues is the real challenge. When I've experimented with this, I've often still heard about issues important to my various identity/interest groups through group chats with friends, in-person conversations, even just passing by newstands and seeing headlines. This doesn't seem like a satisfyingly reliable solution, but like Schwartz mentions, it's kinda surprising how much current info we absorb even when not explicitly reading the news.

> Trying to be happy all the time is overrated.

Completely agree.

“[B]y restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.

I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.”

—Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

I loved that the Onion article, thanks for sharing it!

I find myself doing that as well. To my taste, the discussion is much more valuable than the article. In fact, for most cases, I see the article as simply a prompt for discussion with very little valuable insight found in the article itself.