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Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

theatlantic.com

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Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#61

Post by oblib »

We have to learn to compartmentalize political news and keep it separated from our personal life.

And we have to be honest with ourselves about our personal life. For many of us, and it's probably fair to say most of us here on HN, life is pretty good. But we have to put that statement in perspective to see it that way. Where I live, in the Ozarks, life 100 years ago was pretty tough and even compared to when and where I grew up life is pretty good here right now.

In fact it's pretty amazing. Stuff I find here on HN amazes me almost daily.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#62

Post by mountainb »

fab1an wrote: post #46

I've been trying to cut news and social media out of my daily habits as much as possible, and am attempting to replace it with reading books whenever possible. It sure isn't easy, but I feel significantly more productive, healthier, happier and overall more human on days where this works particularly well. What helps is to not have the phone in your bedroom and charge iit elsewhere instead - replace it with a Kindle…

You can read one book that recaps the events of multiple years in a fraction of the time that it takes to consume the news daily in fragment form, with the bonus that it comes with appropriate context. It is also easier to avoid sensational gore or celebrity tales that are for the most part meaningless (or the opposite if that is one's proclivity).

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#63

Post by kabdib »

I put myself into a news bubble about six weeks ago. I still very occasionally read local news and a mainstream front page (say, every few days), which seems sufficient to let me know what's going on in broad terms. Stuff leaks into the bubble (e.g., via HN) but the point is not to be totally isolated, just not to get caught in hours-long doom spirals.

I've given money to the campaigns that are going to get money from me. I voted yesterday (which answered the question, "are we going to get our mail-in ballots on time?"). I'm done.

As a consequence I'm getting more done and I'm happier. I'm reading a lot more books.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#65

Post by yashap »

This point rings strongly true to me. I have a number of members of friends/family who have become very difficult to be around, because they’ve become so intense/constantly outraged about politics, even if they are on the same end of the political spectrum as me:

> The research doesn’t reveal precisely why we tend to dislike overly political people, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that constant foam-flecked political outrage makes one quite tedious. It also impedes our ability to think clearly: At least one experiment has shown that people become less accurate in interpreting data when the data concern something politically polarizing.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#66

Post by bazeblackwood »

> They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all.

This is some very fancy footwork to leave out some key information. The study found that those watching only Fox News and MSNBC answered worse than people who watch no news programs at all. As far as I can tell, this latter group doesn't exclude people who read newspapers, blogs, political websites, etc. Meanwhile, all of the viewers of other programs/networks (NPR, Daily Show, CNN, etc.) score higher than average, so saying "often less knowledgable" kind of buries the lede if you ask me, which is that some "partisan" viewers are in fact, much more informed than others. Also, since the quiz the survey participants answered was split into domestic and international topics, FOX is the only network whose viewers consistently failed both on exceeding the average number of correct questions than achieved by "no news" viewers—MSNBC at least seems to be informing their viewers on domestic issues better than that baseline.

http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/final.pdf

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#67

Post by nharada »

kabdib wrote: post #63

I put myself into a news bubble about six weeks ago. I still very occasionally read local news and a mainstream front page (say, every few days), which seems sufficient to let me know what's going on in broad terms. Stuff leaks into the bubble (e.g., via HN) but the point is not to be totally isolated, just not to get caught in hours-long doom spirals. I've given money to the campaigns that are going to get money fro…

Same, my new routine is I receive a daily news briefing email in the morning and read that, and then don't read/watch any other news for the rest of the day. I feel relatively informed but no longer feel as depressed as when I would check the front page of news sites every hour.

The other plus side to this is that the whiplash of rapidly developing news is never an issue. Previously the news headlines would speculate on new developments so frequently that you felt like you were always behind on what was current, but truthfully most news can wait 24 hours (and if it can't it's probably an emergency).

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#69

Post by zarkov99 »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
verroq wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won’t call some of these reporters journalists, they are more like activists. They aren’t interested in keeping society informed, they just want to push their agenda.

The only worthwhile journalism is activism. Discomfort the powerful. Unfortunately it's dangerous to be too good at this, see Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Sorry, that is exactly the attitude that got us into the mess we are in. I for one care very little for activists doing journalism. Just tell people the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as best as you can ascertain it and let them make their own choices.

Re: Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

#70

Post by aklemm »

Read the news with a goal in mind: understand civic life. My 20+ years of reading news daily has brought me a personal understanding of the world, and it’s way better than when I started out in my teens ignorant, confused, and unmoored.

I know what’s most important to me now, and I know how to participate in those issues.

Of course, there are many news outlets that don’t offer much in terms of better understanding the world, so avoid those.

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