Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once stumbled upon the idea of calculating the signal to noise ration of "news". Say you consume 30 pieces of "news" a day, you are roughly at 10k "news" pieces a year. How many of those influence a decision you make. Like which job to take, whom to propose to, where to move. The author, Hans Rosling by the way, showed with this little thought experiment, how little signal for our personal lives and our important d…
The big one is voting, of course. It's not like following international politics will impact what firmness mattress I will buy.
I tend to prefer "just in time" and "up to date" research to "just in case" spamming my brain with noise.
But I also know how easy it is for me to fall down the rabbit hole of being back in the dopamine inducing social or news streams. I actively had to purge social apps from my phone(s) and on my private phone setup a launcher, that only shows a few selected apps as text names. No icons, no nothing - especially no badges and notifications for missed mails/messages.
This is currently the only way for me to battle these (at least to me) massively addictive systems.