As someone who used to constantly be bombarded with news, I can say from personal experience that giving up news has an incredibly positive effect on my life. Instead of spending hours consuming news, I now have more time for the things that are really important to me.
I think it’s important to realize that the time we spend on news consumption often doesn’t really get us anywhere. Most news revolves around things we can’t change and that happen with or without us.
90 percent of news is meaningless garbage - that feeds our FOMO
Whether Foreign Minister A meets with Foreign Minister B is irrelevant to me, and in a week no one will remember it anyway. I give up all news - whether on the radio, television, newspapers or the internet. Even without minute-by-minute reports, I know how terrible the war in Ukraine is - because war is always horrific. Whether the front line has shifted by a few meters is irrelevant to me. It won’t end the war and I have no influence on it whatsoever. If a (hopefully soon) peace is to be expected, I’ll find out anyway. 90 percent of all news is uninteresting, unimportant and time-wasting garbage and meaningless filler for broadcasts, internet and newspaper pages. The best example of this is the reporting on “UFOs” in the USA, where there is apparently serious speculation about extraterrestrials.
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The news makers naturally also play on the ubiquitous FOMO (Fear of missing out). We are supposed to constantly feel like we’re missing something. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter & Co. strike the same chord - from which I emancipated myself long ago.
One shouldn’t forget that the business model of newspapers is the sale of advertisements. The more undemanding and sensationalist these contents are, the more readers I reach with them. The business model of television is also not entertainment, but advertising. The program is planned around the advertising and only needs to be just good enough that the respective target group doesn’t immediately switch off. Avalanches of content that bring us absolutely nothing, but steal valuable time. The daily status of gas storage levels. The ups and downs of the stock market are equally unimportant for long-term thinking investors.
The contents of the regional rag even belong to the most unimportant news. Whether a driver with a blood alcohol level of 2.8 was caught in the neighboring village or a house burned down 10 km away is not important, unless it was someone close to us. If that were the case, we would find out without the regional newspaper or regional radio anyway.
I grant every YouTuber, blogger and magazine the income generated by advertising to finance the offering. The prerequisite, however, is that I receive useful content in return. There is also advertising on fricklr and I too strive to offer really useful and individual content.
I find out that the bypass road is closed due to renovation work via Google Maps in my car or through the grumbling of friends and colleagues. However, I have one big advantage, because I’ve never been interested in sports, so I don’t need reports and results on it anyway.
You should completely avoid the comments under the news. Between the troll armies that are supposed to manipulate our opinion, you mainly find stupidity, stubbornness, dogmas and a lot of hate.
Using the freed-up time differently and sensibly
Now I block out all news sources and simply do something else in that time. 15 minutes of practicing guitar brings me more than 15 minutes of the evening news. Moreover, it relaxes me, and my guitar playing improves without great effort or additional time expenditure. In this time, I can also write a blog article or take photos for it. That brings me, and perhaps you too, much more. But that’s often easier said than done, because the constant bombardment with news takes place everywhere. No radio presenter who doesn’t get carried away with a statement on world events between two songs or spread some unimportant gossip.
Instead, I now limit myself to reading really relevant news and content with which I can expand my professional knowledge and which I need for my work and fricklr. I radically cleaned up my feed reader some time ago. There is now a folder “Essentials” in which the feeds are found that offer me the most value and have already brought many new topics and insights.
One thing I was able to do with the time gained by giving up news was to expand my knowledge of the Python programming language. This had been a goal of mine for a long time, but I never had enough time for it - or so I thought. Now that I no longer let myself be distracted by unnecessary news, I was able to concentrate on learning Python. The nice thing about it is that I can now do this quite relaxed without a direct goal - I simply repurposed the time I would have wasted with news.
I have completely banished general news from the feed reader and summarized all other topics into topic groups with their own folders. I can then selectively choose these when I feel like it - or simply check them off unread.
I keep a log of the news that still reaches me
I document all the general news that has still reached me in a file. When did I hear which news from whom. Are they important to me and do they change anything in my life? I can already say: So far, there hasn’t been a single report that I needed to know.
It would also be completely sufficient if I read a summary of the past week. There is, for example, the weekly review of Deutschlandfunk or the Tagesschau for this.
The effect on my life
Without the constant flood of news, the stress level automatically decreases. Whether we want to or not: we consciously or unconsciously think about every little piece of garbage news. They occupy us more than they deserve. Constantly being confronted with war, economic crises, accidents and disasters burdens us more than we believe. It also distorts our perception of reality. We think that there is constant danger and that everything is always getting worse. Our assessment of real risks is diluted by perceived risks conjured up by news.
Without all these reports, I notice how I become calmer and (even) more content. The desire for constant up-to-dateness and information has already subsided. I actually sleep better and also look forward to new things that I can tackle with the saved “news time”.
The book “The Art of the Digital Life: How to Give Up News and Master the Information Flood” by Rolf Dobelli (whose other books I greatly appreciate anyway) describes these thoughts in more detail and offers instructions and strategies to free oneself from the flood of news. By reading this book, I learned how I can reduce my news consumption without missing important information. I can now shape my life more productively and happily by concentrating on the really important things.
Hi! I'm Markus – the Fricklr. ⚡ Electrical engineer, 🎵 musician (bass, guitar, keys) and professionally 'something with the internet' 🌐 for over 30 years – nowadays with AI too 🤖 – a 55-year-old generalist from Bavaria, Germany.
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