Last fall, I stopped my regular consuming of the news and social media. Of course, regular is a strange word for it. And has been since about 2006 or so.
That’s the year I, like many with a university email, joined Facebook.
Before then, regular consuming of news implied something akin to now anachronous concepts like the daily paper and the nightly news. Back then, I was regularly keeping track of national and state news quite easily.
How? A quick perusal of the paper, some PBS News Hour, and a few newsletters. All of it took no more than an hour of time.
Now?
Everything’s different.
For us today, staying on top of the news is like playing pinball under a strobe light.
Being knowledgable in that pre-social media way today is a thankless task of constantly staring into the void. It never ends. Never will end.
And yet, something else is different now.
Now we’re not allowed to stop. Something within us considers it a moral failure to look away, not consume more. That we’ll miss something essential. Some bit of analysis that will make sense of everything.
We all, deep down, know this is bullshit. But it feels true.
This is why I stepped away.
Because regular used to mean paying attention in a way that every citizen could understand. In a way we all could accept. Read the paper. Then live your life.
That is no longer the standard. Not when we have to read multiple papers over the morning coffee (to get “both sides” of a story) and keep up online and watch several hours of cable news…
There is nothing regular about always on. Anything with instant notifications on your phone should dispel that notion.
We aren’t consuming anything regular and we aren’t consuming regularly.
We’re over-consuming.
Picture a scene of grotesque gluttony. That’s us with media daily.
And as much as I stepped away from spending hours of time consuming news and severely limiting my time on social media, I still don’t have half the focus I had twenty years ago.
Because I’m not alone. We are experiencing a common problem. And as much as I’ve reduced my consumption, that doesn’t change the experience of everyone around me.
All of the people in my life are struggling to focus.
They are anxious, frustrated, and scared of what’s going on in the world. My attempts to change my life do little to change my environment. And the environment is what we’re all struggling with.
We have too much media to take in. And consuming less of it will make us more capable of processing any of it.
Last fall I started consuming less.
Today, I’m fighting for less consuming.
And that difference is everything.