How I Kicked The News Drug
About a week ago I made a momentous decision.
I've given up the daily news.
Before you say "So what Ken?" let me tell you a little bit more about my news addiction...
- I used to read up to three newspapers a day.
- I used to watch the evening news for one hour a day.
- I read three or four channels of Internet news, Google News etc., and sometimes download a video clip or two.
I've given them all up. And guess what...
I've reclaimed about three hours a day in free time!
And it gets better...
I actually feel better about the world. To know why, you have to understand that the mass media "sells" news in the same way that a car salesman on late-night TV infomercial sells his automobiles- loud, blatant, appealing.
The difference is that the worse the news, the better the media sells.
So the best kind of news to sell is negative... murders, kidnappings, carjackings, global warming, pollution... the list goes on. All of it bad, bad, bad.
This seeps into your psyche. Slowly but surely you come to depend on the daily adrenaline rush. In a perverse way we feel better when we hear of other's ills.
It does more than that. I believe in the same way that television violence promotes real violence, negative news makes us depressed.
For quite a few years I had been avoiding the negative news by simply not reading it, or turning the sound down on TV items that showed it. It wasn't till a week ago that I finally made an informed decision based on a simple test. I counted the number of news items that were negative, and compared them to the news items that I thought would benefit me.
The ratio was about 1 item of good news to 35 bad.
So the decision was simple. And I haven't felt better for years. I am gradually regaining my positivity, and with it my faith in the good nature of my fellow man.
Because now I haven't anything bad to compare it with.
So what about staying in the loop, you ask? What about world shattering news that you simply have to know about? What about news of tsunamis about to strike, impending hurricanes, tropical weather warnings, change of government, riots in the next street?
It's simple. I rely on the human network. Each one of us is in contact with someone else during the day. That person - even if they don't know the news - will have heard it from someone else. It's a natural part of their community. So I'll get to find out pretty quickly.
It's interesting to read my lotto testimonies and see the number of people who were told of their winnings by someone else... a husband or friend who had bought the ticket for them. While there's not many, there are enough to know that global communication is still alive and well.
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