Most News is Noise
I find most sources of information these days (since several years) to be too noisy compared to the actual signals of wisdom you expect from a popular source.
Rarely, I’ll pull up the news application on my phone and consume a whole bunch of generic, and some domain specific news.
Other than state of the art research in a technical domain, which is based upon a corpora of established citations, most other “new” stuff is noise.
Such media doesn’t particularly invoke any extreme emotion other than temporary intellectual intrigue at best. At worst, it might be a shun or an indifferent scroll.
I might not even recall a piece of news that I’d consumed fairly recently, almost akin to a tweet or a reel that I scroll past to pass short slots of time during the day.
Now, social media is explicitly looked down upon due to several obvious reasons that I do not intend on enumerating out right now.
But consuming news is a somewhat societally neutral (positive even, according to some) phenomenon that I personally find to be best formulated to make it sound like the consumer engages with the world around actively.
It allows you to put on the facade of “being in the know”, to feign awareness.
Although truly being aware has philosophical connotations that I haven’t fully explored yet, consuming news doesn’t particularly align with any of my major life goals relevant to this domain.
Reading research backed books is a much better investment in so that what you read stays with you in a consolidated, sub-conscious manner. This will nudge the status of your mind presently just enough to make a difference than if you hadn’t read the book.
With news, all that is poured in stays on the surface due to its fluffy nature and also readily evaporates the moment you move on.
I personally haven’t ever faced noticeabely severe consequences of being in the generic dark. Anything that is too important always is the first thing to come up at lunch or dinner.
Why bother then, is what I’d like to leave this micro-essay at.