It happened the morning a certain orange-tinted reality TV star became the leader of the free world. Again.
I was in my apartment, sprawled on the sofa like a crime victim, and staring at my phone as if it was broadcasting live footage of an approaching asteroid. Which in certain political circles amounted to the same thing.
That’s when I realised I had spent the last 24 hours in a news-induced fugue, surviving on Ben and Jerry’s, absurdly high stress levels, and refresh buttons.
As a food and travel writer who spends his days mulling over the flakiness quotient of croissants and the quality of a hotel’s 300-thread-count sheets, I had somehow morphed into a political junkie. My browser history looked like a doomsday prepper’s manifesto. I had opinions about electoral districts I couldn’t locate on a map. I actually knew the name Joe Biden’s German Shepherd.
And just as my index finger hovered over another online article giving me yet more analysis of the election results, it occurred to me I had become the equivalent of a political TMZ – except instead of tracking celebrity breakups, I was tracking electoral district breakdowns.
But more than that, I was overdosing on all this news – all day, every day, year after year – had left me disheartened, outraged, sad, grumpy, stressed and lost, all at once. What was the point of it all?
That morning, somewhere inside my head, something gently snapped.
And just like that, I stopped reading the news. In what felt like both impulse and inevitability, I deleted all my news apps – goodbye CNN, farewell BBC, ciao South China Morning Post. I slowly exhaled and waited to see what would happen.
As it turns out, the world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall. The mail still got delivered. My mother still rang to moan about my father. Anderson Cooper still looked worried.
“But how will you stay informed?” my friend Sarah asked, clutching her phone with the kind of intensity usually reserved for lifeboats and winning lottery tickets. The woman reads 14 hardcopy and online newspapers before breakfast, which I suspect is less a testament to her reading speed and more an indication that what she calls breakfast is actually closer to dinner.
I now realise that being informed is remarkably similar to being caught in a whirlpool – a lot of going round and round and ending up exactly where you started, just more dizzy. And after years of mainlining headlines 24/7, what good had all this “staying informed” actually done me?
When a devastating earthquake hit Morocco, did I book an immediate flight to Marrakech to help with rescue efforts? When the sky above Sydney turned smoky red from the awful fires, did I do anything beyond sharing a clip of a burning koala on social media and feeling vaguely guilty while eating takeout? I was treating tragedy like a spectator sport, collecting grief points without keeping score. Like Carrie Bradshaw and Mr Big, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was I in an emotionally abusive relationship with the news cycle?
These days, young people (defined as anyone who can remember a time before the internet but pretends they can’t) are discovering JOLO – the Joy of Logging Off. This is not to be confused with YOLO – You Only Live Once, which is mainly used to justify questionable decisions such as balancing on a flimsy tower on top of a skyscraper, or getting tattoos of complicated Chinese characters that actually mean ‘chicken soup’.
While my peers are busy optimising their news alerts and crafting the perfect tweet about some humanitarian disaster, these young people are cooking up a quiet revolution. Supposed digital natives, they are turning to activities that would make their great-grandparents proud. Like joining reading clubs that involve actual books with pages you can turn, and doing yoga without documenting every down-dog on social media.
My own version of digital detox has been decidedly less ambitious. I haven’t become a blacksmith or started a sourdough cult, though I did briefly consider both during what I now call my Month of Misguided Mindfulness. Instead, I simply stopped treating CNN like a Netflix series I needed to binge-watch.
I literally have no idea what’s happened in the world since the US election results were announced. For all I know, Mariah’s kids now have play dates with J Lo’s.
The truth is, the world’s problems didn’t disappear because I stopped obsessively monitoring them. Bad things keep on happening. Wars rage and children die. People keep hurting one another in words and acts. Floods. Disasters on every channel. Every moment documented, and then repeated over and over till your heart stops feeling anything.
But something interesting happened: I began noticing the sort of news that doesn’t make headlines.
Like my 80-year-old neighbour Mrs Chen needing help carrying her groceries up three flights of stairs. Or my friend’s husband had to be suddenly hospitalised and would I collect their mail and water the plants? Small things, sure, but then most of life is made up of small things.
I’m not suggesting we all bury our phones in the backyard and become hermits. But maybe, just maybe, we don’t need to know about every incremental update to every crisis in every corner of the globe. Maybe it’s okay to admit that knowing the intimate details of political machinations in places we can’t pronounce isn’t making us better citizens of the world – it’s just making us better at pretending to be smart at dinner parties.
Sarah tried again. “But what if something really important happens?” This is the sort of question that assumes “really important” means “trending on social media” rather than “Your pyromaniac child has just set fire to your curtains.” If zombies start roaming the streets, someone will tell me. Probably my Aunt Mei-ling who somehow is always the last person to hear about anything, while simultaneously being the first person to tell everyone about it.
These days, when I meet my news-addicted friends for coffee, I can tell who’s been doom-scrolling by the haunted look in their eyes. It’s the same look medieval monks probably had after spending too long copying manuscripts about the apocalypse.
In a world obsessed with hard news and breaking news, there’s something to be said for choosing soft care over hardcore information absorption. While others are optimising their news feeds, I’m optimising my peace of mind. I am so much less stressed. I also sleep rather well, though I sometimes wonder if I should feel guilty about this. I don’t.
And if that makes me less informed about global affairs, well, I’m okay with that. Besides, have you tried forest bathing? It’s like doomscrolling, but with trees.
And the only breaking news is when a leaf falls.
