Shojiwax.com on Nostr: Breaking news…..thanks but I’m fasting. Im trying a little experiment at the ...
Breaking news…..thanks but I’m fasting.
Im trying a little experiment at the beginning of 2025.
I feel this is going to be a big year (and not in a good way).
So I want to answer this 3 part question:
If I were to stop consuming the news, would the world be a better place, a worse place, or be completely unchanged?
If I were to stop consuming the news, would I be a better person, a worse person or be completely unchanged? And…
What is the relationship between these two questions?
My thesis is that a news fast would make me an incrementally better human… improving my mental hygiene and regathering all that wasted time and energy mulling over events I have little or no control over1.
By becoming better (even incrementally better) the world is ipso facto improved by exactly that increment.
An anti-thesis might be that burying my head in the sand and ignoring local and world events of import, leads to complacency and social ignorance and opens space for nefarious powers to propagate unchecked and unchallenged2.
The synthesis of these two viewpoints lay in the third part of my experiment.–ooOoo–
For a little while, at least, I am fasting from ALL the news. To wit:
No watching commercial news TV.
Avoiding to the best of my ability all other news media formats…
Except once a week, when I will check a couple of long-form analysis/summaries of current events.
Only check once a week!
When out in social situations avoid getting entangled in those circular conversations energetically discussing the latest world catastrophe, political fuckup or breakdown in the last vestiges of social cohesion (ie raging over the state of the world as I see it). You know the convos I’m talking about.
Minimise use of Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon (my main exposure to scroll-bait news).
Fill the void in my time left after removing all the news with a worthwhile replacement. TBA.
End Date: I have a 1 week meditation retreat at the end of this month, so how about I run this experiment until after that…and see how that works for me.–ooOoo–2024 saw me furiously ruminating, simmering in a broth of impotence over the obliteration of Gaza, the war in Ukraine, Climate change, Trump, capitalism, elitism, imminent global war, dumbing down of mainstream TV, the Australian government kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry and the general enshitification of the world by those with power. ↩︎Not because I have any individual agency to change things but because at scale all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. ↩︎
#OnlyWords
Im trying a little experiment at the beginning of 2025.
I feel this is going to be a big year (and not in a good way).
So I want to answer this 3 part question:
If I were to stop consuming the news, would the world be a better place, a worse place, or be completely unchanged?
If I were to stop consuming the news, would I be a better person, a worse person or be completely unchanged? And…
What is the relationship between these two questions?
My thesis is that a news fast would make me an incrementally better human… improving my mental hygiene and regathering all that wasted time and energy mulling over events I have little or no control over1.
By becoming better (even incrementally better) the world is ipso facto improved by exactly that increment.
An anti-thesis might be that burying my head in the sand and ignoring local and world events of import, leads to complacency and social ignorance and opens space for nefarious powers to propagate unchecked and unchallenged2.
The synthesis of these two viewpoints lay in the third part of my experiment.–ooOoo–
For a little while, at least, I am fasting from ALL the news. To wit:
No watching commercial news TV.
Avoiding to the best of my ability all other news media formats…
Except once a week, when I will check a couple of long-form analysis/summaries of current events.
Only check once a week!
When out in social situations avoid getting entangled in those circular conversations energetically discussing the latest world catastrophe, political fuckup or breakdown in the last vestiges of social cohesion (ie raging over the state of the world as I see it). You know the convos I’m talking about.
Minimise use of Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon (my main exposure to scroll-bait news).
Fill the void in my time left after removing all the news with a worthwhile replacement. TBA.
End Date: I have a 1 week meditation retreat at the end of this month, so how about I run this experiment until after that…and see how that works for me.–ooOoo–2024 saw me furiously ruminating, simmering in a broth of impotence over the obliteration of Gaza, the war in Ukraine, Climate change, Trump, capitalism, elitism, imminent global war, dumbing down of mainstream TV, the Australian government kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry and the general enshitification of the world by those with power. ↩︎Not because I have any individual agency to change things but because at scale all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. ↩︎
#OnlyWords