There’s a particular look people give you when you mention you’ve mostly stopped following the news. It’s the look they’d give someone who’d announced they’d mostly stopped washing.
Concerned. Slightly disgusted. Worried about what might happen next.
I noticed it first at a dinner party. Someone asked what I thought about the latest crisis, and I said — truthfully — that I wasn’t sure I’d caught up with that one. The silence was extraordinary. You’d have thought I’d confessed to a war crime.
Here’s the thing they don’t tell you: there’s always a latest crisis. There was one before this one. There will be one after. And at no point in my 67 years has following any of them in real time materially improved my ability to navigate the world.
What it has done is keep me in a permanent state of low-level alarm about events I have no power to influence, delivered at a pace and intensity calibrated to make me come back for more.
Read the full piece (and subscribe): https://theoldgreythinker.substack.com/p/the-news-keeps-coming-youve-quit