Home / A Less Informed Citizen (October 2025)
I stopped using social media and I've limited my news consumption to something like 20 min a day from a handful of independent journalists and outlets. It has been over six months now and while I'm considerably less informed it has been one of the best changes I've made. I feel more peaceful, curious, and less reactive.
A criticism I've received from friends and a fear I once shared was that by cutting back on the news I'd no longer be fulfilling my duty of being an informed citizen. Now, I wonder if the "news = good" meme is one of the most quietly destructive ideas in circulation today.
Being informed is only useful in so much as it improves your life or other people's lives in some way. Learning that a murderer lives down the street isn't inherently helpful, you have to actually do something with the information, like lock your doors or be more vigilant.
For most of human history, the news was so scarce that it was ok to use the shortcut "news = good" because people were starved for information that could help them. This is similar to how for most of human history "food = good" was a useful shortcut, until we developed processed food.
Most of us now know that processed food is bad for us but there were a few decades there where people thought Wonder Bread and Chicken McNuggets were healthy because before that point bread and chicken were mostly good for you - hell, bread is still at the base of the food pyramid. I think we're making the same mistake with news today.
The vast majority of news we consume is empty information calories. It's a biased selection of sensationalist stories from around the world that are designed to addict and entertain us, dressed up just enough as "information" for us to rationalize gorging ourselves on disaster porn.
Not only does spending hours consuming news across social media, TV, print, and radio simply waste our time, but it fills our brains with negative stories that we can't realistically act on in any meaningful way - we have jobs to work and bills to pay and most of us, if we're honest, aren't experts on every crazy thing that happens.
The subconscious guilt of seeing all this horrible stuff day in and day out and not being able to do anything about it is driving everyone crazy and we need a scapegoat, which the news feeds us on a platter by selecting and framing stories to blame the other party, country, religion, gender or whoever - anyone other than the person reading the story. We also ease our guilt by reposting stories to "spread awareness" which is just passing the buck to more people who don't have the time or ability to help.
The "news = good" meme is so enticing because we all want to be good citizens. We all want to help. And it is difficult, at least it was for me, to admit that my brain can't handle all the negative news in the world, and even if it could, I don't have the knowledge or resources to help everyone in the world, or to protect myself and my family from every risk in the world, or to have every one of my votes and decisions be perfectly informed. To be more effective, I need to instead limit my purview to a small number of things I can control so I'm not constantly filled with negative energy, which only brings me and the people around me down, and ironically, leads to more bad news.
We are massively over-consuming unhealthy information. We mostly know social media is bad at this point - perhaps it's the informational equivalent of cigarettes or candy bars - but I'm increasingly confident that spending hours reading CNN, FOX, or even, arguably, the NYT, is going to one day be looked back on like eating 4k calories of processed food from Kraft or Nestle and rationalizing it as a good and healthy choice. And I worry it's going to take us longer to realize the magnitude of the problem because mental illness is less obvious than obesity.
One interesting change since I stopped reading the news is that I'm much more optimistic. When I think about how things are going, I think about real interactions I've had out in the physical world with real people as opposed to thinking about news stories, and for the most part, I'm lucky to live somewhere where 90% of my interactions are positive. I'm starting to wonder if in 20 years we'll look back on the past decade or two and realize that relative to most of history this was actually a pretty great time to be alive and how ironic it would be if we didn't appreciate it because everyone was addicted to negative news.
I'm not arguing life is actually perfect or all news is bad just like I'd never argue all food is bad. But similar to limiting ourselves to 2k calories of fresh food from the farmer's market, perhaps one day the norm will be to only read 20 minutes of news from independent journalists. One practice I've found helpful is being more interrogative of how much the news is helping vs hurting me, as in, is the time and emotional toll of consuming it worth the tangible benefits it provides? I'm only one data point, but I feel like I'm a better citizen now that I'm less informed.