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Comment by wool_gather | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered re-adding a measured amount of news -- at least local -- to your week? You're absolutely right that a lot of the so-called "news" is garbage and just a source of negative emotional energy. Especially the flotsam drifting across social media...

On the other hand, there are things happening in the world, decisions being made and actions taken, that almost certainly affect stuff you value. This is especially true in your town/county/sub-national political region -- which is why I said "local". It's still not exactly fun a lot of the time, but knowing -- and being able to influence! -- what's going on around you ultimately has more upside than down.

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But are they? It's important to vote, but realistically what are you accomplishing for yourself or anyone else by keeping up on things everyday.

Let's even use Brexit as an example. For the average everyday person in England, brexit is a huge deal. But what benefit is there to the general population to keep up with every twist and turn of political maneuvering? In the end it's important to vote smart. Voting smart can br done via checking up on current events once a week if not once month. Things really do not move as fast as online news and social media will lead you to believe. Brexit is taking years to happen. But if you keep up with the news you might think everyday is the brink of doom or salvation. When in fact the average person has months or possibly years between actionable events.

It looks like you've hit 'reply' on the wrong comment? I didn't say anything about everyday, or "keeping up with every twist and turn" of the national news.

I concur. It's important to be engaged with what's going on locally and things that will directly impact you and people around you. If everybody ignored these things and just kept their heads down then I'd argue we'd all be worse off. Your own mental state could be improved by ignoring them, but I do believe that we all have some responsibility to try and improve the society around us.

I've found that keeping exposure to media down to every week or two and mostly reading summaries of events after the fact has helped immensely. It filters out all of the noise you get from live reporting. This helps get down to the facts of what's happened, and allows one to keep a certain emotional detachment from the events and focus on the important things.

Well my local news organizations are particularly bad as well, so not really.

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