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Comment by heikkilevanto | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience many decades ago, taking a long overland trip and being out of touch of news for almost half a year. Coming back, I realized that the world had gone on perfectly well without me following all the daily drama. Most news seemed so irrelevant for a while after that trip.

Of course I fell back in to following the news, and the rest of the internet. Thank you for reminding me that it is not so important.

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I did this except it was more like a month. When I got back I realised how much happier I was to be off of X and oblivious to the news. There is virtually zero utility to being "informed" of most things, and plenty of downsides.

uninstalling twitter on my phone was one of the best decisions I made

I once stumbled upon the idea of calculating the signal to noise ration of "news". Say you consume 30 pieces of "news" a day, you are roughly at 10k "news" pieces a year. How many of those influence a decision you make. Like which job to take, whom to propose to, where to move.

The author, Hans Rosling by the way, showed with this little thought experiment, how little signal for our personal lives and our important decisions lies in "news".

I also worked in publishing for a while as my first job out of university. Ever since I left that industry I am so happy to be out of that drama generating machine.

The big one is voting, of course. It's not like following international politics will impact what firmness mattress I will buy.

But how often would your preferred candidate change compared to which / how much news you consumed? Most people I know are fairly set in their political opinions and already only consume news that confirms their biases

I can easily read up, research the actual behavior of any candidate, their program (aka promises they won't keep) and what the party line is (as program - see before) and in the last few years, when actually putting in their votes on any issue.

I tend to prefer "just in time" and "up to date" research to "just in case" spamming my brain with noise.

But I also know how easy it is for me to fall down the rabbit hole of being back in the dopamine inducing social or news streams. I actively had to purge social apps from my phone(s) and on my private phone setup a launcher, that only shows a few selected apps as text names. No icons, no nothing - especially no badges and notifications for missed mails/messages.

This is currently the only way for me to battle these (at least to me) massively addictive systems.

I agree it's hard to not get sucked into the soap opera aspect of it all. Taking a break once in a while is a healthy strategy, but I think ultimately the sweet spot is to be informed about the important developments as they happen, something that shouldn't take more than 30 mins per day of watching news and political analysis while preparing food etc.

After all, there's more to the democratic process than just voting. There's a global conversation going on which needs informed and diverse participants. Plus there's a personal learning aspect to it, which goes much deeper when one tries to understand and anticipate trends as they happen only to have those inklings and reasonings being checked by the course of history. It's an ongoing lesson in the mysteries of human nature.

I have set up a few alerts and feeds I check semi-regularly. And I have a script sending me a summary of important world, regional, local news as a pushover notification in the morning. So I get two pushes - one is for the weather report, one for global events that might impact my life (I am still in the process of dialing in the sensitivity level of what the report should contain).

Because - on the other hand - I am very much interested in advances in different sciences and would love a better report on actual advances (and not just BS headlines about some new weight loss thing or currently alien speculations from interstellar objects)...

But I am getting there over time. So that I can increase the signal to noise ratio a bit.

It's highly unlikely following the news will make you better informed of politics. Pretty much everyone votes on vibes.

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