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Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

It really isn’t. I haven’t watched the news on tv in probably 20 years, I haven’t had any social media accounts ever, and at this point I use the internet as part of my day job, to do my job.

It is absolutely amazing to be so disconnected and I encourage everyone to try it. People at work tell me about interesting things happening in the world, and my role and my spouses role at her job have the (mis) fortune of keeping me informed about the goings on in the wider world. But there is no spin.

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> It really isn’t. I haven’t watched the news on tv in probably 20 years

It's frequently beneficial to know what's happening in the world around you, even though possessing a sense of empathy can make knowing what's happening in the world around you unpleasant.

I hear this repeated often but I'm not actually sure how or why it's beneficial?

Okay I'll bite, in your opinion what are the benefits?

You're asking me to enumerate the benefits of knowing what's going on the world around you? It's probably not relevant or beneficial if it's something like miners being trapped in a cave on the other side of the planet, but when you get down to your local community you might want to know about things like:

- Road closures - Boil orders - Product recalls - Neighborhood breakins - Weather forecasts and alerts - Updated laws and court rulings that might impact you - Public safety notices - Health inspections - Public works projects - and a zillion other things that happen as a consequence of living in a complex society

Just visiting this site means you're inundated with a lot of news about AI or tech companies, and politics pertaining to those matters. It's hard to remove politics from issues. I think only the most niche of communities avoid politics completely.

The most niche of communities are flooded with their own internal politics. The less important the community, the more toxic the politics.

You're on HN, that's social media.

A web forum is not social media. Full stop.

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