time spent offline

“How are things in America?” my mother who lives in Canada asks me just like she does every time we talk over the phone. By things she means COVID numbers. I tell her, like I always do, I don’t know, I don’t watch the news. She laughs and tells me my aunt, who lives in Ethiopia, has been telling her about the millions of COVID cases being reported in America. “The news finds you even from Ethiopia,” she laughs again. I quit the news back in 2016; the news still finds me.

It is impossible to completely quit the news.

Before I got off social media, I, like you, you, and you, got most of my news from Twitter. By most I mean all, and by news I mean headlines of articles and people’s 140-character reactions and commentaries about the “news.” Read a full article!? I don’t know her. Still, like many, I held staunch opinions on things my poor early 20’s brain barely understood. Then, the world ended. I used to think maybe I felt that way because that was the year I officially entered adulthood, in theory anyway, but I don’t think so anymore. Something truly shifted in the world the year 2016 and I watched it play out on Twitter of all places. Twitter was the only social media I was on at the time. Scrolling through my feed, something felt very eerie; instinctively unsettling. The negativity and negative news about the world— about everything— felt unrelenting and unbearable; choking up my newsfeed, my thoughts, my life. It all felt wrong. Luckily, there was someone else who felt similarly about the news a bit earlier than I did: The Man Who Knew Too Little. If Erick Hagerman can do it, I knew I could too. Young, dumb, and idealistic, I decided to give up the news. And by giving up news I mean I stopped reading headlines and getting enraged and furious about things I knew too little about.

Quitting the news is a funny declaration because there was nothing I had to do. I wasn’t subscribed to any news sources. I didn’t have TV. There was no other source of news in my life except for my Twitter feed. How do you quit something that is intangible? I decided to ignore it: Take no notice of it. Disregard it. Pay no attention to it. I turned a blind eye, a deaf ear, and became oblivious to any source of “news” I came across. It was easy to ignore it because of that eerie, unsettling feeling I had while on Twitter during the 2016 election and leading up to it left me with enough revulsion towards the news that I couldn’t scroll away fast enough. I didn’t want the news in my life. The world ended anyway. It didn’t matter to me.

But, because the news is everywhere, there is really no fully escaping it— unless maybe you go completely offline; completely off the grid. There is a story about a guy who, during the pandemic, was living away from civilization with no news of what was happening and upon his return to civilization, he was bewildered by seeing people wearing masks. Bless his heart. Besides the blessed, for the rest of us the news is inescapable. It will reach you, from family, friends, co-workers, and everyone else you encounter in your day-to-day life. That’s the good news— no pun intended. You can quit the news without worrying much about missing out on much. The important stuff will find you one way or another. That’s also the bad news because, well, the news will find you. Not just the important stuff but the stuff you are trying to avoid as well. For instance, another important reason I quit the news was to minimize my alarmingly embarrassing knowledge of pop culture, and I still know way more than I would like to know about Kim Kardashian. It’s inescapable.

So, why even bother?

For two very good reasons.

One, when you get the news from second-hand account, from people in real life, it’s much easier to take it with a grain of salt and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it off. The media is actively and relentlessly trying to manipulate you; Uncle Ruckus is just bat-shit crazy. You can laugh and move on. Plus, even if you have to put up with hearing about the news, you also get to have real, human-to-human conversation about it. If you’re worried about what to say when someone brings up what’s on the news, you can simply respond, “Oh, I had no idea. What’s happening with [topic]?” It really is that simple. You don’t need to have an opinion. Opinions are like asshole— it’s better to keep your shit to yourself. Two, it’s nice to wake up without the news, to get up and enjoy a delicious breakfast without a care in the world about what went down in the world while you were asleep. By giving up the news, it stops infiltrating every moment of your life with its presence, manipulating you to have its preferred reaction, mild or otherwise, at all times.

So. Quit the news. Unsubscribe from news sources. Cancel cable news. They are lying to you anyway. Move towards a life unencumbered by the news. Ignore it: Take no notice, disregard, pay no attention, turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, become oblivious. Life is pretty great without it. I know enough to know I don’t know enough about the social, political, economic ills of society: Not enough to have any useful opinion on it anyway. I mean it’s really fun sometimes to talk shit about the state of the world over drinks and full on banter— knowing I know so very little about it. But not enough to wake up to it, to like it, to retweet and Tweet about it. As for Billie Eilish’s Grammys outfit, I’m trying to care even less about such things.