No News Is Good News

At some point in November last year, I forget exactly when, I embarked upon an experiment. Now, those who know me will be aware that, even on a good day, I am not naturally predisposed towards happiness and joy, and on top of that, me and autumn don’t see eye to eye: autumn seems to like gloom, rain, mould, death, and roadworks, whereas I don’t, so I never expect much from the soggy end of the year. But as winter approached I noticed that I was even more than usually grumpy and miserable. I won’t go into great detail, because that sort of thing is deeply boring. Suffice to say, it wasn’t pleasant, and I needed to do something about it.

I started casting about for an explanation of my negative mood, and the first candidate that came to mind was the daily procession of horrors published by the various news media. On reflection, it seemed that I had developed quite a habit, without really noticing it, of seeking out all kinds of depressing stories from around the world. Perhaps I was seeing too many headlines like “87% of Americans Couldn’t Find Own Backside If Hands Glued To It”, or “Woman Stoned To Death By Psychopathic Religionists For Eating Sandwich”, or “Ruth Kelly Still Biggest Waste Of Your Money Since Millennium Dome”, or “Dick Cheney Sets Truckload of Disabled Puppies on Fire, Laughs A Bit”.

I hypothesised that I needed to disengage myself from reports of the constant stream of soul-crushingly awful shit that spews unendingly from every figurative orifice of humanity or I would go mad. I am not joking, I could feel my enfeebled mind starting to part company with reality, and I could see its point: reality is an unpleasant companion when viewed via 24-hour news outlets. I couldn’t get to sleep for fears of terrible things happening to my loved ones, or worse, my cats. I was so angry about injustices perpetrated that I had started to swear at inanimate objects and kick things, and in public too. Heaven help you if you cut me up in traffic. Intervention was required, drastic and immediate.

So I cut myself off. I had had my fill of poisonous negativity, and I decided to sever my connection to the warping, debilitating geyser of miserabilia offered up by those high-priests of horror, news journalists. Happily, it proved to be rather easier than expected. I had already given the telly the heave-ho a while back, on account of it being 99.9% rubbish. I haven’t listened to the radio much since last September, when I finally dragged myself into 2001 and got myself an iPod, so avoiding that temptation is easy. I have successfully stopped buying newspapers if I can help it (a couple of Sundays have sneaked into the shopping recently but I disregard the horrible bits as far as possible; I just read the film, books and music sections and make a mess of the Sudoku). The only difficult bit was steeling myself to delete certain sites from my bookmarks: I gritted my teeth and said goodbye to The BBC News, The Guardian, The Independent, and a stack of other news organisations, along with Digg, Reddit, Metafilter, and a load of other blogs and content aggregators, even things like BoingBoing, all of which had directed me in the past to stories and sights that have scarred me for life. Again, I do not exaggerate: there’s some horrendous stuff out there that I really, truly did not need to know about.

Almost immediately I started to feel better. Since my declaration of willful ignorance, my mood has improved dramatically. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all is now flowers and fairy-dust, but what worries I do have are largely limited to soluble problems in my own life, like the difficulty of selling a house, the inconvenience of having to buy a new car, or the annoying tendency of our bin men to not turn up for three weeks in a row, things like that. The sort of things that normal people worry about. I don’t even fret about not knowing what’s going on in the world. If, by some extraordinary conspiracy of circumstance, something really significant were to happen, something that might affect me personally, there would probably be nothing I could do about it anyway. When the giant alien robots land and enslave us all, at least I won’t have had to live through weeks of dread first wondering what’s going to happen.

My hypothesis was proved correct: I was literally sick of being shown the worst excesses of my brother man, and as soon as I averted my gaze I noticed the benefit. So brother man can go and boil his head for all I care. I have decided that am I not his keeper, and I don’t have to listen to, read about, or watch any more of his sick little escapades. That’s what police, judges and juries are for, because they can do something in response. (If I am ever unlucky enough to have to serve on a jury I will trust to the expertise of the court for proper calibration of my part of the verdict, and until then I don’t want to know. Apparently there’s a 1 in 6 chance (pdf) of my having to do that, those are better odds than for cancer, hopefully I’ll get lucky.)

I know that, in some ways, my ostrich-like tendencies are reprehensible and shallow, but I don’t care. I need my sanity, and my sanity is incompatible with following all the iniquitous machinations of politicians, the slaughterings of psychopaths (state-financed or otherwise), the negligence of the intelligent and the stupidity of fools, or the random tragedies of chance. If the world can’t carry on in a civilised manner and act its age, I reserve the right to ignore the world. In my opinion, the world needs to go and sit in a corner and think about what it has done, and come back when it’s ready to say sorry. It’s like a hyperactive infant, dosed up on unpleasant chemicals and addicted to attention. Maybe if we stopped fueling its egocentric tendencies by switching off the news occasionally, it would calm down a bit.

5 comments 2008-01-08 12:47 Categories: Personal, Rage