I forgot to look at the news

Civic duty - or just the acceptable face of scrolling?

Recently I was with friends when the conversation turned to something in the news. And I had no idea what they were talking about.

It was clearly a major event that had been going on for days. But I didn’t have a Scooby.

I stayed quiet.

At first for obvious reasons - no-one wants to reveal how stupid they are.

Then I felt secretly thrilled - almost like life had become a bit more of a game, and I was ready to pretend to be an expert, like the guy from Catch Me If You Can. Yes, I concur. Do you concur?

As I warmed up to this daredevil image, I thought maybe I should tell them.

But then another realisation. It would have been a humblebrag, a kind of boast in the age when switching off is trendy. (Can be… depends on how you dress).

And then as the conversation went on - this event was serious and no-one could deny its importance - another feeling emerged.

Guilt.

How did I get here?

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I grew up in a household that listened to Radio 4 pretty much constantly. I watched the news almost every day for years. I always saw it as a big continuous story that I never wanted to miss a chapter of, a streak I didn’t want to break. And so when the phone came along, it was one of the main things I used it for.

I had long been aware of the downsides.

I’d always suspected that being present was likely a good thing. And that breaking into the day at all hours with the news might not have been the best way of achieving that.

Certainly it made for some bizarre contextual shifts. Brushing my teeth? Time to read about India’s challenges in industrialising. Working out whether to put a star or a fairy on top of the Christmas tree? Intersperse it with the pros and cons of the triple lock on pensions. At the zoo with the kids? Tariffs!

I remember once being in a morning half-dream where just for a second I was India, and going through the challenges of industrialising. This blended with shouts from downstairs as my eldest struggled to find her shoes, and made for an epic chimera of anxiety.

I’d also noticed how the news awoke a not-altogether-pleasant side of me. I could imagine I had a unique grip on a given issue, but was thwarted by an ignorant world. I was forever getting ready to don the toga, wander down the forum and defeat opponents in an imaginary debate. The mind is a fantastic wannabe speechmaker, and it was endlessly polishing an entirely pointless address.

Even more pointless because I’ve never been one for arguing with people on social media. So all this profundity would just spill out, unrequested, at anyone who happened to be near me. Often while they were at the zoo, looking at the lemurs. The only useful output for all this wisdom was getting to choose between three political parties once every five years.

For all that though, there’s one criticism of reading the news that I could never get behind. People say it’s depressing, but the news never seemed to get me down.

If anything it was the other way round. A few years ago, I was on holiday when I got a call about something at work. I was violently transported from a lovely break directly into the stress of the office, and it was horrible. I vividly remember my elevated heart rate and sinking feeling.

And the first thing I did, entirely automatically, was to scroll The Guardian. It was the first time I noticed how scrolling the news could be a distraction from anxiety.

People might call it doomscrolling - for me, doom was the driver rather than the result.

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For all this, while I spent years tackling phone use, the news was never the direct target.

I’ve read articles about people who deliberately decided to stop.

I just forgot.

As I learnt to meditate, my phone use fell away. And my looking at the news fell away. Until, at a certain point - entirely unheralded - it disappeared.

To the point where someone who once could have named the whole cabinet now couldn’t name a single minister.

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I’m now at hour 283 of phone free commuting, and a huge part of the appeal of two hours a day of nothing is that I have time to think.

And I tried to come up with a million ways of justifying my newfound ignorance.

Newly meditatey, I came to believe that endless checking of the news reinforces a certainty addiction. The desire to check, and check again.

I am not an expert on evolutionary psychology (far from it - I dress like a lollipop man to go to work) but I could also surmise that the news was just an extension of the brain’s ancient instinct to scan the horizon for danger.

What’s more, I began to see my mind as so hooked on using the phone that it would endlessly come up with reasons - any reasons - to look at the thing. Viewed this way, the responsibility to check the news began to seem like a trick, a gateway drug that would ultimately end with scrolling for hours.

And yet.

And yet I couldn’t reason away the civic duty of informing oneself.

The answer was simple. I know, I’ll buy The Week. It’s a paper summary of the news, dispassionate and reliable. And I’ll read that each week. And then I’ll write a piece about how I inform myself in an analogue way. Well done me.

Here’s where it went wrong though. Honestly, I’ve found it desperately hard to read The Week. Even putting it by the loo, even by the bed. I don’t want to. It’s all kind of depressing.

For a while we got The Week Junior for the kids. I thought I’d give that a try, but frankly it’s just as unappealing.

I like to think I’d read the manifestos if we had a general election, but beyond that, I can’t be bothered with any of it.

It’s left me in a very tricky spot.

I told myself I followed the news out of civic duty.

Was it really just compulsion, all that time?

For years, it now seems, I used the news as a clumsy distraction from my own anxiety. But once that anxiety eased, I no longer needed the news - and now I can’t face looking at it.

If that sounds contradictory, I suspect I was confusing the immediate hit with my baseline mood. In every moment of checking I got a hit of distraction, of ooo what’s next. But it was all contributing to a background hum of we’re all going to die and there’s no point.

If there’s one thing that my experiences with the phone and meditation have taught me, it’s that everyday actions shape my baseline mood.

And now, more than anything, it’s my 24/7 mood I’m determined to protect. Which makes me even less inclined to read the news.

As I say that out loud, it all boils down to a privileged man declining to hear about the suffering of others.

Some citizen.

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Next week: How trying to assuage my guilt about all this led me to dress up like an absolute idiot each week. And no, I’m not talking about the high vis for once.

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