This Lent, I’m giving up something that might seem essential in our hyperconnected world: the news.
Not social media entirely (though I’m cutting back), not books, not long-form journalism.
Just the daily drip-feed of breaking news, hot takes, and algorithmic anxiety that has controlled my attention for far too long.
Morrissey put it perfectly in the song “I am not a dog on a chain“:
I am not a dog on a chain
I use my own brain
I do not read newspapers
They are troublemakers
Listen out for what’s not shown to you
And there you’ll find the truth
For in a civilized and careful way
They’ll sculpture all your views
News Is to the Mind What Sugar Is to the Body
Writer Rolf Dobelli makes this comparison explicitly in his essay “Avoid News,” which also appeared in The Guardian and sparked considerable debate about our relationship with news consumption. He argues that just as we’ve recognized the toxic effects of excessive sugar consumption, we need to understand that news consumption follows a similar pattern of harm. As he writes, “News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation.”
The parallel runs deeper than you might think. Both sugar and news:
- Are engineered to be irresistibly consumable
- Provide immediate gratification with no nutritional value
- Create dependency through biological reward systems
- Crowd out healthier alternatives
- Lead to long-term cognitive and physical damage
Dobelli notes that news “constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones.” In other words, chronic news consumption literally puts your body in a state of perpetual stress.
The Economics of Outrage
But why is news designed this way? The answer lies in what we might call the outrage economy.
News organizations aren’t primarily in the business of informing you—they’re in the business of capturing and monetizing your attention. As the Farnam Street blog observes, “In a world where news is free and abundant, being wrong costs nothing, but being boring costs everything.”
This creates perverse incentives. News must be immediate, which kills context and accuracy in the race to publish first. It must be emotional because outrage drives more engagement than understanding. It must be divisive because conflict generates clicks. And above all, it must be alarming—fear keeps you coming back.
Social media platforms amplify these dynamics exponentially. Their algorithms are optimized not for truth or wisdom but for engagement—and nothing engages quite like rage. Studies have shown that content containing moral outrage spreads faster and farther than any other type of content. The platforms know this. The news organizations know this. And they’re both profiting from keeping you angry, afraid, and addicted.
What News Gets Wrong
Dobelli provides fifteen reasons to avoid news, but several stand out as particularly damning.
First, news limits understanding. As he explains, “News items are little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world.” The media focuses on the car that caused the bridge collapse, not the structural integrity issues that made the collapse inevitable. They give us dramatic stories instead of underlying causes. It’s theater, not education.
Second, news makes us passive. Dobelli notes that “news stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world.” We evolved to act on information, but the daily bombardment of news about things we can’t control breeds learned helplessness. We become spectators to catastrophe, observers of our own powerlessness.
Third, news inhibits thinking. “Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking.” Every notification, every breaking news alert, every scroll through headlines fragments your attention and makes sustained thought nearly impossible. It’s mental vandalism.
And perhaps most alarmingly, news changes your brain structure. This isn’t metaphorical. Dobelli cites neuroplasticity research showing that “the more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus.” In the words of neuroplasticity pioneer Professor Michael Merzenich: “We are training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”
The Fear Factor
There’s another dimension to this that deserves attention: news organizations profit directly from your fear and anxiety.
Consider how news coverage warps our perception of risk. As Dobelli points out, we end up with “the completely wrong risk map in our heads.” Airplane crashes dominate headlines while resistance to antibiotics goes unreported, even though one is vanishingly rare and the other is a looming crisis. Terrorism is overrated; chronic stress is underrated. Sensational crimes are overrated; structural inequality is underrated.
This isn’t an accident. Fear is profitable. Anxiety keeps you watching, clicking, scrolling. The business model depends on you feeling like something terrible is always about to happen and that you need to stay informed to protect yourself.
But here’s the truth: if something truly important happens, you’ll hear about it. Your friends will tell you. Your colleagues will mention it. You won’t miss it. What you’ll miss is the manufactured urgency, the algorithmic rage, the carefully curated sense that the world is burning and only constant vigilance can save you.
What I’m Doing Instead
For these forty days of Lent, I’m committing to a news fast. Here’s what that means:
I’m turning off all breaking news notifications. I’m removing all news from my… newsfeeds. I’m leaving the Reddit news subs. I’m not cancelling my newspaper subscriptions yet, but I am logging out so that I can’t read articles without the friction of signing back in again.
I’m not going dark entirely. I’m keeping long-form journalism. I’m keeping books. I’m keeping conversations with actual humans, which, it turns out, are a much more reliable source of genuinely important information than any algorithm. And I’m allowing myself one weekly check-in with local news sources.
What do I hope to gain? More sustained attention for deep work. Lower baseline anxiety. Better understanding of underlying patterns rather than surface events. And maybe, just maybe, actual calm.
The Freedom of Not Knowing
There’s something deeply countercultural about admitting you don’t know what happened today in politics, or that you haven’t followed some viral controversy. We’ve been trained to think that being “uninformed” is a moral failing, a dereliction of civic duty.
But I’m starting to believe that the opposite is true. Being constantly informed about everything is making us worse citizens, worse thinkers, and worse humans. It’s making us anxious, reactive, and shallow. It’s stealing our capacity for sustained attention and replacing it with an addiction to novelty and outrage.
As Farnam Street concludes: “The goal isn’t to disconnect from the world, but to connect with it more meaningfully. In an age of infinite information, wisdom comes not from consuming more, but from consuming deliberately.”
So for these forty days, I’m choosing deliberate ignorance over compulsive consumption. I’m choosing depth over breadth, calm over alarm, thought over reaction.
Morrissey, as usual, said it better than I ever could in “Spent the Day in Bed“:
Stop watching the news
Because the news contrives to frighten you
To make you feel small and alone
To make you feel that your mind isn’t your own
For these next 40 days, I’ll be trying to remember what it feels like when my mind is actually my own.
Oh, and I’m giving up caffeine too.