“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” — Philippians 4:8

Forty days ago, I gave up the news for Lent. I wrote about it at the time with the energy of someone building their case. I made my argument. I cited my sources. I was ready to be deprived.

I was not deprived.

What I found instead was silence… and not the empty kind. The itch to check came in the first week, mostly out of habit rather than genuine curiosity, and then it passed. What replaced it was something I still don’t have an adequate word for. I was more where I was. My mornings didn’t begin with the daily crisis. I stopped carrying the ambient weight of things I could neither control nor meaningfully act on, and it turns out that weight was heavier than I knew.

My fast was not perfect. My wife still shared headlines with me. She still asked “Did you hear about…?” and I had usually not heard about it. Push notifications still surfaced on my lock screen before I could look away. I caught a few major events unfolding on Reddit in the moments before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be checking them. The news does not require your consent. It finds you the way water finds a crack. The push notifications didn’t send me spiraling into a thread. The world kept happening and I kept not drowning in it. The difference between encountering a headline and consuming the news is the difference between smelling someone’s cigarette on the sidewalk and smoking a pack a day.

I did not miss a single piece of news that mattered to my actual life. Not one. Everything I genuinely needed to know found its way to me through the people around me, at the pace of actual human conversation. This alone should tell us something about what the daily feed is really for. It is not information. It is stimulation.

I wrote about how we are living in the safest version of this country that has ever existed, and yet nobody believes it, because the systems that deliver our information have a financial interest in making sure we don’t. The news is more focused on showing you what is engaging than what is truthful. And what is engaging is what is frightening. Fear is not a side effect of the media economy. Fear is the product. I spent years consuming that product daily and mistaking it for awareness.

These forty days, I thought about other things instead. I thought about whatever is true. Not the manufactured truths of algorithmic feeds, but the ordinary, verifiable truth of my own life. My neighborhood is safe, my family is healthy, the people around me are mostly trying their best. I thought about whatever is lovely. My wife’s smile, the shady trees on my street, a good song. I thought about whatever is admirable. The teachers I work with every day, the community members who show up for each other without anyone filming it for engagement. I spent time with myself. I spent time with my loved ones. I spent time with my community. I spent time with God. None of these things required an algorithm to push it to me, none of them required clickbait headlines, none of them were breaking news at 6pm. None of them benefited from one.

Paul wrote those words to the Philippians from a prison cell. He was not describing a life free of difficulty. He was describing the discipline of attention. That instruction is two thousand years old and it has never been harder to follow, because the forces competing for our attention have never been more sophisticated, more relentless, or more profitable.

So here is the update on giving up the news for Lent: I am not going back.

Lent ends today. Easter is here. The stone is rolled away. The constant news cycle is something I have been freed from. The same goes for social media, which operates on the same principle: monetized anxiety, served in an infinite scroll.

I understand this will read as dramatic to some. It is not. It is one of the least dramatic decisions I have ever made. Dramatic is checking your phone before your feet hit the floor. Dramatic is the way your chest tightens at a push notification. Dramatic is the way we have all agreed to let media and tech companies set the emotional agenda of our lives and to push us deeper into anxiety, darkness, and fear. Stepping away from that is not dramatic. It is boring and quiet and that is the whole point.

The Christian tradition has always understood that resurrection is not merely an event. You die to the old thing. You are raised into the new. The dying is the hard part, or so you think, until you realize the old thing was already killing you and the new thing feels like breathing.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. — Romans 12:2