Reading the news is the new smoking - by Adam Mastroianni
Experimental History
SubscribeSign in
Reading the news is the new smoking<br>I quit. I feel great. You can too.
Adam Mastroianni<br>Jun 14, 2022
257
56<br>15
Share
Photo cred: my dad<br>One of my major pastimes used to be reading the news and being mad. I’d wake up, grab my phone, and get a quick primer on all the day’s outrages. “They raised tariffs on soybeans!” I would cry, unsure if the tariffs were bad, or if it was bad that they had waited so long to tariff them, but very sure that something about soybeans and tariffs was definitely outrageous.<br>During the Trump administration, I would devour news of the president’s latest impropriety and imagine myself throttling one of his supporters. “WHY DID YOU DO THIS??” I would shout, squeezing the life out of them.<br>I started to feel like maybe this was a bad thing.<br>So in the summer of 2020, I stopped. I swore to only read the news on Saturday mornings. Since then, I’ve given it up almost entirely.<br>And I feel better. Way, way better. It feels like a war that used to be fought in my backyard is now being fought on Neptune instead. I feel relieved of my duty to keep track of the whole world, and I now realize I never had that duty in the first place. My brain got quieter and I started hearing myself think instead of hearing myself worry. And I stopped imagining myself choking people to death, which was a big improvement.<br>I also became more fun to be around. I stopped importing my grand anxieties into conversations with friends, punishing them with my sullenness because I just read an article about climate change or bad senators, as if nobody was allowed to feel good as long as bad things are happening. I lost the urge to extract my phone from my pocket during lulls in conversations, tap the News app, and see if maybe something awful had happened. I could fill my freed-up attention-space with more important things, like my niece and nephews’ various misadventures.<br>That’s how I came to see reading the news like smoking: harmful not just to the consumer, but to anyone nearby. People used to think smoking was a fine way to start the day, a reasonable thing to do on a break, and even a healthy part of their routine—“More Doctors Smoke Camels!”—just like they think about reading the news today. People used to reach for cigarettes when they felt stressed or bored; now they reach for CNN. Some people couldn’t even get out of bed without a smoke, while today some people can’t get up without checking the news first.<br>I can’t promise that quitting the news is just as good for your lifespan as quitting cigs, but it is way easier, and people who do it universally report positive results. The Surgeon General is unlikely to issue a warning label for the news anytime soon, so here’s mine.<br>Why I don’t smoke the news
It makes me feel terrible
A pretty good rule of thumb is “don’t do things that make you feel terrible unless you have a very good reason.” I feel terrible when I read the news, because all the headlines are things like “Republicans Vote to Reclassify Plastic as a Vegetable“ or “Birder Murderer Murders Thirty-Third Birder" or “Bradley Cooper Calls Holocaust ‘Big Misunderstanding’”. Sure enough: studies show that reading the news makes people feel bad.<br>The news often makes me feel even worse than bad: it makes me feel bloodthirsty. I read about Congress doing something and my brain goes “smite them, slice them, burn them, bury them!!” And I’m not alone. I’ve seen mild-mannered moms swear they would kill certain politicians with their bare hands if they had the chance. I’ve seen Christians pray for Supreme Court justices to suffer heart attacks. I’ve heard nebbishy grad students wonder aloud whether assassination is such a bad thing. I’m not saying the news is solely responsible for this, but it sure doesn’t help.<br>I would reluctantly keep reading about bad stuff if that somehow made it go away. But no matter how much I read, bad stuff keeps coming. Which makes sense, because it’s not like the news actually led me to do anything about the bad stuff. It kind of felt like my big contribution to the cause was reading and feeling bad. It was like I was floating above all the victims of every bad thing, going “Don’t worry everybody, I’m here to read all about you and feel awful!”<br>The news screws with my perception of the world
Villainy is rare in the world but common in the news, so reading it may fool you into thinking you’re surrounded by evil-doers. But you’re not.<br>As part of a research project, I once looked at two weeks of New York Times front pages and color-coded all of the stories based on whether they were about people being bad (red), good (green), or neither (gray). It turns out the newspaper is black, white, and red all over:
Red = people being bad. Green = people being good. Gray = neither.<br>With all this coverage of people’s misdeeds, it’s no wonder that people think crime is going up even when it’s going...