Home / A Less Informed Citizen (October 2025)

I stopped using social media and I've limited my news consumption to something like 20 min a day from a handful of independent journalists and outlets. It has been over six months now and while I'm considerably less informed it's been one of the best changes I've made. I feel more peaceful, curious, and less reactive.

A criticism I received from friends (and a fear I once shared) was that by cutting back on the news I'd no longer be fulfilling my duty of being an informed citizen. Now, I wonder if the "news = good" meme is one of the most quietly destructive ideas in circulation today.

Being informed is only useful in so much as it improves your life or other people's lives in some way. Learning that a murderer lives down the street isn't inherently helpful, you have to actually do something with the information, like lock your doors, otherwise it's just entertainment (which is fine if that's your thing, but I'm focused on consuming news as a civic duty).

For most of human history, the news was so scarce that it was ok to use the shortcut "news = good" because people were starved for information that could help them. This is similar to how for most of human history "food = good" was a useful shortcut, until we developed processed food.

Most of us now know that processed food is bad for us but there were a few decades there where people thought Wonder Bread and Chicken McNuggets were healthy because before that point bread and chicken were good for you - I mean, hell, bread is still the base of the food pyramid. I think we're making the same mistake with news today.

The vast majority of news we consume is empty information calories. It's a biased selection of sensationalist stories from around the world that are designed to addict and entertain us, dressed up just enough as "information" for us to rationalize gorging ourselves on disaster porn.

Not only does spending hours consuming news across social media, TV, print, and radio simply waste our time, but it fills our brains with negative stories that we can't realistically act on in any meaningful way - we have jobs to work and bills to pay and most of us, if we're honest, aren't experts on every crazy thing that happens.

The subconscious guilt of seeing all this horrible stuff day in and day out and not being able to do anything about it is driving everyone crazy and we need a scapegoat, which the news feeds us on a platter by selecting and framing stories to blame the other party, country, religion, gender or whoever - anyone other than the person reading the story. We also ease our guilt by reposting stories to "spread awareness" which is just passing the buck to more people who don't have the time or ability to help. All of which only further polarizes our country and world.

The "news = good" meme is so enticing because we all want to be good citizens. We all want to help. And it is difficult, at least it was for me, to admit that my brain can't handle all the negative news in the world, and even if it could, I don't have the knowledge or resources to help everyone in the world, or to protect myself and my family from every risk in the world, or to have every one of my votes and decisions be perfectly informed. To be more effective, I need to instead limit my purview to a small number of things I can control so I'm not constantly filled with negative energy, which only brings me and the people around me down, and ironically, leads to more bad news.

We are massively over-consuming unhealthy information. We mostly know social media is bad at this point - perhaps it's the informational equivalent of cigarettes or candy bars - but I'm increasingly confident that spending hours reading CNN, FOX, or even, arguably, the NYT, is going to one day be looked back on like eating 4k calories of processed food from Kraft or Nestle and rationalizing it as a good and healthy choice. And I worry it's going to take us longer to realize the magnitude of the problem because mental illness is less obvious than obesity.

I'm not arguing all news is bad just like I'd never argue all food is bad. But similar to limiting ourselves to 2k calories of fresh food from the farmer's market, perhaps one day the norm will be to only read 20 minutes of news from independent journalists - i.e. humans you trust, not huge corporations. One thing that could help us get there is being more interrogative of how much the news is helping vs hurting us. As in, literally asking ourselves, "is the time and emotional toll of consuming this worth whatever tangible benefit it provides?" I'm only one data point, but I feel like a better citizen now that I'm less informed.