How do you process the news?

Media's aim is to keep people emotionally hooked on short term directional adjustments in political trajectory, including the presented minutia of the events that seem to determine it.

The only way to consume news, without subjecting oneself to the inner turmoil that the news is designed to produce, is to develop a long term theory and then just check in with the headlines to make sure that things are progressing toward it.

If they don't seem to be, adjust the theory and then keep-on with the aforementioned method.

Sure, some people emotionally need to be apprised of the tragedy of every story. They may even convince themselves that the World's trajectory hangs on the balance of every event. I'd suggest that this is both irrational and hints at addiction behavior. But if this isn't you, or you want to become less addicted, then give the above method a try.

After awhile, you'll begin to admire the efficiency of and relative inner-peace from your new hard-won detachment skill.

I struggled my whole life with “high empathy/hypersensitivity“ and what helped to fundamentally shift my experience of life and especially news is body-centered trauma therapy and learning how to establish and keep inner boundaries between me and the world around me (without needing to isolate from it).

To give one possible but specific recommendation if you don’t want to try regular therapy again would be to do a basic multi-weekend training in Focusing, in a group setting.

Personally and collectively, I see it as an exercise in how to process and integrate feelings of grief/loss, anger, overwhelm, helplessness and powerlessness, amongst others, and still live a happy life.

I decided to go "founder mode" on my news-consuming experience. The "founder" here being Tim-Berners Lee, whose vision was for an internet of dumb pipes where the view layer was controlled by the end-user.

News sites have trashed their user experience in search of ad revenue and clicks. But many have RSS feeds, so I created a PHP web page running on localhost that pulls in RSS feeds from news websites.

I have only got it to list the stories with hyperlinks so far, not the full content. I then disable images on the sites I'm pulling feeds from with UBO, so when I click on something on my PHP page, it remains a text-only experience.

I've realized that images on most news stories are utterly useless. They are usually stock images, and not original up to date pictures taken for the story. And considering that newspapers for the past decade have chosen to splash one guy's scowling face in the headlines day after day, I've decided I don't need that. Text-only for me.

I'm hugely sympathetic to this, but at the same time, I want to say, "snap out of it!"

We shouldn't take on the burden of things we cannot control. I think telling kids that they can change the world is mentally damaging. They could easily come to believe that if the world sucks, then it's their fault for not trying hard enough.

As for how to actually process the news, I remember a scene from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Total Perspective Vortex is a torture device that shows your true place in a vast, uncaring universe. You are revealed to be an insignificant spec on an insignificant dot, thus demoralizing you. But when Zaphod Beeblebrox steps into it, he come out unscathed. "How?" ask the torturers. He replies, "I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox!"

I'm a Gen X'er. We lived through the end of the Cold War, when we expected 30 minutes to say goodbye after WWIII started. We lived through the AIDS pandemic, which made every sexual encounter (rare or not) a life-or-death decision. And we were at the tip of the spear of the technological revolution that is still changing the world today.

As a generation, we are cynical optimists. We believe people are idiots and the world sucks and it's probably only going to get worse, but...yeah...things will work out for us personally.

Nowadays, I mostly consume news via HN - and much less than I used to. When I come across something relevant - which rarely happens - I post it to my aggregator[0] where I try to make sense of the news. It’s like a draft of contemporary History.

[0] https://www.slowernews.com

Since the article explains how they "process" the news, i'll anecdote for a moment.

Prior to 2001, i watched maybe 15 minutes of news a day, like while making lunch, or just KNX 1070 in the car. September 11th, i began watching 2+ screens of news, recording it, analyzing it. This went on until at least 2002.

Something "snapped" and i got rid of my TV. a few years later, i still had no TV, no cable, etc. I just didn't "watch" news. Professor Naji Dahi said i was the first person in his class to ever answer "0 TVs" when he polled the class about how many screens were in their house, around 2004-2005.

I still don't have a "TV". And 50% of my news is "social media", and the other 50% of "real news" comes from a news analysis podcast that i won't evangelize. I've linked to archival news clips hosted by the showrunners, here, though. THe podcast is ~5 hours a week, and i spend about 5 hours actually researching and analyzing news i see on social media, usually so i have an understanding if someone mentions the news story later in the week (or whatever).

The news stresses me out. It makes me angry - but approaching it from an analysis standpoint makes it less so. It makes it funny in a "tragedy" sort of way.

Just as an example, i look outside every day and it's the exact same. regardless of what the news says is going on. This might not hold true for everyone.

I don't have some deep philosophical wisdom to share, here. No matter what you ingest and process, if you talk about it in public, someone will disagree with you.

I skim, and I skim quickly. I completely ignore entertainamy,and have learned to avoid empty stories, and ... Literally bot-shit. I had to take over a mailbox from an employee who almost never used it. 30k of emails. I started at 1~200 a day, and soon reached 1000+ and kept up with the current stream. Completed the whole task before my probationary review.

The trick always is...

My wish for a better news ecosystem would be this:

At the bottom of every story should be - at least one but preferably a few - exact quantitative predictions based on the story.

So, for example, after a dramatic story about a pending government shutdown it should say:

- over 100 children will die due to loss of funding to lunch programs (if shutdown occurs %78

- Government will be shut down for > 2 weeks %63

- > 10,000 gov employees lose a month of pay %54

And then if the predictions don't pan out it'll be obvious that most of it was hyperventilating, and if they do, I'll know to take seriously their warnings about the world coming to an end.

Another plus is; I think while the writer is choosing probabilities, he/she will realize he/she might have oversold the story, and will go back and rewrite it

Hundreds of RSS sources. Multiple purposes; together with pluralistic perspective and search for lesser known goods, you must consider:

-- the most important pieces of news may be hidden in thousands of instances of noise;

-- you have to have the ability to identify the best commentators, in order to follow them (and the search is continuous also because even the topmost are not perfect).

Mostly I read Slashdot, HN, and the Wall Street Journal. I read the Economist when I feel like paying for it (sometimes I get a deal like $50 for the digital version for a year). I did Ground News for a year.

One, I'd like to note that Alex has an exceptional component of his site dedicated to older-edition-style tabletop roleplaying and it's well worth checking out if you're interested.

Two, given a choice between the front page of the New York Times and a PDF or expert blog post - I typically select the latter - or read about my town and local jurisdiction. I keep Bloomberg and the AP around for things that are events I may need to know about quickly.

Of course this gets into the problem of filtering and knowledge gaps, I might be reading something really interesting about natural gas but I have no idea if the person is a crank or not because of my lack of domain knowledge - so I've got to cautiously work the bubble perimeter every time.

Every time I operate on urgent news I get burnt, so any sort of world changing news can handle a nights rest before responding. Things that are published on paper have a higher priority on my Apple News process.