When I turn off the news and just get outside and in the company of strangers, I get a much more uplifted view of humanity.
I agree though it's a bit of sticking your head in the sand, no? There person is smart, people ... (per men in black). That's why it's always refreshing to talk to a person or two, but easy to be horrified when you look at what people are doing.
I don’t think it’s about the news horrifying us as much as too much consumption making us numb and hypnotised. I used to watch the news once a day on TV and read the newspaper two or three times a week and the experience of news to that cadence compared to what I’m gorging on now is night and day. That was habit, this is addiction.
People who watch too much news tend to be the unhappiest people, and for some reason, they like to spread that unhappiness and negativity around...like a zombie infection or something.
What I take out of this, is rather that the news are (at this point) more the ruminating, focusing on the bad/worst of humanity, rather than the uplifting/inspiring.
In that, it's addictive, and/but not useful nor efficient nor representative of humanity state and progress (of which you get a broader perspective when you get to meet different people everyday).
In that perspective, skipping the news is not so much burying the head in the sand, rather the opposite.
TV news is curated for a particular effect; Why this story, and not that one?
It is a type of commercial entertainment. It it simultaneously inane and culturally violent. Here are people dying in an ongoing struggle for power between warlords and a corrupt government; here are professional athletes winning a tournament. Here's the weather forecast. These subjects merit approximately equal time and similar sentiment in tone. As a viewer of TV news, you are not empowered to change anything because you are not informed of any of the forces and complexities driving the violence and there is no call to action.
People put those systems we live under in place, and, importantly, people continue, even go out of their way, to keep these systems in place. It's not enough to simply recognize that issues are systemic. Good people would actually do something to address them.
