This is the third instalment in my series of posts on cutting out the noise from my life.
Part 1 was about cutting out social media, part 2 was an experiment in cutting out the smartphone from my life. Part 3 ( i.e this ) is about my latest experiment in cutting out noise.
Back in college, c.a 2013, I wanted to build an ‘Opinion or Fact’ plugin for a browser ( part of my long list of things I wish I had actually gotten around to building )
The reason I wanted to build that was I just didn’t like the no of op-eds that were being passed around as news articles back then, this was pre-2014 elections.
Through the last ~5 years, that fundamental reason has morphed into my own solidified opinion ( gah ) which led me to take an adverse step.
I stopped reading the news. All of it, in all forms, everywhere.
Here’s what I think,
- Most news is opinion
- Most opinions are irrelevant
- It takes time to find non-opinion-relevant news
- The trade-off isn’t worth it I would love to read better news, but, I just don’t think its worth anyones time to do this these days.
There’s a lot of news out there to consume, but, they’re all morphed in this templatized op-eds which do atleast 1 of the following,
- State random facts, draw correlation
- State random facts, imply causation
- Go on a diatribe
- Claim to be unbiased in order to be biased
- Sponsored content ( also, obviously unbiased )
- Spend too much time politcking
- Ideologise all facts Try that out, see if a random news article you read falls in these. There is good content out there, but, I got tired of searching for it in our news media.
Some of this is a function of what the market wants, which is why I’m not here to change the way news works. It has a role, it plays it reasonably well, it could do better, I just decided to cut it out.
I’ve still not spent enough time away from the news to quantify/qualify the effects I’m seeing, I’ll reserve that for a later post.
Thank you for reading
Sainath