Day Eleven: Stuff

This whole post is, of course, with apologies to the late, great George Carlin.

As you grow older, you accumulate a lot of stuff. At first, it's kind of cool--stuff is great. You buy books and games and music and electronics; eventually you get some big stuff, like a car or even a house; and then you fill the house with more and more stuff, like pots and pans and bedroom sets and couches and bookcases. Meanwhile, you continue to buy and otherwise obtain the little stuff--more books and games and knick-knacks and random other stuff that clogs up everything.

And eventually, enough is enough.

But this doesn't happen only with physical stuff. It happens with informational stuff, too. Again, as you get older, you learn more and more, you cram piece after piece of random information into your brain (and nothing falls out, really, but some of it becomes a whole lot less accessible). You start out with the basic stuff, useful stuff, like multiplication tables and grammar, eventually you get into more advanced stuff, but all the while, you're also accumulating random stuff (locker numbers, passwords, what spot you parked your car in) and useless stuff (your favorite news story goes here).

And eventually, enough is enough.

For both physical stuff and informational stuff, at some point, it's time to clean house. At least with the physical stuff, you can get rid of it; for the informational stuff, the best you can do is control your intake so that it's the quality stuff that you're consuming. For both types of stuff, the key is to pare down to what's necessary: to simplify as much as possible, but no more (to quote a smart guy). Focus on what matters.

For me, this is what cutting out news amounts to.

Postscript--Although it doesn't really fit into the flow of the post, there's a third kind of stuff--emotional stuff. It also accumulates as you get older, and, like the informational stuff, there's not much you can do to get rid of it--once you have it, it's yours for life.

Day Ten: Turning a Corner?

I had a few good signs today.

First, I've noticed my thinking has gotten a bit clearer. I feel more creative, and ideas seem to be coming easier. This could all be the placebo effect, or a result of a normal cyclical pattern--I've had plenty of times in the past while still reading the news where I would have a patch of exceptionally clear thinking. Either way, I'm definitely at the beginning of a fruitful period of thought right now.

Second, I happened to hear the radio announcer say something about it being Super Tuesday as I was flipping through stations on the way home. My reaction was anger. I didn't want to hear about it. I had forgotten that it was Super Tuesday and I didn't want to be reminded. A week ago, I think hearing the same news would have whetted my appetite to hear more. Today, it had the opposite effect.

Third, I'm not feeling the anxiety over the stock market that I expected to be constant so long as I was without the news. There were a few moments last week when I wanted to check, but overall, I'm pretty calm about the whole thing. I have to admit, this surprises even me.

Fourth, calm is really the word. I have an overall sense of calmness that has started to come over me. The news twitches from last week are severely lessened--generally, I don't really care at this point, and that's a good thing. News now feels like noise on an emotional level rather than just on a rational level. That's going to be key for this change to be a lasting one.

I remember reading somewhere that it takes 28 days to form a new habit. If things continue to progress the way they have so far, the news should be a distant memory by then.

Day Nine: Hate Reading

Not as in "I hate reading" but as in hating things and reading them anyway (or really, because of the hate). I've found cutting out news has stopped me from doing a lot of hate reading.

It's a weird but real phenomenon. I would look for articles that I knew would provoke a reaction in me, whether because of the writer (poor logic always gets me going, for instance), the opinion stated, or even the comments by the usual suspects. Sometimes I would read the comments to see others tear the writer apart; sometimes I'd read them for the same reason that I read the article--to hate them.

I'm not sure what drove me to do this. However, I am sure that the content producers know that people have this tendency (some more than others). I look at a place like Slate, the types of headlines and stories they put together, and I'm amazed I didn't realize the blatant manipulativeness of it sooner. I knew that their headlines were supposed to be provocative, but I never thought deeply enough about it to see the extent of the manipulation.

When the profit motive becomes a driver for news sites, this is the result. It's more noticeable in the headline news segment of the business, or even the local news business ("What common item in your house can kill you in under twelve seconds? Tune in at 10 to find out!"), but it also exists in those news sources that present themselves as more serious. It all gets back to the idea of simulation--the selection of stories does not represent reality, but rather an elaborate front, one shaped by ideology, greed, and cognitive biases.

Day Eight: My Nemesis, the Lazy Sunday

Maybe I spoke too soon. Today is killing me.

I don't even know what I'd expect to find if I went through my news sites right now. It's not like I'm looking for anything. It's just something to do when I don't feel like doing anything else. Maybe that's the root of the problem.

I backtracked to last Sunday's post to see what I was feeling then. I wasn't having any issues. I think that's because it was my first day, and it was a novel idea, and I was like "Oh, I'll write a blog about the experience, it'll be cool!" That novelty's gone now, leaving me with nothing but a vague feeling that I should be going through my familiar website ritual.

That's about all I've got for today. Not much to say and a yen that I have to work through.

Day Seven: Week One Scorecard

One week down, the rest of my life to go.

As I mentioned in my day six post, I'm not yet using my extra time as well as I hope to. There are still too many news-like reflexes in my behavior, and too much wasting of my extra time.

However, I have done some good stuff: read Of Mice and Men and American Nerd: The Story of My People (how's that for a pair of books?); a fascinating interview with neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran; interesting thoughts from some of the smartest people in the world about their favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation (a recurring theme: "everything is the way it is because it got that way"); and a variety of New Yorker articles. I have more planned, including picking up Borges again, learning some new science, and maybe writing some fiction of my own.

As for news: I've seen and heard few headlines here and there (actually remarkably few, given how ubiquitous the news is turning out to be) but have successfully avoided most of it. I pretty much know nothing about what's been going on for the last week other than Davy Jones dying (from a status post on Facebook).

I miss it and I don't. I do sometimes have a nagging feeling like I may be missing something, but I don't feel the rush to go back to reading the news. The biggest issue is that this whole thing seems temporary, like I'm going to pick the news up after 30 days of an experiment or when Lent ends or something. I'm not (at least that's not the plan). I need to get out of that mindset, or else I will fail. The change needs to be a complete change in lifestyle, so there's not even a chance that I would want to check news. It shouldn't be a question and it shouldn't be an effort. I haven't succeeded to that degree, but that's asking a lot for only one week.

Overall, I give myself a B+. Not bad, but room for improvement.

Day Six: Transference

I've noticed that there are two facets to giving up the news. The first is the news content itself. I'm doing pretty well with that: I've been avoiding it mostly successfully, and I don't miss it as much as I thought I would. The second is the act of compulsively checking things for updates. Here, I'm faring... not so well.

Even without news, there are plenty of places to check and recheck for updated information. The websites I've allowed myself have frequent updates, so I check those a bit more often that I used to. Of course, there's always email, though that's not too much of a problem at home. It's a bit more of a problem at work. Also at work, we have a system that updates when people are adding content to our wiki, and that makes a perfect target for checking frequently. Luckily, work's been busy the last week so I don't really have too much time to fixate on the feeling of not being up-to-date with my information.

Should I give all these up? I think the answer is no, but I also need to temper that need for the quick fix that has been cultivated by instant news (and the internet culture in general). To be fair to myself, it's not the case that all my non-news-reading time has turned into compulsive checking of other things (or even of watching videos on Procatinator), but some of it has.

One thing at a time. Once the news embargo becomes a bit more normalized, I'll start working on some of the other fast-twitch bad habits the news culture has helped spawn in me. Until then, I'll cut myself a bit of slack.

Day Five: Simulacra and Simulation

Another earlier memory I have, this one of young adulthood, is of reading a certain novel (I wish I could remember its name) during my senior year of high school. Whatever that novel was, I loved it. I can't even remember the plot, but it was generally about life in small-town America on the eve of one of the World Wars. The plot wasn't the point. It painted such a vivid picture of a close-knit community and a simple life, and that picture is still with me years later.

In my more stressed moments, I daydream about moving to a small town, where I can walk to work and I know everyone and they know me. In some ways, it's not much different from when I was in school, in the midst of a place with a great sense of community.

I don't want to say that news singlehandedly destroyed community, but I think it represents something larger which has taken its toll. When we put energy into the news, that's energy that does not go somewhere else, somewhere more immediate.

Which leads me to think about the idea of simulation. I haven't read Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (it's on my list to get to soon), but one of the things it discusses is the progression of real things to things that represent reality to things that are disconnected from reality. We are at the point where reality has been replaced completely by representations.

I think news has helped with that progression. News does represent reality, but it represents a twisted version of reality. The same way a photograph can be altered so that it is both real and unreal at the same time, news sources filter the entirety of world events so that they represent a distorted reality.

Maybe in some way, getting rid of the news is bringing me one step closer to that daydream.