Today Is Day-One of a 30-Day News Fast
By detaching from news, I might just be able to be more of service to humanity than were I to continue the slog through the goings on of a humanity largely asleep
Reading the news can be depressing. And yet there’s something about it that draws me in. Even though I’m selective about the sources I follow I still feel sadness reading about the constant discord, corruption, and violence in the world. I wish more for humanity and can see how easy it would be for us to live in a nearly utopian world if only we held different beliefs about politics, economics, race, ethnicity, gender, and religion. Truly it would only take one little itty-bitty shift in thinking to radically change the course of humanity: that we are all interconnected and interdependent.
Such a small shift, with plenty of science and wisdom to back it up. All of nature is interconnected and interdependent, and yet we tend to perceive ourselves as somehow separate and distinct from nature, which enables the perpetuation of the illusion of separation.
And there it is. Me and you. Us and them. And those “them” people are not right in the head — they have it all wrong and we have it right. And on it goes.
News is a business. It always has been. Even in the days when individuals would travel from village to village sharing happenings from afar, there was still an obligation to deliver something engaging and entertaining. Otherwise, the bringers of news may have found themselves wanting for hospitality, food, and shelter. Remember the colloquialism don’t kill the messenger?
News is meant to entertain, if even in morbid and cynical ways. We need to remember this. There are those who go to journalism school with high ideals and aspirations for enriching humanity. There are even a few publications that do a fairly good job of achieving higher ideals — emphasis on the word “few.” But most news establishments are constantly battling a fine line between making money and doing the right thing. I experienced it firsthand in my eleven years working for a large newspaper. Then there are a number of news outlets that have seemingly no intention of doing the right thing, which calls into question if they are actually a news source at all.
News does not manifest an intention of assisting in the evolution of human consciousness, but with making money or promoting a particular ideology. It’s mostly selfish. SEO writing is one of the most disingenuous forms of writing. SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and there is a whole industry of experts who work continuously to reverse engineer the algorithms and write for maximum ranking. You can spot it when reading a paragraph and come to a phrase or sentence that seems out of place. It’s a little distracting, but one can easily attribute it to “not the best writing,” when in fact it was a deliberate and intentional insertion of a specific phrase designed to rank in the search engines.
There are plenty of bright spots in the world of blogging, newsletters, and Youtubers. There are a few non-profit investigative journalism sites doing amazing work. And yet overall, my personal consumption of news has become a little less than healthy.
This past week’s leak of the draft supreme court opinion indicating the impending demise of Roe vs. Wade was just another of many things that brought up a feeling of sadness within me. Even this morning, I read an email from Heather Cox Richardson, a writer who I can’t say enough good about, and felt sadness. She’s a historian who writes about politics in a historical context. This morning’s email is about the origins of Mother’s Day, and it’s not what you would think. She wrote, “When the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage.”
WOW!
Mother’s Day is about the need for the matriarchy to take charge, to arrest control from the men so hell bent on solving problems through violence. I can’t even just pamper Maria on this day, with the Salmon Benedict I’m making her, without feeling some sadness for the current (and continued) state of human consciousness.
Then it occurred to me, that I need to take some of my own medicine and listen to my own words, as I just recently wrote back in January, Everything Is Exactly as it Needs to Be, and more recently in April, Things Are Getting Better, Even When It Seems Like They Aren’t. So often we talk about and write about what we ourselves most need to hear. So, I’m taking this in and returning to a more peaceful energy today — as I make Maria Salmon Benedict.
And . . . I’m taking a bold step in announcing publicly in this post that today marks the beginning of a 30-day news fast. For the next thirty days I’ll be abstaining from all forms of news. If I see something news related in my social media feeds, I’ll keep scrolling. I’ll delete all my precious daily emails I receive from esteemed writers and news sources. I won’t visit any news sites. No news. Nada.
During this time, I’ll be measuring my emotional state and posting about it daily on social media, and no doubt writing a few blogs about it for the DEEPER side of things. The big challenge I see is a subtle belief I still hold related to what it means to be a well-informed individual. I think this belief is mostly egoic. So, I’ll be looking at this as well.
What I perceive to be the truly important component of this exercise is not just that I might find myself feeling less sadness, or maybe no sadness for the state of human suffering, but rather that I’ll be able to project more of an energy of peace and love into the field of human consciousness. By detaching from news, I might just be able to be more of service to humanity than were I to continue my slog through the goings on of a humanity largely asleep to the reality of its magnificence.
Onward.
Wow! Another home run!