2020 has been a crazy year so far. Nothing new here. I have the habit to read news in the morning, like a lot of people. Nothing special there. With the presidential election coming up, the different news outlets are just going with what is mostly sensationalism. That impacts the mood of people in ways that I didn’t really consider before. For some interesting reading about this, check Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being or the HN thread.

I wanted to run a similar experiment as what some of the commenters on that thread mentioned, “Avoid reading the news”. The logic behind it is pretty simple:

  1. If something is really important, you will hear about it outside of your morning reading.
  2. It can put you in a bad mood/mess with your emotional state early in the morning, switching your mindset for part of the day.
  3. It takes time, if you want to be somewhat thorough and read from multiple sources on specific issues.
  4. At the end, most of the news of today don’t matter a week from now.

I did try that for more than a week now. I don’t check twitter as much, and avoid social media. I only get a news digest by email once a day that I don’t read. I don’t miss reading news. Most of it carry a negative tone. We need some positive news, while having good and neutral reporting on COVID, and objective and fact-driven reporting on politics.

Not reading news also gives me time to read other type of articles, whether they are technical or straight Wikipedia page about random things, it feeds my brain with more questions that are worth answering more than the reality-tv show we are currently living in.

Hoping for a better 2021.