About six months ago, I decided to get off social media. I wasn’t particularly active anymore, but I did a lot of scrolling, mostly on Threads and a little on X. I rarely went on Facebook, and I never made the transition to the more visually-oriented platforms like Instagram much less Tik-Tok. So I was already mostly gone, but I decided to stop entirely. I removed the apps, and read only my MB timeline.
It wasn’t difficult. It was mainly something I reached for automatically. But I did feel an almost immediate sense of relief. I was no longer getting pulled into the outrage de jeur.
But then I started reading news sites, trying to find a good source for doing my duty as a citizen of staying up to date on contemporary politics. I had the AP app, MSNBC (now MS NOW), CNN, and The Dispatch.
When I lived in NYC while I was doing doctoral work in the late 80s, I did what most NYers did: each morning, I’d walk to the deli and by a newspaper, usually the NY Times, and I’d spend Sunday mornings reading the Sunday Times. And even then, I’d finish and feel as if I’d wasted my morning watching cartoons. I didn’t find current events satisfying, nor did I find the editorials particularly thoughtful. And now here I was, 35 years later, feeling the same thing about the news sites. I was back to the outrage de jeur again, but spending even more time on them than I had been when I was popping into Threads.
Finally I realized, as Ricky Nelson once sang, “it was time to leave.”
This was harder, because all my life it has been drummed into my mind that being a Good Citizen meant keeping up on The Issues. But I felt as if I was constantly being made to pay attention to Trump. Steve Bannon had talked about “flooding the zone,” and that now dominated the news cycle: throwing chum to the pundits, who enthusiastically generated post after post analyzing, fretting over, condemning, and prognosticating about the latest nonsense that happened to cross through Trump’s (or any other politician’s) pea brain.
Then I read Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration, and I started to understand what was happening to me. “The tsunami of information,” Han writes, “means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. [And so] It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening. Since I am now retired, and I want to do a lot more contemplation, this was not good. More Han: “Information cuts up time. Time is reduced to the narrow track of what is momentarily relevant. It lacks temporal extension….A life that trudges along from one present moment to the next, from one crisis to the next, from one problem to the next, slows to a mere survival. Living is more than just problem solving.” Another nail: “In digital late modernity, we conceal the nakedness - the absence of meaning in our lives - by constantly posting, liking and sharing. The noise of communication and information is supposed to ensure that life’s terrifying vacuity remains hidden.”
I had become increasingly aware that politics–the vacuous, superficial politics that we’ve been living with since at least 2016, and probably since the 24-hour news cycle was invented–had gradually chipped away at my ability to tolerate meaningful narrative. I found myself reading books about politics, and realized that they were just longer versions of punditry based entirely on a foreshortened version of history combined with a heightened sense of existential danger. At the same time, I was receiving more and more emails and text messages from political organizations telling me that, unless I contributes X number of dollars right now “we” were in danger of losing the House, losing the Senate, losing the Presidency, losing democracy. I wasn’t supposed to do anything, learn anything, understand anything – just send money. I had become a vending machine, not a participant in democracy.
Around the same time, I attended my first annual town meeting for my little town in Berkshire County, population 3254. There was probably 75 people at the meeting, which was focused largely on approving the budget. There was some discussion, a few ad hominem attacks, and after about 3 hours the budget was approved. It wasn’t life changing, but when I walked to my car afterwards, I felt more a part of my community. I knew some of the main characters, a few of the plot lines, and could see the issues that might lead to crisis points later. After 3 hours sitting on an uncomfortable folding chair in a stuffy room, I felt calmer somehow, and more rooted in my place.
So about two weeks ago, I stopped checking the online news sites. I read my local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, which is an excellent paper that has a little national news but mostly stories of local goings on. My focus drifted from the US-as-a-whole to my town, my county, and my state. And as my understanding of these deepened, I felt empowered, because there were things I cared about that I could actually do something about, something more than just contributing money.
I also found that my ability to concentrate on novels, ideas, and philosophy began to improve. Our tiny local library was having a summer reading challenge that gave us ten categories of books (e.g., set outside country, body of water in title, 2026 release, and so forth, as well as one category of an experience [museum, concert, or hiking]) to read over the course of six weeks; I filled them all in. Instead of reaching for my phone, I reached for a book or an ebook.
I checked into the news sites once every week or so, and realized that most of it was just the same-ole-same-ole: Trump was insulting the looks of another female reporter, Hegseth was firing another qualified military leader, pundits were fretting over the latest Supreme Court case, the Iran War was back on and then off again. I hadn’t “missed” anything, really, except a lot of anxiety.
I know mine is an old story: gosh, I got off my phone and I felt so much better! Hoop-de-doo! Still, I was surprised at how much better I felt not fulminating about things I could do little about, and that didn’t really affect me directly. I spent time actually looking at the websites for the Senate candidates who I’ll have to vote for in the upcoming primary instead of relying on the newspapers to “frame” the “race” according to their own priorities. I signed up to receive email updates from my town’s website – today, for instance, I found out that mosquitos with West Nile virus have been found in towns around me and I should be cautious about being bitten. Good to know! That’s something I can do something about. I’m going back through my personal library and finding books I never read that suddenly sound intriguing. I’m going to read them.
What can I remove from my life next???