On news

Whenever I used to follow the news, somehow, I always saw more negative news than positive news. This affected my mood, but it didn’t change anything materially in my life. It was purely passive consumption. I could not do anything about it, and neither did it affect me.

So, I just stopped following the news now - 0 news. I just follow some people on X for tech gyan, and that’s the only source of my general knowledge.

I am so disassociated with news that I didn’t know about the terrorist attack in Pahalgam until at least 2 days later. Neither did I know about the mock drills until it was scheduled within the next few hours.

I have come to realise that this is a good thing. For me. 95% of the news doesn’t affect me in any way, or is blown way out of proportion. The incentives of the media outlets are not in sync with the viewers. In the rest of the cases, where the news can actually affect me, I rely on my peer group to surface it eventually to me (eg, India-Pak war). So I rarely partake in conversations involving recent general news.

This has reduced my general knowledge but given me time to focus on other important things.