In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.
Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
I’ve been reading Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman and it’s just so good. It’s meant to be read one chapter a day for 28 days and it’s hard to read just one chapter.
The reading for Day Six is titled “You can’t care about everything”. It mentions this article from The New York Times about Eric Hagerman’s decision to avoid all news after the first Trump election. He’s spending his time restoring 45 acres of wetlands instead with plans to preserve them forever.
The article’s title and subtitle are telling “The Man Who Knew Too Little: The most ignorant man in America knows that Donald Trump is president — but that’s about it. Living a liberal fantasy is complicated.”
Perhaps he is neither ignorant nor living a fantasy. Perhaps this guy understands that actually spending his time doing something positive will have a greater positive impact in the world than doom-scrolling.
I read only a few of the comments on the article, but they all seem to condemn the guy for being irresponsible for not keeping up with the news – as if there is some moral credit for reading about the constant stream of terrible things that happen.
I think it’s actually really amazing that this guy has picked ONE THING that he can actually make a difference with. Helping to preserve one piece of land is maybe one of the most impactful things a person could do for the world right now. Protecting this one planet we have right now matters and it will matter for generations to come.
Perhaps this resonates so strongly with me because I’ve ended up drawing similar conclusions about these topics on my own.
The news has not contributed in a positive way to my life in the last several years. During the last 8 years in particular, the more I’ve read the news, the more stressed out I’ve felt. The news itself has shifted so much from anything resembling the communication of relevant information to clickbait. If it was really news I might feel differently, but what I was consuming as “news” was not really news. It was something else which was actually very, very toxic to my emotional well-being.
I’ve taken some long breaks from reading the news and while I don’t know the day to day happenings of things, I really don’t feel it makes me less responsible as a citizen. It gives me the emotional bandwidth and clear thinking to focus on the sort of person I want to be with my family, in my job, for myself, what sort of goals are important to me. It lets me focus on bigger goals – questions like how I might like to contribute in a meaningful way to the world, rather than just living in a ball of stress, hopelessness and anger over what is going on in the world.
It’s not that I have my head in the sand – I’m not pretending that things are all rosy and cheery with our world. I am well aware of exactly the sorts of things that are in the news. I’ve read enough of it to pretty much know what it’s in there without reading it. Most of the “news” is really just drama.
(And unlike the guy in the article, I DO let my friends and family talk about the news, so I will hear about anything that is actually really important.)
I’ve thought more and more over the last few years about how I DO want to contribute to the world. I’ve started thinking about my long term goals and my life plans. I’ve thought about what I could do for the world to make a positive impact with the rest of my life.
Some of the people I follow who write about financial topics write about giving 10% to charity – obviously this practice is not new. As my business has been growing I’ve started thinking about how and where I want to give.
I gave money to the Salvation Army during covid and they have sent me so many letters asking for more money since then that I am sure they have spent all the money I gave them and more on those letters and not on actually feeding people on Christmas.
I’ve thought about how if one wants to save for retirement, saving consistently over time and investing the money makes for a lot more retirement savings. What if one saved and invested their money for charity?? If I look at 10% of what I make this month, there’s not much that I can do with it. But what if I saved 10% of my income for 20 years and then used that money for my own project to benefit the world?? That way I could make sure the money was well spent (and not just going to spam mail me later with requests for more money).
Buying and protecting land is very, very high on my list of potential projects. Our natural places need protecting and they don’t have their own voices.
So I could spend time doom scrolling through the news which causes me to feel depressed, stressed, angry and hopeless. Or I could avoid that, wake up, journal about my own goals and thoughts for the day, focus on the things I need to do for the day, take time to get exercise so that I am a healthy person, take care of my kid, work on my business and work towards real, long-term goals to make the world a better place.
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