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The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)

Cutting out the news has been one of the best lifestyle decisions I've made in recent years, second only to cutting out social media (though the two are not mutually exclusive). Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed up more of my time to pursue other interests and deeper reading.

I believe that if I want to improve myself, I should begin by critically looking at what I have in my life and removing something (an object, behavior, or belief) before adding something new - much like cutting out the heavily processed shit that we put in our body. This is why we're presented with bite sized nuggets of information in the form of headlines, lazy articles, and tweets that don't require much thinking because it's easy for our minds to digest. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

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