Pascal’s Diversion
April is here and I’m a few days away from a month without news. I’d like to take the chance to reflect on the past month’s experiment of tuning out.
So far, I’ve doubled my bench press max, earned my first million and found a cure for arthritis…
10 Days Without Headlines
Or perhaps, not quite. There’s a tendency in the self improvement world to oversell the benefits of any given habit or protocol, when the fact is things are much more nuanced and may be as much tied to our expectations as they are to reality.
What started as an intellectual exercise in avoiding distractions has revealed some inconvenient truths (see below) behind why I may have been consuming news at such high frequency to start with. In short, the No News Diet continues, but read below to find out how it’s gone so far.
First of all, let’s evaluate my original conditions from the last article and if I stuck to them:
I will not read news articles or visit news websites.
I will not listen to news on the radio
If tv news is on in public I will ignore it where practical.
I will not watch videos or listen to podcasts discussing recent news.
I will not check news on social media (made easier by the fact I don’t have any)
The Easy Part
Some of these were rules easier to adhere to than others; I’ve taken a break from uploading Tik Toks (I don’t seem to get along with the community guidelines) so I was able to delete Tik Tok from my phone. I’ve also disabled autoplay YouTube shorts, so that averted being sucked into doom scrolling and potentially being exposed to news haphazardly. Radio news was even easier; I’d just stick a podcast or playlist on when driving instead of the car radio. As for podcasts, I’d tend to pick episodes where I thought they weren’t likely to discuss current affairs (anything with a thumbnail like “people are losing their minds”, or indicating something to do with politics or the culture wars was off limits), and I’d have a quick browse though the chapters to check I’m not going to spend 20 minutes listening to what the latest outrage is. These are the easy ones addressed,
So What Was Difficult?
Public news. It was difficult to ignore news on a bus stop such as an LBC headline, luckily most of the time I’d look away without reading, I’d get a glimpse of Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer, or a member of the Royal Family, and deduct it was a news headline before I’ve had the chance to read it. I accidentally caught a headline that Vladimir Putin had won re-election in Russia (hardly a surprise to anyone I imagine). I did however accidentally catch the resignation of Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkhar on a TV as I walked through the reception in my office building!
LBC Bilboards: The menace of the No News Monk
The hardest part was not reading articles. I have come to realise that I had a habit of compulsively checking the front page of the BBC News website before I started this experiment. In random moments of boredom our phones are there to serve as a crutch to keep us occupied, because god forbid we endure any longer than 3 seconds without our thought pattern being interrupted. I caught myself a few times halfway through typing “BBC news” into my browser. At the time I wasn’t even thinking “I wonder what’s going on in the news”, it really was just muscle memory kicking in. I’d been so used to just checking the news whenever I had a brief moment of inactivity, it became second nature.
Fighting this habit was difficult but it also made me aware of some of other strange browsing habits (turns out I check my credit score a few times a day, knowing full well that it only really updates significantly every few months). Youtube analytics is a bastard too; I have already committed to making content for several years, so it begs the question why I should check my views dashboard several times a day, as if I was going to stop or continue purely based on what the dashboard currently says, especially as how often I check has zero correlation with how recently I’ve uploaded a video.
As I predicted before embarking on this journey, people did tell me about news that happened. Here’s some of the highlights:
A terrorist attack in Russia
Princess Katherine has cancer
Border Force intend to go on strike
Majestic Wine has purchased Vagabond
UberEats delivery driver bit someone’s thumb off
The Stoics believed the key to happiness is recognising what is within your control to change and what is not.
Of the things which I did unavoidably find out last month, none of them are in my control (although maybe the universe is trying to tell me to order fewer takeaways).
Accepting that they are outside of my control and there’s nothing I can do with the above information, I move on with my life, focussing on my own problems. This is not to say I somehow lack compassion or empathy for the woes of others, rather I am acknowledging my own irrelevance to the story in question.
If it’s not in the middle circle, forget it
I have noticed my brain has a bit more respite to think through ideas (I’m reading through 4 books at the minute), but I cannot pretend to have attained a level of self mastery when it comes to compulsively checking my phone. Clearly, if you remove one thing it gets replaced by another. In my case, finances and my Youtube channel’s performance have taken the place of breaking news. Now one may argue these are at least things somewhat within my control whereas the news is not, but I don’t need to log in to my bank account 6 times a day, that’s more likely a compulsion than an impulsion.
I like to think I manage this better than many; I sleep with my phone outside of my room, my phone is always on silent, and I tend to put my phone away if I am focused on a task, but I still bemoan the fact I am incapable of sitting alone at a table whilst waiting for a friend without having checked my phone 3 times in the short time they were gone.
I will be continuing with the no news diet, but I shall try and explore what I more can do to improve on the habit hidden behind the frequent consumption of news; the compulsion to consume novelty as an antidote to boredom.
We have been conditioned to think boredom is a bad thing; as if we’re some 80s movie hotshot city executive exclaiming “sell, sell, sell” over the phone or the US president in the situation room, we must project a frantic activity to those around us. We’re all guilty of pretending to check our phones when in an awkward situation, knowing full well no one has texted us (if we’re not, I have spectacularly thrown myself under the bus), to avoid locking eyes with someone across the room.
Our Addiction to Diversion
I’ve been wrestling with Blaise Pascal’s quote: “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
This quote is often interpreted today to be a call to mindfulness and meditation, but there’s something more sinister lying within Pascal’s writings. The quote is actually from an essay called Diversion within his Pensées. Pascal explains that we pursue frantic activity so as to not be left alone with our own thoughts, where we would be hideously confronted with the existential angst of our own mortality.
“Weariness.—Nothing is so insupportable to man as to be completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his loneliness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. At once, from the depth of his soul, will arise weariness, gloom, sadness, vexation, disappointment, despair.”
Get out of my head, Pascal!
Touching base with ourselves can be an uncomfortable interaction, it may take us to a dark place we were not anticipating. We may be faced with some uncomfortable truths, such as the real motivations behind why we do certain things. This curse of consciousnesses however, is a double edged sword. Whilst being left alone with our thoughts may place us in a Vale Tudo MMA fight with our inner monologue and intrusive thoughts, it is perhaps the only time we are thinking independently of stimulus. There’s the common concept of shower thoughts, and perhaps the reason so many people come up with great ideas in the shower is that it’s one of the few moments of our waking hours wherein we are free of stimulus from conversation, our phones or anything else.
So here where are, on with the next step in our journey (you have my full permission to kick me in the nuts if in 4 months time I start writing about the merits of ayahuasca). I’m going to be making use of the Waking Up app by Sam Harris, to see if I can learn through meditation to embrace the stillness and moments of existential angst.
I’m hoping that by becoming accustomed to touching base with my inner monologue, I can be aware of it, and perhaps circumvent some of my more compulsive uses of technology.
Too tall of an order? Stick around to find out.
