In Defence Of Wilful Ignorance

In what looks to be a hectic year with elections all over the globe, bloody conflicts raging and economic hardship, it might seem the perfect time to be glued to the news. And yet, I find myself at the start of an experiment to do just the opposite; I am going to spend a month without checking any news and see how (if at all) it changes my relationship to information.

We are caught in a 24 hour news cycle, where we have the ability to follow each and every development at our fingertips. Such remarkable progress cannot be understated, and the opportunities in the Information Age are truly infinite. But it has come at some cost; our attention span. More content is being uploaded in one day than we could possibly consume within a millennium, which means the competition for our attention is stiff. The best data engineers in the world are producing algorithms which keep bombarding us with content aimed at holding our focus, leaving us in a fatigued, aimless state. Most of the stuff we see is here today, gone tomorrow.

Most of this information will not have any direct impact on how you live your life, nor will you likely have any capacity to do anything about what you are shown. To which we must ask, then why am I watching this? I can’t do anything about it, it makes me feel worse, and my knowledge is superficial and loses its relevance in an afternoon.

In the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Watson is incredulous to discover that whilst Holmes has incredible powers of deduction, the most impressive knowledge on tobacco, botany and footprints, he lacks even the most elementary scientific knowledge, such as that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Holmes contends it would make no difference to his work if the Earth revolved around the Moon.

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

Sherlock Holmes: Shits given about the Solar System? Zero.

To choose to become knowledgable on something is to make peace with the fact that you’re going to be ignorant about something else; to do otherwise is merely to pretend. Once you accept this fact, a new world of possibilities opens up; you get to choose what you are going to be ignorant about.

And so for a month I will not know anything about politics, which celebrity said something controversial, which conflict caused endless suffering, or who won the 6 Nations (I’ve given up on Wales).
To set a few ground rules, until April:

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)




Instead of reading instant news, I’m embarking on an experiment to spend more time reading about long term ideas, books that have stood the test of time. Foundational works- the first ideas in any domain, will always serve as a point of reference throughout your journey of discovery. If you want to understand economics, don’t check Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal every day on whether the S&P 500 is up or down, read Adam Smith’s The Wealth Of Nations. If you want to understand politics, don’t follow every syllable spouted by TV commentators’, read Plato’s Republic. Such works are not easy to digest, they will take time to read, reread, and fully appreciate, but you will arrive at a deeper understanding of the topic than constantly jumping on whichever shiny object may happen to appear. Reading long form can feel a waste of time, there’s not the instant gratification like when you view a 30 second video, it will take time for your thoughts to develop. The psychologist Amos Tversky quipped "You can waste years being unable to waste hours”- sometimes the most productive thing in the long term does not appear productive in the short term, and vice versa; frantic busyness and absorption of new information may appear productive in the short term, but leads nowhere in the long term.

So why have I singled out the news for my low information diet instead of funny videos on Youtube? I believe the news occupies a particularly sinister spot because of the social pressure to appear to be an informed citizen; to come across as a good person, it’s no longer enough to express kindness to the people around you, you have to announce your sympathy for events on another continent beyond your realm of control, as if you were a head of state expected to make a statement.

But most of us are in not in a position to do anything about the potholes in our city, much less solve the wars in the Middle East! It’s self indulgent to pretend our opinion one or another makes the slightest of differences.

But what about if a war starts or the economy crashes? I have every confidence the people around me will let me know. Such events are impossible to avoid; family, friends, co-workers will no doubt bring such an event to my attention, so there’s no fear on that front. The biggest challenge, is to be willing to appear out of touch with the latest developments on any given issue, knowing that you’ve instead dedicated your attention to what is important to you. And so like Sherlock Holmes, I’m going to choose the furniture going in my attic.