Before we begin, a reminder:
I’m launching exclusive content! My first exclusive post is going to go out on Sunday, August 1st. This is when I’ll begin releasing my writing for The Unfamiliar Movement Project, the personal healing journey I’m on. Also, based on the feedback I received from the Google Form I sent, I’ll be offering a private server where readers can chat and meet each other, and if enough people sign up, I’ll be opening up the opportunity to write paid guest posts once a fortnight.
For the next seven days, I’m offering 40% off for one year. This means that if you sign up now, it will be $3 per month or a flat rate of $24 a year for exclusive content. After August 1st, it will be $5 per month and $40 per year.
If you are honestly, truly in a challenging financial place and you still want to join, no worries! Send me an email and I’ll add you to the community, no questions asked.
Now, without further ado, on to today’s post!
If you’re a psychology nerd like me, you’re probably familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
If you’ve never seen it before, think of it as an arcade game: The objective is to build a happiness pyramid in your own life. You start with the foundation (basic needs), then as those needs are met, you’re able to pile more happiness on that bedrock. Once you have physical safety, you can dedicate yourself to building love and belonging.
Now, because of the way our world currently works, there are a lot of crappy building materials around. If you’re looking in the wrong places or consulting the wrong people for happiness-building materials, you might end up laying a styrofoam foundation that’s going to send the whole pyramid tumbling to the ground.
The 24-hour news cycle is one of the worst places to look for happiness-boosting materials. Why? Because most news is funded by advertising.
That means that the point ceases to be keeping people informed, and becomes keeping people’s attention so that you can sell them things.
Now, if you’re selling a completely gratuitous home security system, or a blood pressure medication, how do you make sure that you keep people’s attention? You make them afraid and anxious. You dig up all the bad things that are happening in the world and blitz them into people’s faces in real-time.
If you’re a high-news consumer who’s getting their news from the most entertaining, publically-funded sources, your news pyramid ends up looking like this (the purple monster represents the news).
You haven’t finished building the second layer, because the news monster keeps eating your happiness.
“But… But I need to stay informed! It’s my duty!” You might be yelling.
True! As citizens of various democracies, we have a responsibility to be well-informed so we can make decisions about how to be most effective with our time and resources.
It is not, however, your responsibility to:
Feel fear and hopelessness, and buy things as a result.
Be entertained while being informed.
Social media algorithms create echo chambers for us. Because of this, what most people are really saying when they say “it’s my duty to be informed” is not that at all. They’re saying “I want what I already believe to be echoed back to me in a way that entertains me.”
There is a huge difference between being informed and entertained. One is useful to society, and the other is lazy.
Truly informed people do not just check out a few news sources that confirm their current worldviews. They get balanced perspectives, especially when that means finding out what the people who disagree with them actually believe.
There are two wonderful, completely free services you can use right now to start building a balanced perspective. Check out Adfontes media’s Media Bias Chart, and look at Allsides. The media bias chart rates media on a curve by how biased they are towards a certain side. Allsides lays out today’s news for you, but on a bias spectrum. Every story has a left-leaning headline, a center headline, and a right-leaning headline so that you can see how different people are perceiving the same story.
Your favorite news source is not exempt from bias, and neither are you. You are not most likely to believe objective truth, you are most likely to believe what you want to be true.
A good rule of thumb is: Get the vast majority of your news from publically funded sources (NPR, PBS). To add a balanced perspective, get the rest of your news from sources outside your own country (for me that’s BBC and Al-Jazeera).
Now you’ve got to opt out of the 24-hour cycle. Shut down the news feed on your phone, get rid of news apps, and make sure notifications are off. Why would you want bad news to interrupt you at any time of day? Pretend it’s 1955. You get to read the news in the morning, then you go about life until the next morning when you pretend you’ve been delivered a newspaper again.
Most disinformation in today’s news occurs at the cutting edge. Because news outlets are trying to be first, they’re writing fastest, not most accurately. Because we’ve been conditioned to consume bad news at all times of day, we’re actually less likely to feel empathy and act, not more. You cannot wrap your head around all human suffering in real-time. No one can.
Now you can start building your “love and belonging” level on your happiness pyramid. But there’s one more BS-filtering strategy I’d like to leave you with:
Follow the money.
Because of the way we consume information in today’s world, always remember that information is a product. Someone profits if you believe something, whether it’s directly or indirectly.
No matter how badly you want to think that something’s true, always ask yourself “who profits if I believe this?” If you’re able to find out and you’re okay with it, go ahead. But don’t sit there thinking that someone’s trying to do you a favor, or that a major news network is full of crusaders for the truth. That would be naive, which you, my friend, are not.
Remember, when looking for true news:
Seek to be informed, not entertained
Research the bias of your favorite news source, add in a few more
Take away the news’s power to interrupt you at all times of day
Follow the money
If you implement these strategies, I guarantee you’ll feel safer and happier in the world.
Happy researching!
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