– Wonder Woman lassos Catwoman
– Catwoman pees in Tina Fey’s shoes
– Tina Fey gets Wonder Woman a sandwich, a copy of the Feminine Mystique, and a Kevlar bathrobe, until she has time to go shopping for something more realistic for crimefighting than a leotard.
Ladies and Gentlemen, It’s the time you’ve all been waiting for — that’s right, it’s Late Night Poetry time, a monthly feature here at the Skinny (where our motto is: No, I Do Not Want To Hear That Song That Loud At This Hour).
Ah, spring! New buds, warm weather, and, if you’re Shakespeare, unconsolable longing. Get out your lighters, unwrap your pathos, and let’s all commiserate with lovelorn Will:
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
– William Shakespeare
I saw this article after a morning of obsessive refreshing about the Boston marathon suspect manhunt. From 8:30 to 9:30am – one whole hour! – that’s what I did. I ceased to think, ignored my day’s plan, did not even notice that an hour had flown by. One entire hour of my precious work day (my work days actually are precious to me; am not being ironic).
Then a friend posted this article by Rolf Dobelli… and I read it, and felt set free. Because all the news swirling today – it makes me miserable.
Be afraid! Worry! Despair for the world! Look at those evil people: focus on them! Worry that you are next!
Give up! Why do anything?! You’re just going to die at the height of your vitality in a totally random bombing/mass shooting/plant explosion/terrorist attack/nuclear strike!
But, let’s face it. You’re much more likely to die in a car accident. : ) Or of cancer, or, the point is, of something more specific to your particular life; your genes, diet, choices, vices. We truly know not the hour nor the day. Staying inside won’t save us, and getting out won’t either. And this is the part I’ve been getting wrong: being worried all the time won’t, either. It just leaches the joy out of being here now.
Yes, it could be that we, or worse, someone we super duper love, will die in one of these big scary random group events. But, when you think about it, there are soooooooo many ways to die. To quote one of my own songs on the subject of death: if God is real, he’s certainly creative about how to get the job done.
I think I’ve been doing this all wrong. I forgot about the option to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative Perhaps instead of hunching over our glowing screens restlessly ingesting tiny bites of ADD-inducing factoids, we should git up and gather together and enjoy being here more.
So I’m re-posting the article for you. Read it, and then maybe step away from the infernal machine for a while? Twirl in the kitchen, or walk outside. Put on a song, and sing along. : )
News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.
We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.
News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.
News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we’d expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That’s not the case.
News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.
News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, “The market moved because of X” or “the company went bankrupt because of Y” is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of “explaining” the world.
News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory’s capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.
News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.
News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?
News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is “learned helplessness”. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.
News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t.
Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.
I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.
This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
Hello, lurker friends! Welcome! (I’m a frequent lurker myself. Joining is not everybody’s cup of tea.)
If you’d like to hear more about where I’ll be playing, you can sign up for my mailing list via the form on the right side bar. (thataway) ————->
Or lurk on: you can read the latest without signing up:
My friend Caleb is an indie rock star. He packs venues in many cities (including here in NYC), tours relentlessly, and has national name recognition from singing his way onto American Idol a couplea seasons ago – without even showing off his virtuosic guitar playing. The man works his petushka off.
So it was interesting to hear his response to the What Are Your Dreams question. I’m re-posting his answer from his blog in full.
Today someone asked my what my dreams are… like my goals or something. Goals & dreams are so different. If you ask me, goals are achievable, but dreams are luck. You gotta fall asleep on the right night with the right things going through your head in some simultaneous combustion. That’s a dream. You can’t predict it. You can hardly remember it. You can hardly believe it.
Well anyway, my goal is to have 500 fans show up to a show in any given city countrywide. Right now I’ve got anywhere between 1 and 200. Those 200 shows are fun and those 1 shows aren’t but this is what I signed up for when I decided to chase this dream ten years back. My goal may be achievable with a high amount of luck… and maybe it’ll even sustain with a higher amount of luck. But when all said and done, let’s face it. Luck is it. Luck is the main ingredient in all of our dreams.
Stretch break time!
Get up outta that chair!
Snap, clap, sing along!
It’ll make ya feeeeeel goood…
You folks know Shel Silverstein, yes, of course, right? One of the best books ever written in English IMHO is Where the Sidewalk Ends. I tend to focus on Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout (who Would Not Take the Garbage Out) and other of the wackier poems from that collection, but I find the title poem is more poignant as time goes by….
Where the Sidewalk Ends
from “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1974)
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
and before the street begins,
and there the grass grows soft and white,
and there the sun burns crimson bright,
and there the moon-bird rests from his flight
to cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
and the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
we shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow
and watch where the chalk-white arrows go
to the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
and we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
for the children, they mark, and the children, they know,
the place where the sidewalk ends.
– Shel Silverstein
Thanks to my new friend Jeff Z (not Jay-Z; that’d be super cool but quite surprising) I was interviewed on an excellent radio show called Live and Local, hosted by Kevin Kelly, which originates out of WILL-FM in Urbana, IL (and I believe is syndicated to other places, too).
It’s so inspiring to watch someone do something well, with ease, isn’t it? DJ Kelly was so smooth (like buttah!), managing our – mostly my – rambling ruminations with consummate skill and keeping the show flowing and well-paced, down to the last second, quite literally. That’s gotta be tougher than he made it look.
It was me, a duo called the Flower Jax (lovely people, fun music), and Kevin, plus a handful of guests in the studio, most welcome for a live performance addict like myself.
Here are a few shots of the day…
Radio’s funny – you’re singing into a microphone that’s not amplifying you, in a purposefully dead room, and if there’s an audience, often it’s trying hard to keep quiet. Definitely not the same energy exchange experience as during a gig. (I can talk about energy. I lived in San Francisco.)
So it can be odd, but this one was fun! You can judge for yourself — will post the whole interview to my website. It’s an hour, so it’s ideal for frequent travelers. Download or stream it, and voila, there I’ll be, chatting and singing. It’ll be be a lot like having me there with you in the car, minus the food wrappers and ‘are we there yet?’. It’s a virtual road trip! Looking forward to it.
Oh, the pickle hat burger is a curious thing
Dormant in winter and poppin’ up in spring
Keeps off the rain and adds such flair
Can you imagine a better topper there?
Pickle hat burger!
Pickle hat burger!
Pork pies stand down – the pickle hat’s in town!
