No news... 10/13/21 ------------------------------------------------------------ ...is good news. That's what they saying says, and there must be something to it. On 9/11/2001, two weeks before I was getting married, the world changed. Well, at least in my mind, and probably in the collective minds of a few generations of folks. On 9/11/2001, too, I started watching the news. It wasn't that I had never seen the news. We watched it growing up, and I sat in front of it from time to time. That day, I started consuming the news like a drunkard. Part of me felt like I was being responsible, informing myself of world events and such. Whatever the reasons were, that was the start. Fast forward to 9/11/2021. Five US presidential elections, numerous political, social, and whatever-else-under-the-sun events later. Twenty years of bingeing on the "news", and I was done. Burnt out. Used up. Wasted. So, I finally followed the advice a friend gave me--the advice that numerous friends echoed, in fact--and gave up the news cold turkey. I had tried to quit before, but 9/11/2021 was an awakening for me, the completion of something, a revelation. Perhaps I already wrote about it. I'll have to grep around in here when I'm done and see if I was verbose or not. Anyway, I'm here now to write about quitting the news watching of 20 years, one month later. A month of sobriety isn't that much. I guess I'd at least have one sobriety token by now, so it's not nothing. It's been fairly easy, given the revelation mentioned above, which has cemented my resolve. But that's not what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about how things look from this perspective. You see, I thought that by not watching the news, I would feel far less informed, far less connected, and far less in control. And yet, life has gone on. The world still turns. Everything still functions. It turns out, the world doesn't need me to watch the "news" at all. And, I don't feel that I've lost anything at all. No one, surprisingly, has tried to convince me that the news is vital. Not a single person I've told. I'm sure if I got in touch with advertisers, they'd have some other thoughts on the subject, but no real humans have told me that I'm way off base. Email me tfurrows at sdf.org if you are the one who is going to try to convince me. Am I still tempted? Yeah, I am. Maybe I always will be. But, it isn't nearly as bad as it has been in the past. I still read long-form stuff that I come across when I'm looking up specific questions. I still love to read and research. I just don't care much about "current events." (an exception or two: I still track the weather and earth events, watchers.news and the like; and, I still track solar weather and space events. I don't view these things as related to what is generally called "the news".) What month two, three, twelve, and beyond will look like, I don't know. What will I do when global chaos picks up again, as it always does. Maybe I'll read more history, to see what's going on outside my doors now. Or, perhaps I'll be too busy with whatever else fills in the time.