A the beginning of 2014, I decided to take a year off from following the News. A year later I thought I would write a bit about my experience.

The idea of a Low Information Diet first came to me from Mr. Money Mustache. He got it from Tim Ferriss who I think got it from Stephen Covey who probably got it from Siddhartha Gautama or someone like that. The general idea being that watching The News places your focus on things that are outside of your control which ultimately isn’t a very wise way to live. As an avid News follower I thought this would be an especially good experiment for me.

I would no longer read the New York Times or Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish. I stopped listening to NPR. I no longer got the jokes on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. It may sound easy but for me this was incredibly hard. When friends sent articles I read them. I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon or two on the couch with a stray copy of the New Yorker. But I really did drop News consumption from my life to point where it took some adjustment.

Empty Calories

Going in, my biggest fear was that I would become ignorant and fulfill the “ugly American” stereotype. A year later I don’t feel any less a citizen of the world. I can’t tell you the name of the president of France but it turns out I couldn’t have done that before the diet. And that is the problem with The News. It doesn’t teach you the things it makes you feel bad for not knowing. It’s constantly making you feel ignorant without giving you any wisdom.

Templates

I was surprised to see that the world doesn’t change very rapidly. The types of stories I hear on the News now are almost identical to the stories I was hearing a year ago. The protagonists and details change. But the business cycle continues. The human triumphs continue. The politics continues. The injustice continues. The gradual improvement of our world marches on. Taking a year off helped me see News templates in a way I had not previously appreciated. You start to see that we are kind of just repeating the same patterns over and over again. If we want to see change, you have to start to think outside the News cycle and the punditry and the conventional wisdom.

Space

As a News junkie, the major driver of this experiment was a recognition that entertaining myself with News was a crutch that was making my life seem more exciting and intellectual than it actually was. You read about far away places and it’s almost as if you’re there. When work is boring, just spin up a new tab and read about what’s happening in Washington DC or London or Afghanistan. After awhile I realized that it was the control + T buzz that I was actually craving. I loved the possibility that something, anything new had occurred in the thirty minutes since I last checked. Once the page loaded I would scan to see that there was nothing new that really interested me and return to my work. I would repeat this cycle throughout the day in a way that prevented me from ever achieving any kind of flow. Many people do this same thing with email.

Removing this opiate forced me to be honest with myself when I was bored. When I had down time, I had to do something else - like write or go talk to a friend.

The experiment didn’t instantly transform me into a hyper-productive being. But it was an important first step in realizing just how much I used The News to entertain myself and to make the days go by a bit faster. If you take News out of your life you start staring at a lot of blank space. It’s scary and it’s probably not for everyone. But if you want to do something interesting with your life you probably have to stare into that space at some point. You have to look at it and decide that you’re going to do something new to fill that void.

Independence

Belle and Sebastian’s chief songwriter Stuart Murdoch told Terry Gross in an interview that as he started writing music he started listening to other people’s music less. He needed to leave room in his head for his own songs to bubble up.

The most surprising and welcomed benefit of the low information diet was the intellectual independence I felt. Like playing hooky from school it was exhilarating and intellectually empowering. After years of reading and internalizing the opinions of others, I found that in my year away from The News I started to think for myself more than ever before. As a moderate person, I've always given the benefit of the doubt to the media and political establishment. I prefer this approach to outright cynicism, but I benefited from a sharper critical eye.

Reading the opinions of others isn't inherently bad, but I had lost any semblance of moderation. Even if you try to find a diverse range of opinions or a variety of News sources, you are still seeing the world through the eyes of another. Sometimes this is incredibly valuable. Sometimes reading about the conditions of people in Somalia is illuminating and broadening and incites action. Other times it adds clutter.

Fear

The other major claim made by Low Information Diet advocates is that media corporations use fear to create malleable consumers for their advertising partners. While this claim seems a bit too coordinated and conspiratorial for me, you cannot watch 10 minutes of local or national News without finding some new thing to feel anxious about. Stepping out of that cycle did make me feel like less of a fearful person and less anxious about things outside of my control.

Social

Knowing about current events is largely a social lubricant. It is helpful to know what is going on when you’re having lunch with someone you don’t know that well or drinks with coworkers. Not following most News cycles I felt at a slight disadvantage here, but it wasn’t as pronounced as I thought it would be. You can usually pick up the major topics of the day just through osmosis.

Again?

Now that the one year experiment is over, I have to decide whether to continue or not. At this point, it’s actually more of an intellectual question. I no longer feel the same compulsion to read the News that I once did. I’ll read articles that come my way, but I don’t think I will return to reading the New York Times every morning, afternoon, and evening.

Whether you were as addled a junkie as I was or just interested in little life experiments like this, I think it’s a useful exercise. Don’t expect major changes in your life, but I did experience a mild and welcome sense of well being.

Abundance is one of the major issues that first world citizens will have to tackle in the twenty-first century. Like easy calories, drugs and mindless entertainment, we have more access to media and News than we can possibly handle in a healthy way. Figuring out your own limits is probably worth some experimentation.