A month or so ago I took a weekend away to do a solo spiritual retreat, which I’ve done a few times now and have always benefitted greatly from. I’m hoping to do them quarterly going forward.
As I reflected on some things in my life, I decided I want to spend drastically less time on my phone. Two ways I thought of to accomplish that included checking my phone only three times a day at specific times (and only spending 20-30 minutes on it when I did) and otherwise being on Do Not Disturb, and disabling notifications for all news apps and creating a recurring task for myself to read the news a few times each week.
One thought I had as I started adjusting to my lighter diet of headlines and articles was that there can be a sort of meaninglessness to our consumption or intake of news. As some have already said long before me, it does feel like we as humans aren’t quite meant to have access to as much information as we now have access to. I’m inclined to believe we’re made for more of the flesh-and-blood stuff of life, particularly embodied relationships with other people, and reading the news can often draw us away from those relationships in favor of an attractive alternative that really doesn’t accomplish much. By that I mean, if I read the news to be informed, what am I actually accomplishing in or contributing to the world based on that newfound knowledge and information? I fear that often my motivation has simply been a desire to appear smart to other people.
Simply put, maybe I ought to read the news less if my only reason for doing so is to chime in to a conversation with, “oh, I heard about that……pity,” make no other remote contribution to the topic, and return to my quietude pleased with myself that I might now appear more relevant, aware, and in-the-know—all while accomplishing nothing beyond my own self-aggrandizement.
The monks and nuns have probably influenced me in my thinking here, but it seems like a far better practice to read the news, pray for the people and communities affected by what I’ve just read, check in with any people affected by it with whom I have a relationship, and perhaps even consciously decide not to say anything about the topic even if it does come up in conversation.