Stop Reading The News

Bad news is perceived as more relevant than good news. Negative information has twice the impact that positive information does. In psychology, this is called negativity bias, and it can be observed in even one-year-old infants. They respond more sensitively to negative stimuli than to positive ones. Adults are no different. A stock falling by ten per cent makes us twice as unhappy as a stock climbing by ten per cent makes us happy. Negativity bias is innate.

We ought to try and understand the 'generators' underlying these events. We ought to be investigating the 'engine room' behind them. Sadly, shockingly few journalists are able to explain these causal relationships, because the processes that shape cultural, intellectual, economic, military, political and environmental events are mostly invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our brains to digest. This is why news corporations focus on the easy stuff: anecdotes, scandals, celebrity gossip and natural disasters. They are cheap to produce and easy to digest.

Imagine you're at a football game. A few spectators in front of you stand on their tiptoes to get a better view of the field. Now everybody else is forced to stand on their tiptoes. The net gain is zero, and now everybody's calves are cramping up. It's exactly the same with news production and consumption. The louder one outlet screams, the louder all the others have to scream too. The more outrageous one side's arguments, the more outrageous the other side's counterblast has to be. The consequence? White noise and a polarised society.

The philosopher Epictetus offered another important argument two thousand years ago: 'You become what you give your attention to ... If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.' If you consume the news, you're becoming another person, another character—a worse one than if you filled your mind with wise content. To achieve wisdom, we should choose 'a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works,' suggested the philosopher Seneca.

Nintey-nine point nine per cent of all world events are outside your control. You have no influence on what's happening in the world, where or how. It's much more sensible to focus your energies on things you can control. You can influence what happens in your life, your family, your neighbourhood, your city, your job, but the rest you simply have to accept.

The Stoics, a very practical school of philosophy in Ancient Greece and Rome, symbolised their belief system with the image of an archer. An archer can control which bow he chooses, which arrow he selects from his quiver, how far back he draws the bow and how still he holds it. But from the moment he lets the arrow fly, it's beyond his control. A gust of wind may knock the arrow off course. Or it may break mid-flight. Or something might get between the flying arrow and its target. Or the target may move.

If we survey the last 2,500 years—since philosophers first began to write their ideas down—we find a remarkable degree of overlap between philosophers. 'Inner peace' was nearly always considered a key component of a successful life, though in the old days this concept was often expressed in terms of 'tranquillity', 'equanimity', an 'inner strong-hold', 'serenity' or 'peace of mind'.