I Read The News Today Oh Boy

A continuous effort to optimize my news consumption habits and answer the question of to what end does The News serve me and to what lengths do I go to to serve The News?

What would I miss out on if I accepted that most of my consumption habits are born out of boredom, anxiety, perceived obligation, and the habitual need, forged over a decade-plus, to accumulate a certain shared social currency so that I might gamble again and again and again at the blinking attention casino in my pocket? What if my “optimization” consisted instead of a daily (as it currently is) and disciplined (as I am working towards it being) prioritization not only of those sources for which I gladly pay – The Washington Post, The Economist, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and WIRED – but of the centuries of knowledge and thought awaiting in the books stacked perilously, one on top of the other, tsundoku-style, on the far shelf?

Perhaps I’d have more to write about than a purpose squandered daily to the whims of FOMO and a resultant systemic overload which not only perpetuates itself but exists solely at the expense of a single-minded focus on The Work at hand.

Reading: Thomas Hardy, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

Listening: Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan & Okko Kamu, SIBELIUS: THE COMPLETE SYMPHONIES