Turn It Off
6
min. read
Ask yourself — when was the last time a news story actually changed something in your life? Not made you angry. Not made you anxious. Actually changed something.
If you can't remember, it's because it didn't.
The news doesn't tell you what to do with your career, your relationships, your money, your time. It doesn't make you a better parent, a better partner, a better version of yourself. It doesn't help you live.
The goal of the news is not to inform you.
It's to generate ad revenue by keeping your attention.
Emotionally charged stories that feel urgent but aren't. Catastrophized events that feel unprecedented until the next one. Noise dressed up as information.
You finish watching and feel like you just accomplished something.
You didn't.
Then there's the outrage cycle.
The more extreme the take, the more attention it gets. The more attention it gets, the more extreme the next take has to be. Outrage culture isn't a side effect of the news. It's the business model.
Social media pours gasoline on it. The algorithm rewards the most outrageous content. The angriest post. The most divisive take. It doesn't care about truth. It cares about engagement.
It's not just what they cover. It's how far they reach to find it.
It used to be local. Your news was your town, your region, your world within reach. Now they search the entire globe — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — for anything that can trigger fear or FOMO.
The delivery mechanism made it possible. Newspapers became radio. Radio became television. Television became the internet. The internet became your phone. Each step wider, faster, louder. And with every evolution, the noise grew — and so did the reach, the speed, and the appetite for crisis, conflict, and catastrophe.
And now that noise never leaves your side. It lives in your pocket. It follows you to dinner, to bed, to the moments that are supposed to matter most. Constant. Relentless. And getting louder.
People who consume news constantly overestimate crime, violence, and danger in the world. They trust others less. They feel worse about their own lives — not just the world. Watching catastrophic events on repeat creates real anxiety and stress even when you have no direct connection to them whatsoever. The trauma is documented. The pessimism is measurable.
Studies show people who watch partisan news are actually less informed than people who watch no news at all.
The temporary market panic gets the headlines. The decades of prosperity before, and after, don't get the same coverage. Real human progress is rarely reported accurately.
Pessimism sounds smart. Always has. The man who despairs when others hope has always been admired as a sage. Pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds naive. A bear sounds like a sharp mind. A bull sounds like a cheerleader.
But pessimism always gets the same thing wrong. It extrapolates present trends without accounting for how reliably people, markets, and societies adapt. To the pessimist a bad event is the end of the story. To the optimist it's a slow chapter in an otherwise excellent book.
History is on the optimist's side. Always has been.
The truth is there has never been a better time to be alive. More opportunity, more access, more abundance than any point in human history. People lifted out of poverty at unprecedented rates. Longer lifespans. Medical breakthroughs that were unimaginable a generation ago. Technology that puts the sum of human knowledge in your hand.
And long-term, the trajectory is up.
It doesn't stop at fear. FOMO is the other side of the same coin. The fear of missing out. The feeling that everyone else is winning and you're watching from the sidelines.
The market rips and suddenly everyone is getting rich but you. A new investment is going parabolic and you're missing out.
Fear says get out. FOMO says get in.
Both are noise. Neither are relevant to your life.
You control your time, energy, attention, and action.
What you allow yourself to focus on is what determines how you live. Media companies want your attention — and the ad revenue that comes with it. The algorithm is built around it. And most hand it over without a second thought.
Our advice is simple. Shut it off. Turn off the alerts and step away from the feed. Read a good book. Go outside — go for a walk. Focus your time, energy, and attention on the people and experiences that actually matter.
Your life is our passion,
