Turning off the tap
Jon Honeyball calls time on the endless flow of bad news.
How much is too much? Obviously, I’m not referring to gin. Or a nice wine. Or even the smile of someone you have helped.
No, I am referring to the flood of news that seems to be overtaking everything in our lives. Maybe the start of Covid, and the work-from-home mantra, accelerated the dreaded FOMA or “fear of missing out”. Certainly it prompted us all to pay unprecedented levels of attention to the big questions: how was Covid progressing? Which form of lockdown were we in? Could we speak to five people over the garden fence or was it only three?
I think there was a small, subtle, but important shift in the way we consume news from that point. No longer would we wait for news media to deliver their latest pontifications. Now, we could get the self-same commentators via Twitter delivering their missives in usefully short soundbites. Forget any kind of context or analysis – you could be whisked away to a long-form page of text on some website if required, complete with adverts. Meanwhile the spoken format of podcasts seemed to gain relevance, at least in my circles. Maybe it was because you could listen to this stuff while driving to work, and have a change from the same radio commentators repeating the same thing on a ten-minute rotation cycle.
With the arrival of 2022, we all hoped for a return to normality, whatever that was. But no, this was not to be: the unfolding war in Ukraine led to a growing worry about the economy, energy prices and where to buy petrol at a decent price. Or even at all. Then Her Majesty died. The news cycles reached unknown levels of hysteria.
So surely we have reached Peak News Flood? Of course not. But now I have reached peak exhaustion. I am clamping down on my news feeds, and trying to Take Back Control (remember that?). And yet the news flood keeps increasing. This morning I went down a rabbit hole reading an expert’s article explaining how the population of snow crabs has been decimated. All to do with artic ice shelves, and what happens deep in the ocean.
The more you hear and read, the worse things appear to be. And there is actually nothing that can be done by the likes of you and me. Of course, we can turn the heating down, think about the replacement cycle for the car and decide that it will be electric when it finally dies. Small changes are good, even if they are small, as they add up. But, despite all the good intentions and worthy efforts, it is so dispiriting when being flooded by all of this noise as, deep in our hearts, we know that our efforts are irrelevant in the greater picture.
Maybe it is time to cut off the tap. To walk away from all the ya-hoo-nonsense of the politicians and political commentators. To continue to make donations to appropriate charities that can do real good out there, pull the lid over my head and then weld it shut from the inside.
Little wonder that many people watch YouTube videos of cats to calm them down, but I am yet to find my equivalent.
Perhaps a channel showing wood logs burning in a fireplace, with the subtle crackle of the embers? Except I would then feel guilty about the carbon generation.
"So surely we have reached Peak News Flood? Of course not. But now I have reached peak exhaustion. I am clamping down on my news feeds, and trying to Take Back Control (remember that?)."