Keeping up with the news these days isn’t for the faint of heart. Just separating real, legitimate news from conjecture, as well as purely fake or AI-generated content that’s been designed to mislead us, is a job in itself.
Even those of us with journalism backgrounds, who pride ourselves on confirming facts in every story, are caught in the whirl of a tornado-like information cycle and confused by its content. I recently took an online quiz to “spot the AI-generated photos” and failed it in a spectacular way.
Stoicism teaches us to evaluate every bit of information we encounter against the answer to one fundamental question: Can I do anything about this? If the answer is no, we’re taught to let it go and move on with our lives. Admittedly, this is a tall order when decisions that are out of our hands have real-life implications for us or the people we love.
Caring without being captivated
The question many people ask of Stoics is, “Does this mean we’re supposed to treat those things as if they don’t matter?” Absolutely not.
Stoicism has often been mistakenly interpreted as a withdrawal of emotions, but this isn’t really the case. Emotions are real, they’re important, and expressing them is only human. But once the Stoic has had their moment of anger, elation or frustration, they don’t allow the emotion to consume them.
This is accomplished through different methods:
- Bringing one’s attention back from the macro to the micro level. What in your own life can you control? What needs your attention that will improve your own little part of the world?
- Finding a distraction. That could be doing something creative like writing or painting, or devoting time to helping someone else. Getting outside our own world does a world of good! Giving one’s time, especially to someone less fortunate, is a direct route to gratitude.
- Doing something about the issue, to a point. This could mean taking part in a peaceful protest, signing a petition or calling your government representative and telling them how you feel—then putting the phone down and going on with your day.
The world is what you make of it
Stoics are also sometimes accused of avoiding reality when they don’t agree that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. This is also untrue. We see the world for what it is.
There’s good, as well as bad. We don’t expect everything to run smoothly all the time. Life is messy and unpredictable, and we accept that. But we also try to operate like a social media algorithm. Here’s what I mean:
Many people seem to be unaware that they get more of what they interact with on social media and the internet in general. If they’re constantly clicking on negative stories, the sites’ algorithms will assume that’s what they want and show the person more of them, suppressing information that doesn’t fit the criteria.
That being said, this doesn’t mean a Stoic will only click on videos of puppies and flowers. However, we do keep in mind that social media isn’t the real world. It’s a world the user curates through clicks and likes, and the time we spend there makes a lot of money for each platform’s owners. Our eyes are wide open to its purpose.
To operate like an algorithm, take in less negative information and you’ll begin to see it less often. A person can know what’s going on the world without doom-scrolling and launching a deep dive into every possible opinion about it. Ultimately, we control what we ingest, whether that’s food, drink or news.
Silencing the news cycle’s delivery system
One of the broader related issues is our addiction to smartphones. They’re designed to keep us focused on them with little hits of dopamine from messages and attention from others.
Fortunately, the Stoic value of temperance can be applied here. It’s the virtue of moderation and self-restraint. First, we must accept that we alone decided to devote more time than necessary to a small rectangle in our hand, and then want to do something about it.
Kostadin Kushlev, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, says that smartphones bring us joy in some ways, but they also take away happiness a little at a time. As a gamer, he’s not immune to the lure of his phone, but he’s been working on spending less time on it:
In terms of things that work for me, it is critical to have notifications silenced. I don’t like notification badges on top, the red dots that show you how many notifications you have. That is distracting to me—you see it, and it’s automatic. You have to click on it. My research also shows that batching notifications, having notifications delivered several times a day rather than as they come, can reduce stress and improve well-being.
In other words, you don’t have to be Pavlov’s dog and react every time you hear a bell.
It bears repeating
The Internet isn’t reality. Social media isn’t the real world. It’s designed to keep your attention so its owners can make money. If you want to return to real life, step away from the screen and talk to a neighbour, walk a dog or plant a tree. Do something that speaks to your soul.
Ruminating on issues we can do nothing about not only robs us of joy, but of sleep and sometimes our good nature. To remain at peace, we must keep in mind that not ruminating doesn’t mean we no longer care. We’re just choosing to put our energy where it does us, and the world at large, the most good.
It sometimes helps to remind ourselves that the news is composed of stories about unusual happenings in the world, and hearing about a terrible occurrence isn’t necessarily an indication of a terrible world. Good people are out there doing wonderful things every day, but they don’t make the news because we’re supposed to do good. The anomalies, the bad actors in society attract coverage because they’re less common.
Amid the noise of the news in our 24-hour news cycle, Stoics accept that the common denominator is ourselves. Information is there for the taking, but like a second serving of cake, whether we go for it is completely up to us.
If the news is making you miserable, start with what you can control, and that’s yourself and your level of news consumption. Just like a second piece of cake, too much negative news might also give you a stomachache.
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