I want to take a break from reading the news for the month of February. Specifically, political news. It’s hard to avoid, but I’ll admit that I seek it out and read more than I need to.
Why do I want to avoid the politics? Because the news is mostly unpleasant, and it’s upsetting, and it doesn’t make me happy, or improve my life or my family’s life, in any way. I can see how it’s because of my white privilege that I have the luxury of blocking off the news. I’m unlikely to be directly affected by anything that might happen in the next month. I’m not at risk of being deported, or experiencing financial problems.
So where do I get my news, and how am I going to block it?
New York Times. I get the daily newsletters. I’ll need to stop reading those. I’ll unsubscribe for the month of February.
There are a few other newsletters that include the news such as NextDraft, and Casey Newton. While I don’t subscribe to them for the politics, it would be impossible to miss any large news events. I’ll unsubscribe from those. If I unsubscribe from any others, I’ll add them here.
I’m not planning on unsubscribing from Pocket Hits that sends the most popular articles of the day. The articles aren’t political, too often, and there is a lot of good content, so I’m just going to skip over anything referencing politics, etc. If things get too bad, I’ll archive the emails for a month.
Log out, and don’t log back in for a month. No way around it.
There is lots of great tech content, but politics are just in the mix, and a part of everything, and it would be impossible to miss.
This is tough. I could hide people from my newsfeed if they share political news. But there are plenty of Facebook pages that also share articles, and I don’t necessarily want to block all of those.
There are Chrome extensions that can do the job for me. I’ll probably go this option if I can find an extension that doesn’t look sketchy and won’t steal my personal information.
I could disable Facebook, but I use Messenger to keep in touch with my family, And Facebook is great for getting updates on people, and seeing photos.
I’m not sure, I don’t really go onto Reddit for the politics. I might be able to hide a few subreddits, but if I stay away from “All”, I’ll be able to avoid almost everything.
News
New York Times, Drudge Report, etc. I’m going to use my hosts file to actually block these sites, since I might type in the URLs out of habit. By blocking the websites with a hosts file, I can’t access the website or any articles at all. Of course, I could easily remove the block by editing the hosts file… but it’s a lot more effort than just clicking on a link, so I won’t do it.
I’m not going to freak out if I hear about the news. The goal of this is to just decrease my own exposure to the news, and then see where I am in 28 days, and how I feel, and whether or not I need the exposure. Will I be happier knowing less? Hopefully, I will.
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