One of the nice things I’ve noticed from not following the daily news (in addition to the countless other benefits) is that I feel less partisan.
My understanding is that it is a well-documented fact that the media has evolved with the internet over the last few decades into a format that caters towards those with pre-existing biases and serves to amplify them.
It slowly turns everyone into a hyper-partisan monster.
Everyone slowly grows to hate “the other side” and thinks that everything on their side is right and everything on the other side is wrong.
In my view, that’s not simply unproductive, it’s also completely wrong.
It also makes people stop thinking. If you become so partisan that you become an ideologue that blindly follows your side, you stop critically thinking. You stop acknowledging that they might be wrong, and that the other side could be right.
My understanding is also that in the past, before the internet (and particularly before Nixon, Reagan, and Roger Stone), people were far less partisan and tended to follow issues much more closely and actually questioned things from their own side.
If people had more of that, the world would be a lot better off.
So for the point of this post, I’ve noticed that when I’m not inundated with the same ideas over and over again, day after day, I am far more receptive to other ideas.
At the very least, I tend not to take things at face value and actually put thought into things. I don’t just believe them because someone on my side said it.
In addition to just feeling way better about literally everything, this has been a really nice side-effect of not following the daily news.