First we had cuckoo clocks, then cheese with large holes in it, and finally Rolf Dobelli's Die Kunst des klaren Denkens (who's Swiss hence his book is written in German - but then so was Mein Kampf.)
If you can't read his book, either because you're allergic to Swiss cheese or can't stand the sound of cuckoo clocks, or because you can read neither German nor Swiss, you may want to read his English essay Avoid News - Towards a Healthy News Diet.
In it Dobelli makes the case that news makes us distracted, wastes time, kills deeper thinking, fills us with anxiety and is toxic to our mental health. His analogy: "News is to the mind what sugar is to the body."
Dobelli's analogy with food is a good one. We know if you eat too much junk food, it makes us fat and can cause us all kinds of health problems. Dobelli makes a good case that the mind works the same way. News is brightly coloured candy for the mind.
News is systematically misleading, reporting on the highly visible and ignoring the subtle and deeper stories. It is made to grab our attention, not report on the world. And thus, it gives us a false sense of how the world works, masking the truer probabilities of events.
News is mostly irrelevant. Dobelli says to think about the roughly 10,000 news stories you've read or heard over the past year. How many helped you make a better decision about something affecting your life?
We get swamped with news, but it is harder to filter out what is relevant - which gets me to another point that hit home. Dobelli talks about the feeling of "missing something." When traveling, I sometimes have this feeling. But as he says, if something really important happened, you'd hear about it from your friends, family, neighbours and/or co-workers. They also serve as your filter. They won't tell you about the latest antics of Madonna because they know you won't care.
Further, news is not important, but the threads that link stories and give understanding are. Dobelli makes the case that "reading news to understand the world is worse than not reading anything." In markets, I find this is true. The mainstream press has little understanding of how markets work. They constantly report on trivia and make links where none exist for the sake of a story, or just for the sake of having something that "makes sense."
The fact is we don't know why lots of things happen. We can't know for sure why, exactly, things unfolded just as they did when they did. As Dobelli writes, "We don't know why the stock market moves as it moves. Too many factors go into such shifts. Any journalist who writes, 'The market moved because of X'... is an idiot."
You contaminate your thinking if you accept the neat packages news provides for why things happen. And Dobelli has all kinds of good stuff about how consuming news makes you a shallow thinker and actually alters the structure of your brain - for the worse.
News is also costly. As Dobelli points out, even checking the news for 15 minutes three times a day adds up to more than five hours a week. For what? He uses the example of the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008. If a billion people spent one hour of their attention on the tragedy by either reading about it in the news or watching it, you're talking about 1 billion hours. That's more than 100,000 years. Using the global life expectancy of 66 years means the news consumed nearly 2,000 lives!
Pretty wild, right?
So what to do? Dobelli recommends swearing off newspapers, TV news and websites that provide news. Delete the news apps from your iPhone. No news feeds to your inbox. Instead, read long-form journalism and books. Dobelli likes magazines like Science and The New Yorker, for instance. If you're like me interested in the market, read the weekly Economist.
Dobelli himself has sworn off the news. And he reports he feels much better for it: "less disruption, more time, less anxiety, deeper thinking and more insights." I can't do the whole idea justice here; you have to read Dobelli's article yourself. It is the antidote to news. It is long, and you probably won't be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost the reading habit and struggle to absorb more than four pages straight. This article will show you how to get out of this trap - if you are not already too deeply in it. Check out the full article here.
Print it out! (it's only 10 pages). Turn off the smartphone. Stop checking email for 25 minutes. And just read it. Be forewarned: It might just change your life!
