Events that happen around us do not represent reality—unless they are experienced from our unique perspective first hand. News serve as an echo to what most of us understand as truth. We hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see. Some people made sure to serve us the version of the world we crave because this is exactly what we ordered.
Following the news is much like an addiction. This is true for any domain of life whether the news are about crypto, fashion, sports, politics or anything in between. News Sites do not sell “news” but rather our cravings about the state of the world. On our end we only receive a repackaged opinion of someone about the world. An opinion that stimulates our passions and justifies our fears. This is why we rarely hear anything good. News sites make sure to tell us that the world sucks so it's ok if we suck too. Hollywood works much the same way.
One would think that exposing oneself to more news sites would solve the problem. This is not true. Ingesting more and more material doesn’t solve the problem, but rather aggravates it. Information is not always good as one would think. Information creates noise and clutter in regards to what is really going around us. Our brain can only handle that much. Instead of relieving it we stuff it even more.
If that was not enough, most news tanks have vested financial and political interests. If for example an event occurs, one site will present the situation different than another. The event might be cut and clear such as “man murders woman”. Who that man is, why he did it, what impact this has to society and other speculative projections, are up to the news site to imprint that kind of information in our mind. At the end of the day reality gets distorted, completely forgetting that the information we received was not news at all ot begin with. Murder is something that happens all around us all the time. We oversee why is it still happening because we are too busy blaming each other for it's cause.
The way we perceive information begins with history books. It has been said that the entire history of the world can fit into 100 pages if one is laconic enough. Nonetheless, we get millions of pages of historical “facts”, most of them of which happen to be glorified myths and hearsay. We add clutter in order to forget why war is happening and rather focus on who we should be attacking. We then use that poisoned information as a gateway to understand more news, more information, more clutter. Although the truth is always shades of gray more clutter pushes us into black and white zones. We go for the news and we end up with propaganda.
Less is more. If one needs to understand the world around them one only needs to look at basic truths that govern our world. War is war no matter what period in history we examine. Violence breeds violence no matter how we apply our political agenda. Love is selfish no matter how we like to believe we can love everyone the same. There are thousands of religions around us and no matter how much we study and excuse our own it won’t make it more true. We group into ideologies because we are still bound from our primitive instincts.
These are the news. These basic realities are the things we need to accept in order to understand the world. The more we need to excuse the world around us through facts, interpretations and future projections the more we get lost.
If you want to understand the world try not to watch the news for one month. Instead try to understand what is going on by listening to people around you. Try to see their emotional response and how they try to explain important things to you. If you don’t hear about something, it most likely wasn’t important enough. If they are panicking about it, there is probably not much you can do about it.
In all likelihood, no piece of “news” will ever affect you. News are not really new to begin with.
