Life

Why Do You Care About The News?

66 Comments

I recently encountered a paper by Swiss entrepreneur Rolf Dobelli that advocates for completely cutting the consumption of news out of our lives.

“Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that –because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news.”

The author lists 15 compelling reasons to excise news from your informational diet. Among these are:

It alters your brain

Similar to the way porn rewires our brains to crave constant sexual novelty, news rewires our brains to crave constant informational novelty. I never felt the need for a Twitter account until a couple years ago. A few months ago I started checking it more often. Now I find myself checking it several times a day, almost compulsively when I’m idle for a few moments. This is not healthy. Our brains acclimate to increasingly unnatural levels of stimulation and then demand them when they are absent.

It inhibits thinking and prevents understanding

Becoming accustomed to the 30-second soundbyte prevents us from exercising the deeper analytical capabilities of our minds. Though most people fancy themselves expert multitaskers, true introspection on an idea necessitates concentration that a constant stream of news renders impossible. Some studies even suggest that consuming news makes us worse decision-makers.

It is manipulative

The media is used to planting ideas, often furthering the aims of equalism, feminism, and political correctness. Politicians and corporations alike use media campaigns to manipulate a public who considers it completely normal to spend several hours a day consuming news on their computers and televisions. The lack of context clues makes it difficult for the average person to detect whether a story has a particular bias.

I suggest you read the full article, which is available here.

News is a vicarious time waster similar to sports. Nothing you see on popular news is going to help you get healthy, make money, or get girls. Even if you find the occasional useful tip on science or nutrition, you would have discovered it much earlier with more targeted independent research. The New York Times may begin singing the praises of intermittent fasting on a paleo diet in 10 years or so, but I’ll have a decade’s head start based on reading books, consulting with experts, and careful self-experimentation.

News, of course, isn’t the only culprit in our ever-growing hunger for useless information. Some people are addicted to texting friends on their smartphones, reloading their Facebook pages, or checking for bikini shots on Instagram. These are all time-wasting activities, but occasionally they give us some insight about how to live or some superficial interaction with others. News fills your mind with wasteful thoughts without adding anything that will make you a more well-rounded, knowledgeable, or successful person.

The solution? Stop consuming the news. Cull your Google reader, switch your homepage from NYtimes.com, and bring a book to the doctor’s office. You may just find yourself happier, sharper, and better equipped to dominate.

 Read More: Juicing Will Kill You

66 thoughts on “Why Do You Care About The News?”

  1. I assume you are talking about the big, national, 24 hour news stations right? Every man should read a newspaper daily and/or watch the local evening news. A real man knows his environment. A good business man does too.

  2. I assume you are talking about the big, national, 24 hour news stations right? Every man should read a newspaper daily and/or watch the local evening news. A real man knows his environment. A good business man does too.

      1. That was what I got from it. In the service, I kept up on the latest news by reading blog posts from opposing viewpoints of opinions I respected. I liked having a couple differing points of view when stuck in the middle of nowhere for months on end to see if their was meaning to the harassment I was giving all these foreign lands. When I realized I was not, it was time to leave. Even the “humanitarian” missions we do are political agendas. Like how the US manipulated Japan during the earthquake. There really is not anything you can do. Made me sick.
        If guys like Glen Beck or crazies like Maddow on MSNBC are where you get your news, just shoot yourself or live as a hermit in India.
        Your are not doing any good here for us.

    2. The local evening news tends to be rubbish. Non-stop talks of crime and such that will make you think the world is ending.
      Newspapers tend to be better for that stuff.

  3. This article hits it right on the head. I just discovered ROK and the manosphere a month ago and I am just blown away by the amount of valuable thought provoking content

  4. This article hits it right on the head. I just discovered ROK and the manosphere a month ago and I am just blown away by the amount of valuable thought provoking content

  5. I used to be very into politics watching news, reading news thinking these things matter. Then one day I realized this was not benefiting my life. Not only was it a time waster I would get angry about things I read when ultimately there was nothing I could do to change it.

        1. Anger is for free. Lumps of coal are not unless you buy them from someone or mine them yourself.
          If you buy them please invite us all to the bbq pool party.
          If you mine them yourself, I am so glad to know that miners are learning English and how to surf the net.
          But if you are a mini-boss at a mining company, I am afraid to tell you that this shitty model of organization

    4. This is spot on, no point in watching politics when you know nothing you do will change anything. That anger that you get is pointless, that’s why it also good to stay away from shitty message boards.

  6. Hamsters gonna hamst! Brotip: always keep your apartment lined with newspaper, just like the player in the headline photo

  8. “It is manipulative”
    Very. Watching and reading anything with a red pill state of mind you tend to see these things quite clearly. The unbiased holds bias, the free thinking is non existent, people hold themselves within gender roles and do not even realize it. The cherry picking of facts and play on words. And the fact that you should not believe everything you hear on the news about politics or government.
    Be aware. But beware.
    Get it?

  10. I no longer watch cable news. I read custom online news RSS feeds I’ve set up to sift the wheat from the chaff. This way, I stay informed enough to make wise investment decisions and to avoid conflict with stupid political initiatives. I thereby carve out more free, unencumbered time for myself.
    I use Twitter and Facebook to influence my extended family (and some of my military buddies stationed across the country and overseas).

  11. I don’t watch the news but If the elites are going to tell us to stop watching the news, that’s probably exactly when I’ll start.

  13. What is “news?” Is it not merely propaganda spun as truth by those who benefit from the deception?
    Even if we are enlightened and informed, news is a construct of the world through lenses others have ground into shape and focused on the agenda they want to push forward.
    So, what’s the point!

  14. i been saying this for a couple years now. news especially, but tv in general, are pretty useless and counterproductive.
    think about how many products you buy that you would NEVER have heard of without tv. you wouldnt even realize most of them. coca cola, pepsi, taco bell, you name it. now imagine, if you had never seen the ads, never heard of and therefore never tried the product, would your life be any emptier without these things?
    for almost everyone, the answer is no. life would be just fine without them. for most, our lives would be BETTER without using all these useless, resource wasting products. and EVERY ONE of these useless product industries is driven almost entirely off of tv advertisment.
    if you think about it, our consumer culture is driven almost entirely by watching tv. if everyone stopped watching there would be minimal advertising media and the markets for these worthless things would dry up. we would only hear of products we were genuinely interested in.
    not to mention all the memes, paradigms and such that we inadvertantly allow to pollute our minds by staring at this thing. watch a show about a hard working mother with a bumbling fat fool of a husband and a whore teenage daughter, then watch about obamas latest press conference about whatever gun shit or iran shit is going on at the time, then watch COMMERCIALS and BUY USELESS SHIT which we all know is the whole point of putting the tv programming on in the first place.

  16. Tim Ferriss defends the same on his “The 4-Hour Workweek”. I couldn’t agree more. Recently I drifted away from news content but even more importantly facebook, twitter and other social media. I couldn’t feel better about it. There is no point on following others’ lives and special our overwhelming media which can make an event that can be described in one sentence into a week of 24h TV.

  17. The MSM is completely and totally monopolized by the left. Nothing that is written by them can be trusted. If you want to be informed, you need to find alternative media and meanwhile do your own research and form your own conclusions about current events (as best you can within the obvious physical limitation of not being able to everywhere at any point in time.) Meanwhile people who are not informed about the goings-on on our planet and the chaos and disconnect we are headed into are woefully unprepared for the hand the world is about to deal them. Part of being a man is being prepared. Don’t believe me, watch The Crash Course from Chris Martenson and come to your own conclusions. If you are here, you’ve taken the “Social Matrix red pill”. There’s a bigger red pill out there and it’s called the “Modern Civilization Matrix red pill”. It’s bigger and badder … matter of fact the Social Matrix is but a small and dependent subset of the Modern Civilization Matrix and once it falls, it will take the Social Matrix with it. Feminism, mens’ rights, political correctness, socialism – will all fall with it.

    1. Have you read or heard of Oswald Spengler and The Decline of the West?
      What’s happening to our civilization is nothing new. Civilizations, rise, peak, then decline. We are well into Winter, the declining phase of Western (Spengler called it Faustian) Civilization.
      Tell me this isn’t exactly what’s happening, as he predicted in the 1930s:
      Winter Political Epoch:
      “Increasing primitiveness of political forms. Inward decline of the nations into a formless population, and constitution thereof as an Imperium of gradually-increasing crudity of despotism.”
      Winter Spiritual Epoch:
      “Dawn of Megalopolitan Civilization. Extinction of spiritual creative force. Life itself becomes problematical. Ethical-practical tendencies of an irreligious and unmetaphysical cosmopolitanism.”
      Winter Artistic Epoch:
      “Existence without inner form. Metropolitan city art as a commonplace: luxury, sport, nerve excitement. Rapidly-changing fashions in art (revivals, arbitrary discoveries, borrowings.)”

      1. Sad but true. I forgot the title as it was long, but there is an enormous written work on Ancient Rome that covers the last 550 years until it finally fell for the last time. We are on track to do it in less than a third of the time if you count from the War of the States (Civil War) on.
        The parallels intimidated the hell out of me. Going over it was like reading our own history the last hundred years. If you start to see Natalist Laws getting past, laws trying to “encourage” reproduction of you guys to marry dem sluts, just run for foreign lands. We might be in for the fatal collapse the tin foil hatters have been writing on cardboard body signs for the last forty years.

        1. read up on
          Lothrop Stoddard.
          he was forecasting the decline almost 100 years ago

        2. If you can somehow find the name of the work on Ancient Rome, I would really like to look at it as a student of history.
          Spengler based his Decline of the West on what had happened in all past “great” civilizations for which a history had been written.
          And the parallels between civilizations are amazing. The details change, but the big picture does not.

      2. Yes of course, civilizations rise and they fall. That is obvious given history. The fact is however our civilization believes whole-heartedly in its “specialness” and that “it can’t happen to us”. Yet fiat currencies historically hold their value no longer than 27 years and here we are, well past that 27 years. My position is that the collapse of our currency is long overdue and will come suddenly and without warning. Pundits insist its longevity is a testament to its permanence. The point is: if you listen to the MSM you will learn nothing of the coming disconnect and hear only soothing words communicated calculatingly to convince you to believe that our civiliziation will continue on into the future, ad infinitum, in the same manner in which we have all become accustomed. A great book by one of your current men of the manosphere, Captain Capitalism, isn’t written like a masterpiece (he has some grammatical challenges but these are easily ignored as the content is good) but provides succinct background and a long list of “what you can do about it” for your own life. Highly recommended. Here is the link:
        Enjoy the Decline
        BTW: The reference to Chris Martenson’s Crash Course … certainly it is not the only or the first work to explore the coming crash but it is easily accessible and watchable on YouTube in efficient 20min Chapters. The presentation is simple and understandable and concepts that many people are unfamiliar with such as what is money and exponential growth are explained in detail. Don’t dismiss it just because it’s not a classic work. It is a modern variation of an old warning and IMO very well thought out, presentated and assembled.

      3. Yes of course, civilizations rise and they fall. That is obvious given history. The fact is however our civilization believes whole-heartedly in its “specialness” and that “it can’t happen to us”. Yet fiat currencies historically hold their value no longer than 27 years and here we are, well past that 27 years. My position is that the collapse of our currency is long overdue and will come suddenly and without warning. Pundits insist its longevity is a testament to its permanence. The point is: if you listen to the MSM you will learn nothing of the coming disconnect and hear only soothing words communicated calculatingly to convince you to believe that our civiliziation will continue on into the future, ad infinitum, in the same manner in which we have all become accustomed. A great book by one of your current men of the manosphere, Captain Capitalism, isn’t written like a masterpiece (he has some grammatical challenges but these are easily ignored as the content is good) but provides succinct background and a long list of “what you can do about it” for your own life. Highly recommended. Here is the link:
        Enjoy the Decline
        BTW: The reference to Chris Martenson’s Crash Course … certainly it is not the only or the first work to explore the coming crash but it is easily accessible and watchable on YouTube in efficient 20min Chapters. The presentation is simple and understandable and concepts that many people are unfamiliar with such as what is money and exponential growth are explained in detail. Don’t dismiss it just because it’s not a classic work. It is a modern variation of an old warning and IMO very well thought out, presentated and assembled.

  19. Read “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brain” by Nicholas Carr, much the same, science and some interesting conclusions are testing.

  20. Next article: “Why do you waste time worrying about how other people waste time?”

  21. I care about the news because I find my fellow Americans’ lack of knowledge about what is happening in this country politically appalling. A man must know what is going on around him. I consume the news because being cognizant of the direction the country is headed allows you to make better financial and personal decisions about your life.
    Mainstream media IS useless, though, so the Internet is a vital tool for staying informed.
    As another thought, I’m tiring of the people on this website who think that anything that doesn’t directly help you get laid isn’t worth doing.

  22. How many people have experienced this?
    “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You
    open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In
    Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and
    see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts
    or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the
    story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets
    cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
    In any case, you read
    with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then
    turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the
    rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the
    baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
    ―
    Michael Crichton

    1. It’s true. I’m a trade journalist covering my regional commercial fishing industry for the last four years. The shit regular newsroom journos write about the events in the industry make me cringe. Most of what they write is copied from each other so the shit gets mixed and distilled into an even purer form of shit. Nobody ever calls them on it because dumb journos that don’t know anything are easy to manipulate by the factions and competing groups (gov, corps, enviros, native rights groups etc.) Same for most subjects I am in expert in, eg: drugs. Clueless bastards don’t know their skag from their woonga.

  23. yeah, we used to read nice bed time stories, now we sit in bed watching news reports about double homicides at midnight and wonder why we need sleeping pills to nod off…..

  24. i basically changed ROK to my evening reading…. it’s better than anything mainstream…. murdoch is doomed

    1. Fuckin’ awesome. ROK is fertile ground for the development and sharing of new ideas.

  25. I don’t understand people talking about “watching” the news. I “read” the news in the Ny Times.

    1. The New York Times is the poster child for the left-liberal Eastern establishment. A Texan should know better.

    2. The fact that comments like this one are frequently left on this site, without a hint of irony, raises serious questions about the readership.
      Guys claiming to be red pill out of one side of their mouth, while revealing themselves as liberal, conformist SWPLs out of the other side.

  27. I disagree with your article. I read the news on the BBC webpage everyday and it has opened my eyes to many interesting topics which I can then discuss at a later date with women and friends.
    Whether you believe the news or not, a news article is a great conversation starter. There is nothing stopping you from reading some light news before attacking a heavier piece of literature or work. Think of it as a warm up.

  28. I’ve been in the news business going on 15 years and I have to say I agree with Rolf. It’s ironic that I work in such a business yet I watch almost no TV, other than documentaries and a few classic shows on Netflix. I haven’t watched cable or broadcast TV in at least 6 months. I feel like I’m a better person for it.
    I can find out what I need to know online. TV news is dreck.
    There are many reasons why TV news is brain-rotting.
    People who watch lots of television are more likely to be overweight, due in part to the constant food advertising AND food placement in shows and movies, they’re more likely to be in debt and live a materialistic lifestyle (those car commercials and Mac product placements really do work) and they’re likely to be female, according to the audience research I’ve seen. As much as 70% of the news audience is female in some areas. Which is important, too, because as most American men have been gelded in recent decades, women make most of the important purchasing decisions.
    There are other problems. News stations focus on ratings. It’s important to remember it’s a business, just like every other business. They’re going to report on sensational, banal, and worthless topics simply because that’s what draws the most eyeballs to the screen.
    As viewership declines, the tactics get even more desperate and voyeuristic. That’s why many of the “journalists” you see being thrown up on screen nowadays are just vacuous (but pretty) girls thrown in front of the screen. Women identify with them, and men like ogling them.
    Bottom line is, I agree with everything in this article, and then some. One could write a book on the subject.

  29. No doubt that whatever the problem in the news is, they’ll figure it out without us. Or not, and it won’t matter anyway.

  30. Don’t use Internet news, but do continue to subscribe to a paper newspaper delivered to your door. The news in a newspaper does help me make decisions, because it helps give me a complete knowledge of what is happening in my local community, including crime, good stores, bars, and restaurants, financial opportunities, local government, and traffic issues.

  32. You’re talking more about the new delivered via the Net instead of the older print news. Though I’d have to agree about the Twitter fix, cutting out the news entirely isn’t such a good thing. Really, the news via the Net can be quite useful if you know what to look for and are disciplined in filtering the wheat from the chaff.
    TV news is a complete waste of time anymore. I’m old enough to remember when TV news just presented “facts” and not sound bites, and before the rise of news personalities like Anderson Cooper. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher fall into this category as well. Bread and circuses.
    A better way to approach the news is to do it like Noam Chomsky does, if you have the time. Say what you will about him being too “liberal” and, in his old age, monotonic, the guy has perfected the skill of hunting down the “real” news. The Net makes it somewhat easier to do that. But, again, only if you know what you’re looking for and only if you ignore the mainstream US and Euro media.

  33. You’re talking more about the new delivered via the Net instead of the older print news. Though I’d have to agree about the Twitter fix, cutting out the news entirely isn’t such a good thing. Really, the news via the Net can be quite useful if you know what to look for and are disciplined in filtering the wheat from the chaff.
    TV news is a complete waste of time anymore. I’m old enough to remember when TV news just presented “facts” and not sound bites, and before the rise of news personalities like Anderson Cooper. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher fall into this category as well. Bread and circuses.
    A better way to approach the news is to do it like Noam Chomsky does, if you have the time. Say what you will about him being too “liberal” and, in his old age, monotonic, the guy has perfected the skill of hunting down the “real” news. The Net makes it somewhat easier to do that. But, again, only if you know what you’re looking for and only if you ignore the mainstream US and Euro media.

  34. Somewhat agree, a lot of the news is utterly pointless crap that will do you no good. For instance, last night’s coverage was about the tornadoes in Oklahoma- non-stop. No other stories.
    Of course, those are tragic events, but I asked myself (as I have many times before with similar stories): “why is this WORLD news? How is this an important issue that will affect my life in any way?”
    That’s why when I have to get my news from somewhere, I usually opt for the financial networks or publications. Sure, it’s not 100% great, but there’s comparatively less bullshit in all forms there.

  35. Staying informed about world events and caring about the news are two different things. One involves reading about events and analyses and finding it interesting, the other is about indulging in indignation and self-righteous rage just for the sake of it (a distinctly feminist way of approaching the world, so no surprise it’s so widespread). As the article says, it’s very important to avoid the latter, but of course that doesn’t devalue the former.
    In other words, I always like a piercing analysis of politics or society, but emotional detachment is crucial.
    Oh, and I can’t stand twitter.

  36. man it’s almost eerie the way that posts on ROK regularly resonate with me. I’m definitely not a fan of the news, I’d much rather free my mind.

  37. If you aspire to join the upper echelons of society, an understanding of world events is essential.
    Ah society where the go-to response of most men is “ah fuck it, let’s just drink beer/get high/play a video game”, is one which will only get worse.

    1. Misinformation is worse than bad information, so I would say in a great majority of cases, if the choice is between consuming news and going off to drink and play video games, the latter choice is, in fact, better.

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