I Don't Care, And Neither Do You.

Why you shouldn't read the news.

The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t quite do it justice. In the 90s when TV channels first dedicated every second of not just your waking day but everybody’s to broadcasting news, there was at least the option of changing channel (as long as you could avoid all the other channels that had adopted the same model). You might have found a channel that you liked, one with the right sort of opinions, the right sort of bias. A channel that played into your own notions of right and wrong, made you feel vindicated, righteous.

When you were done imbibing a cocktail of moral superiority, outrage and catastrophism, you would turn off the box and awaken, ready to do absolutely nothing about it. Indeed, the knowledge itself would be no more useful than a way to make small talk at the water-cooler. Perhaps you’d be able to impress your colleagues with your knowledge of the vitally important border conflicts between Chad and Burkina Faso. Riveting stuff, I’m sure.

Of course, recent technological advancements have only made it worse. Now there isn’t a box to turn off, or a channel to choose, but a constant series of notifications that inject you with little bursts of stress hormones throughout the day.

You’re an 18-year-old girl trying to pay attention in a Psychology lesson, wait, here’s a reminder about that bombing that happened last week, and don’t forget about the famine in that other place. You’re a 24-year-old man on his way to a job interview, desperately running over a tidal wave advice in your head, hold up, why aren’t you thinking about demographic collapse in China? Isn’t Venezuela’s economic situation of immediate importance?

There’s absolutely nothing you can do about these situations, but somehow keeping up with them is absolutely essential. What would the world do if you just turned off the notifications and starved it of that most vital commodity, your attention?

It brings to mind Keanu Reeves as Neo, clad in roughspun wool and shaven-headed, waking up after a solid 10-hour session of martial arts neural uploads. Except, instead of grinning up at your mentor and proclaiming the famous line “I know Kung Fu,” you turn, rheumy eyed, to whoever has accompanied you on this fruitless binge, “I now have anxiety and somehow, a powerful sense of moral superiority.”

Armed with a sound knowledge of world events, a quiver full of borrowed opinions and a will to dominate in any test of performative empathy, you crawl off to bed, knowing that you’re a great person, that in performing this sacrifice of your time, attention and health, you have made the world a better place. You are one of the goodies, and woe-betide one of the unsavouries utter an unacceptable opinion. They’ll get a quick retort, a three-bullet burst fire of borrowed geopolitical commentary. They’ll slither away from the water-cooler, chastened, humiliated, and the world will know what a damn excellent person you are.

I don’t know about you, but that isn’t a person to be admired. Indeed, if pressed to describe such a person, pity is the first emotion I feel. Pity that they’ve bought into the idea that a valuable use of the limited time that they have is a self-flagellatory practice of “keeping up with current events” as though it brings any real value or meaning to their lives. Perhaps this view is bleak and judgemental, and you might be right. To that I’d say, I don’t care, and nor should I. Just as you don’t care about the esoteric goings-on in far flung places, and nor should you. Here’s why.

Our capacity for the suffering of others.

In 1990, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that the maximum number of stable relationships that a human could reasonably maintain is 150. “Dunbar’s Number” as it came to be known, essentially represents a maximum threshold for the size of a tribe, crucially, the number of individuals with which it is possible/fruitful to socially invest in, to maintain some sort of relationship with to, at least to some degree, care about.

The human brain just isn’t evolved to absorb the woes and catastrophies of 8 billion people. Nor would it ever be productive to do so. What end would even achieving the nigh-omniscience of a geopolitical savant be productive towards? What difference could you materially make, even were the private political machinations of all the world leaders and politicians directly uploaded to your brain via huge blunt needle to the back of the neck? Absolutely nothing. I submit, that nearly nobody given this “gift” would be able to make any difference to the course of events at all.

The Stoic philosopher, Roman Emperor and modern international bestseller, Marcus Aurelius said:

“Do not waste time on what you cannot control.”

and

“The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

What would a man like Marcus Aurelius make of our obsession with knowing, feeling and damaging ourselves with a titanic tidal wave of depressing, outrage-inducing information, nearly all of which will never have even the remotest effect upon our lives and are most assuredly well out of our control? There are those things that we can control, there are those that we can influence and then there’s everything else that you may as well ignore. The latter is a very large category indeed.

Again, I submit, there are very few circumstances in which knowledge of those things leads to some beneficial end. Indeed, even taking these into account, the combined effect of reducing stress and anxiety would require that these benefits be significant before we could consider such knowledge a net benefit.

“But we should seek to know about the world,” I hear you say, “to hide in ignorance is just selfish. We must know the state of the world so that we can fix it”. That is indeed a noble aim, but one I fear that most wouldn’t live up to. The question is raised, to what extent do we have a moral responsibility to help those living in distant lands? What of those in neighbouring countries? Villages? Streets?

Are we morally obliged to stay informed?

If the argument stands that we have a moral obligation to not only damage our physical and mental health in engaging with current global affairs, but also to make some material sacrifice to address those issues that come to light, I ask, to what extent? From where does this moral obligation arise?

The well-known moral philosopher Peter Singer, in Famine, Affluence and Morality, proposed an interesting thought experiment that may shed some light on this obligation, if indeed there is one.

Suppose that as you travel to work one morning in basic business attire; a £200 suit, a pair of standard leather shoes, M&S shirt for maybe £50. Let’s say the whole glorious ensemble came to £350, nothing wild or extravagant. Basic stuff. Let’s say you’re driving to the train station, down the country lanes of the absurdly expensive commuter town you live in when you see a large puddle has collected on a waterlogged field. The muddy water must be four feet deep, not to mention the knee-deep, sucking mud beneath. Wouldn’t want to walk through that!” you think.

But there, as you slowly wind your way down the single-track road, bumping unceremoniously on pothole after pothole, you see it, her. She’s thrashing in the water, arms flailing. You can just about hear her screams over the monotonous drone of Radio 4. She’s…she’s drowning! You slam on the breaks, don’t check the mirror. Someone could have rear-ended you, but it doesn’t matter. Who cares? There’s a life at risk! You don’t think, you just do.

Out of the car you rush, scrabbling through a child-sized gap in the hedge. You get a few scratches from errant branches and a sneaky bramble that you couldn’t see. It doesn’t phase you, she’s still screaming. You have to get to her, there is nothing else, no job, no politics, no Radio 4, no worrying about whether your tie is straight or your shoes shined. None of that matters.

Into the murk you go, splashing, sinking, wading. She’s gurgling now, she’s sinking below. There’s not much time, but you’re fast, strong, tall enough that the sinking mud doesn’t slow your stride. You reach her, hoist her up onto your chest. She’s still choking, coughing up muddy water, vomiting it over you as you drag yourself back out of the mire to fall, panting, onto the dry field. She lives. You saved her.

Your suit is ruined. Torn, sodden, mud-caked. Your shoes…well you can’t even see them beneath the mud that covers them. It doesn’t matter. You had no choice. It was the right thing to do. What sort of person would have driven by? What sort of callous, vain, selfish bastard would have saved their suit rather than her life?

Some time later, after a hot drink, a fresh change of clothes and a hearty pat on the back, you set off again, along that bumpy road, hoping that you won’t be too late for work, that your manager won’t mind you being late. After all, her life was on the line.

A few minutes into the reverie of self-congratulation, you see another field, another puddle, another girl thrashing in the water, alone, destined for death but for the intervention of a courageous and self-sacrificing stranger. You’d rather not lose another suit, another pair of shoes but again, it’s a life-or-death situation, you have a moral duty to help her…don’t you?

I’m no moral philosopher, and I won’t claim to have all the answers here. But you get the point. Somewhere, there’s a line. At some point your moral obligation to sacrifice your time/money/resources to save the life of another person stops being a moral obligation. It probably morphs slowly into a moral virtue, still admirable but not expected. Eventually, after the third, fourth, fifth rescue it tends toward absurdity. Surely someone else is responsible for this? How much is it reasonable to expect you to sacrifice?

In the case of Singer’s analogy of the pond, proximity seems to be a relevant factor in deciding what is a moral obligation or not. If the girl was on the other side of the country and you had to save her by donating £500 to the local fire service so they could save her, you’d probably have a different opinion. Moreso if she was thousands of miles away, her death not caused by sucking mud but by biting flies, by a vicious protoctist parasite, a killer of humans more deadly than the worst dictators combined and multiplied by 10. In this case, £500 would buy scores of mosquito nets, could save hundreds of lives. Doesn’t feel quite the same though, does it?

To my earlier point, we just don’t have the capacity to truly comprehend the multitudinous catastrophes of an entire planet. Without this ability, we struggle to care enough to arrange a £5 monthly direct debit. Even when we do, their strife quickly fades from our mind. We’ve done our bit, we’ve discharged what moral duty we felt and now we can get on with our lives, back into the bliss of ignorance.

Don’t feel bad, though. This bliss is our default state. Unable to absorb the woes of the world, we’ve zoomed back in, the world has returned to a circle with a 10-mile diameter with us at its centre. This is the part of the world we can affect, this is the part where we can actually change things, the part we actually care about.

I’m sorry, but I don’ t care.

At this stage, I feel the need to clarify something. To care, to really care, is to feel true anguish. When something troubles us that we truly care about we find it hard to think of anything else. When tragedy strikes close to home it makes the rest of our life pale into trivia. We lose focus on things that had previously seemed so important. The bar is raised and that presentation at work that you were worrying about becomes meaningless. Why did you ever allow yourself to feel so stressed about it? Talking in front of a few people about some ideas you’ve had. Wild!

When local lives are on the line, when members of our tribe are suffering or die, we know what it is to care. Caring is evidential, empirical, measurable. If we’re honest, we know when we actually care, it is in our actions. In the case of global catastrophies, our actions do not reach this high bar, not by a long shot.

Conversely, when the news squeaks through the gaps of the various blockades I have put between it and myself and I hear of some tragedy; a bombing somewhere, famine somewhere else, a politician has done something duplicitious and dishonest again, I can’t say I care. I know I don’t care, I’ve accepted that fact. Indeed, it would be disingenuous, a pretense, a lie to say that I did. I feel sorry that these things are happening, that people far beyond my ability to help are suffering, but I just don’t care, and neither do you.

Don’t read the news, don’t watch the news, don’t listen to the news.

And this is why I don’t engage with the news, why I avoid it as much as possible. Engaging with it does real damage to my mental and physical health. I make sacrifices just in reading it, yet there is nothing I can do about nearly all of it. Even where I might be able to do something, a small donation perhaps, I don’t really care enough to do that.

For us, the sacrifice is too great, the cost-benefit analysis beyond unfavourable. We need to let it go, stop trying to control things that we just cannot. The news does nothing for you. It isn’t there to inform but to outrage, to farm attention. Your attention is too valuable, your mental health too fragile to let yourself face the torrent of tragedy.

Do yourself a favour and join me. Give it all up. It’s not selfish, it’s natural. Look after your health. After all, you’re sorry, but you don’t care, and that’s ok.