Should You Avoid Reading the News In Order to Preserve What’s Left of Your Mental Health?

The fire was always burning and it will burn on

I was a freshman at NYU. It was my second year in the U.S. It was the Fall of 2016.

Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

America was still a relatively unknown entity to me. Even though, like many people of my generation, I was basically raised on American pop culture, the American people themselves and American society were still a mystery to me. Unfortunately, because I lived in New York City, I was only being exposed to one small facet of America: the most globalized and most tolerant one. I learned at my own expense just how small — and, indeed, quite insignificant — that America was, compared to the Other America.

Following the 2016 elections, I found myself more and more reluctant to keep up with the news, which had previously been a regular habit of mine. As somebody who strongly believed in the value of being informed and socially aware, I saw keeping up with domestic and international news as a personal duty.

But, as my mental health deteriorated, so did my tolerance for what the personal cost of “being informed” was.

Keeping up with the news meant that I would feel horrified, disgusted, and deeply disturbed on an almost daily basis.

Yes, knowledge and awareness come at a personal cost.

I began to be less assiduous in how I kept up with the events of the day. In the best of cases, I settled for being “generally informed” without exposing myself to the sordid details of every scandal and every horrifying word or action by the Commander-in-Chief.

The news coming from my own country and the rest of the world was no consolation.

This was around the time that the world began to experience the global consequences of the “Trump phenomenon” in a general shift to the far right. In the words of Professors Daniel Drache and Marc D. Froese, “[Trump] gave the global populist movement a blast of dark energy and launched it into the popular consciousness of people everywhere.”¹

Then Covid-19 happened.

Then the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin happened.

The latter particularly affected me, as somebody who has lived in Russia and who has had a long love affair with Russian culture. I was no stranger to the dark nature of the Russian political system, but I could not envision a full-scale war ravaging Europe once again, nor could I ever imagine an Orwellian reality in which so many people would blindly believe whatever lie their Big Brother told them.

At the present moment, it often feels like I have to choose between preserving what little is left of my mental sanity and well-being — which often includes trust and confidence in the decency of humanity — and being informed about what’s happening in the world.

I often shamefully opt for the first option. And I say shamefully because, as I said before, I believe in knowledge and awareness as personal duties, not just for me, but for everybody who, for better or worse, is part of the big and complex world we live in. But I can’t ignore the personal toll that this knowledge takes on me, and I know I am not the only one.

Most Gen-Zs have had to learn pretty soon about what Billy Joel dubbed “the Fire” that’s been consuming our world for… well, since its inception, really.

As early as my early teens, I was informed that the world was experiencing a financial crisis the likes of which hadn’t been seen in decades, and which would have disastrous consequences for the generations to come — namely, my own. This happened along with headlines that reported, each and every year, how that year’s summer was going to be the hottest on record. The world was literally on fire. And the major takeaway, at least according to news broadcasts and government officials, was something along the lines of: “We certainly didn’t see that coming, and there isn’t really anything we — or anyone — can do about it.” What a great time to be a teenager taking their first steps into “the World.”

If you have heard about the latest news from the world — and chances are, willingly or not, you have — you know that today (2023) doesn’t look much better than yesterday (2008). Young adults like myself are dealing with the disastruous consequences of actions and choices performed by older generations, which are beyond our control. We have inherited a world that is burning, and burning hot.

So, how much should you keep up with the news if you value your own mental health?

Unfortunately, as almost anybody can tell, simply turning your eyes away from headlines and news broadcasts won’t do the trick. Each and every human on this planet experiences the consequences of the Bigger Events that are happening. Willful ignorance is not a palliative.

The world is burning today, as it was burning yesterday, as it was burning years before you were born, as it will keep burning tomorrow, and years after you’re gone. And our simple minds are not naturally equipped to deal with this m(a)ega Dumpster Fire.

That is why it is OK to take a step back, to divert our eyes from the Fire, to muffle the background noise, and to be able to feel ourselves again, our bodies, our humanity, everything that still has beauty to it and that is untainted by the Ravaging Fire. It is not a selfish act, it is an act of self-preservation.

Throwing yourself head-first into the Fire will not help anyone. Dumping a bucket of water on it while others do the same might just make a difference.

¹ From the 2022 book Has Populism Won? The War on Liberal Democracy (ECW Press).

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