You can now listen to an audio version of my article “A Short Meditation on the News”
In it I reflect on the question, how can we be informed citizens while refraining from being addicted to the news?
As the news becomes more sensationalized and graphic, how can we make judgements on what is really information is really important to us?
I don’t claim to have any answers to these questions, but the article is an extended ‘rant’ on the subject
https://anchor.fm/alifeofvirtue/episodes/A-Short-Meditation-on-the-News-e1csjit
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Your heart races and you start to breathe heavier. Internal tensions flare as you are confronted with the world’s latest catastrophic event.
How can one possibly maintain a sense of calm or equanimity while watching the news?
One quickly becomes mentally and emotionally exhausted by the constant reminder of our grim and dark Hobbesian world. We ponder, maybe Thomas Hobbes was right when he noted “life is nasty, brutish and short.”
Attention, our precious finite resource, is constantly hacked by the continuous shocking headlines. Curiosity and terror grip your mind scrolling through the latest articles in your news feed.
Your imagination runs astray.
I empathize with all the suffering that is displayed in the news, but how much compassion can a heart hold?
In a fragmented media environment, the reasonable person is bound to ask – who is right, who is wrong, what is…
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I listen (and don’t watch) to the news once per day, try to keep myself informed to be a responsible citizen, as you say without being overwhelmed by the news. Interesting post!
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There is no industry that is not currently in crisis, journalism included, and for a rather simple and obvious reason, as I see it: the very fact that even public services are now viewed and thought of as “industries,” busyness for the sake of busyness, rather than the servants to us they were originally intended to be — the inevitable outcome of the era of industrialization and its highly questionable logic.
The corporate model of for-profit management (as opposed to governance) and military model of “chain of command” has been adopted across the board for all manner of formerly public services from healthcare to journalism to governance itself, if not outright outsourced to for-profit corporations. It should be no surprise, then, that “crisis” is pretty much all we ever hear about today.
Fortunately for us, just as “the cure for the pain is in the pain” (Rumi), so the possibility, opportunity and crossroads is in the krisis.
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yes, I think you may be familiar with the ‘meta-crisis’? It is unfortunate we are still talking about the same systemic issues that were first identified in the 1970s.
I don’t think we can solve these issues with the same type of thinking that has gotten us here in the first place. But, the question is then, what will emerge? Where is hope to be found?
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The question appears to be: what is emerging? “Emerge” is a keyword people seem to be gravitating toward. No real surprise there, either, really. If Rumi’s logic holds (and it does), the emergence is also in the emergency.
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