The news isn't informing you - it's holding you back

You actually want to accomplish something difficult.

My writing examines how we decide what is true and how we deceive ourselves. You can sample the range of topics I’ve covered thus far through this compilation. Thank you for your attention in a noisy world.

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I’m at a dinner party (because I’m at that age) and someone brings up the Israeli-Palestinian war, or Iran, or Trump, or immigration, and I feel the air shift. Do they expect me to have an opinion? Do I even know enough to have one? What’s the correct one that will signal that I’m with the group? Shit, have I read an article on this? Which is the correct name to drop for authority? Everyone does this calculation.

I don’t blame anyone for going through that calculation before speaking. You are implicitly expected to affirm the group consensus, even if you don’t privately believe it. If the room is majority women, the stakes suddenly become even higher.

The dominant position among millennials, at least, is that we should consume the news because we’re all expected to have an opinion on every topic. Culture and social expectations exist amorphously outside ourselves — and implicitly, because people expect an opinion, you must have one.

Reading the news is deemed a requirement to be ‘informed’ and ‘educated.’ I live in Austin, surrounded mostly by people who think this. It is, for all its progressive packaging, a startlingly conservative position.

I’ve asked people why they bother reading the news. The answer is always some variant of “it’s important to be informed and educated about issues in the world that affect us.”

I don’t consume the news in any form. The charge that I face from liberals in particular is that it’s ‘privileged’ and ‘elitist’ to not care about the news, because it indicates you’re safe enough that it doesn’t affect you.

This is the actual position underneath: it is morally unacceptable for a person to choose mental quiet and not consume what is essentially entertainment in the service of signaling the correct opinions socially.

What this position doesn’t consider: the people who are most affected materially by the contents of the ‘news’ don’t have the time or space to consume it, because they’re too busy surviving.

Even if those affected were attentive, not one of us could do anything. So why widen one’s field of concern to the entire world and become paralyzed? This imperative to ‘be informed’ is actually a call to emotionally overload yourself, and implicitly requires a person to consume the output of advertising platforms.

I know from experience that voicing a dissenting opinion during what people feel is a perpetual emergency invites only coldness. One creates distance only by engaging in an argument.

The people claiming that everyone expects you to have an opinion overlook that you must also have the morally correct opinion that conforms to the group’s. Given that these sorts of conversations happen at social gatherings, it follows that no one’s trying to have a debate (except maybe me, and that’s why I’m not often invited to parties).¹

I was part of a leftist fringe that not only controls the Democratic party’s direction but also was behind much of the moral shaming that dominated the 2010s over problematic opinions. I was among those doing the shaming because it was an easy way to externalize the shame I felt inside over many things: my mental health, heavy internet use, and my lack of actual capital.²

Being on the online left was the apotheosis of social performance, my era of conformity in exchange for belonging. I thought we were constructing unique identities on an advertising platform. And this fringe is actually visible out and about in Austin, which has attracted the most leftist people in the region due to its liberal reputation.

For those lacking material capital, dissenting opinions are far more socially costly. In an era of overproduced elites, rectitude³ is essential to accruing status, especially for credentialed women. We (including me) followed the script millennial feminism handed us, and many of us are deeply unhappy for doing so.

I suspect, and life has borne out, that women in particular hold ourselves to these expectations of having opinions not to get at the truth, but to signal social alignment with the correct positions that confer the most moral capital, that we might turn into tangible capital.

Regardless of sex, however, in practice, people don’t actually express dissenting opinions even when asked. The only acceptable opinion must fall within the boundaries set by the group, even if no conversation has occurred about what’s acceptable.

I didn’t learn to examine my bad choices until I hit the bottom and worked my way back up, choosing to conserve my attention and focus. Many of us feel unable to focus for long enough to do something difficult, though I know many want to. It’s a constant nag for a non-zero amount of you, and for me, always, even now.

I won’t lie, opting out of this performance of intellect is costly.⁴ I’m only writing this because I paid for it.⁵ One thing we don’t discuss enough is tradeoffs — they’re annoyingly present, always. But the position that opting out of news consumption is elitist hides an implicit classed assumption: that educated people ‘knowing’ about the world and its ills means we can save it. Yet, most of us don’t have a single friend without a degree.

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1. I once debated gender ideology at a birthday party. I am a 1:1 person due to this socially awkward behavior.

2. Symbolic capital can’t quite compensate, a difficult lesson millennials learned.

3. Morally correct.

4. This is also true about spaces in which I had to ‘dumb myself down’, as it were.

5. Yes, it is genuinely lonely. But I also can’t be any other way.