Would you hang around with a person for several hours every day if they talked incessantly about stuff that made you angry and anxious? The same three or four things over and over and over again. When I asked myself that, and answered no, I realized it was time to delete the news.
It’s not news anyway in the Walter Cronkite sense of the term. It’s just content, the more sensational the better. It’s clickbait. It’s manipulation. It’s an attempt to keep you on a website and use your data to stir you up more and sell stuff to you.
I’ve tried before to get rid of the news, albeit unsuccessfully. Late last year I swore off of it because it was making me miserable, and I deleted all the news apps on my devices and unfollowed anything on social media that was pretending to be news. It worked for about a week, then some story emerged (I don’t even remember what it was) that made me re-install the apps and I was back to spending too much time looking at manipulative headlines.
I decided to step away from the news again as my Lenten commitment this year. A couple of weeks before Ash Wednesday I started putting together my plan for how I would abstain from clickbait. I realized that I had tried and failed before because I had no plan. This time I would have one.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine.
Like most of us, I found myself watching this horror unfold every hour. Vacuum bombs. The shelling of evacuation routes and hospitals. Mothers and children huddled in subways to try and survive. A very real nuclear threat. Now was not the time to stop looking at the news.
When I began losing sleep and having disturbing dreams that seemed to drag on half the night, I knew I had to move forward with my plan for Lent. On Ash Wednesday, I deleted everything, went to church, listened to Reverend Jeanne’s sermon on how to make Lenten fasting meaningful, and then received the imposition of ashes. It was time to do the work.
Underscoring my commitment to abstain from the news are these three realizations.
1. Just because it exists doesn’t mean you need to consume it. Yes, the news stations are on 24/7. And their apps make it easy to pull up their sites 24/7. They have to fill those 8760 hours a year with “content.” So they fill it with “news and analysis” that pisses you off and, for some reason, you keep coming back for it.
2.You have a choice: feed and water your soul and brain. Or don’t. In thinking through this decision, I realized it’s my life I’m talking about here. I have 8760 hours a year with my soul and brain, if I’m lucky. What am I feeding them? Why would I feed them a never-ending stream of things that manipulate me and raise my cortisol levels?
3. I can’t just stop looking at it. I have to replace it with something. It has to be something that feeds and waters my soul and brain. So here’s what I’m doing with varying levels of success:
Put unread magazines on the kitchen table.
This was my sister-in-law Chris’ idea. She’s been doing it. I took the pile of magazines I haven’t read—about six of them—and put them on the kitchen table. After I get Mom’s room ready at night and I’m waiting to help her out of the shower, I read them. Just bits here and there. If I stop to eat lunch and Jimmy isn’t with me, I read an article instead of picking up my phone. By doing this I have learned why male cardinals are more red in the winter. I’ve learned about a couple in Minnesota who built a greenhouse for $1000 out of scrap wood and discarded windows. This is stuff I find interesting and useful. It makes me happy not angry and anxious.
Read something challenging in little bits. I’ve made a devotional called Mornings with Jesus part of my morning meditation. The faith step or call to action one morning was to look up Dietrich Bonhoeffer and read about him. I realized I had his book Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible in my library on my iPad.
It’s not an easy read for me because of the writing style and the translation from German, but I don’t care. I know very little about the Bible and I’m learning something. That’s more than I can say about news apps.
Go outside. If you read my blog from time to time, you know that I think being outside cures about 80 percent of our ills. Spring is here, so I am answering the call to be outside as much as possible when the weather is even somewhat hospitable. When I’m outside filling bird feeders, watching birds or sitting by the fire, I don’t feel an obsession with my phone. Life is too interesting outside to even pick it up. It’s the best way to enrich my soul.
Pray in a new way. I haven’t just looked away from the suffering in Ukraine, hoping it will go away. I am praying about it. But I’m finding that I need to pray differently about this—in a way that is stickier and more concrete. So I am writing my prayers, talking to God on paper. I’ll share more about this in an upcoming blog.
This is the plan for mental and spiritual growth that I am following for these 40 days. I am not doing it perfectly. Some days I pull up a news website in Safari and let myself get sucked into a long scroll of headlines that jab at me like pointed sticks. Some days I just get a sense of what’s happening on Mom’s TV and move on.
The bottom line is I’m doing things differently. I’m learning more than I was before Ash Wednesday. I’m practicing new ways of being, some of which may become habits. And I’m talking to God about the fact that this world really scares me right now. That’s a lot more comforting for me than spending time with media that exists only to stoke my fears.
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