Curating Life in a Noisy World

I recently found myself wondering if it was possible to go on a diet from the news. The thought came from the unbearable weight that today’s media seems determined to place on our backs.

“The job of the journalist is to tell the truth when everyone else is lying.”

— David Halberstam

I think that expectation still lives in many of us. It is probably why the constant noise feels so heavy now.

People often joke about how easy it is to gain physical weight. They’ll say something like, “All I have to do is look at dessert and I gain two or three pounds.” Lately I feel the same way about the emotional weight that piles on from an endless cycle of negative headlines. It comes from stories I don’t need to know, and from an information stream I no longer want shaping my daily narrative.

Everything today is labeled “breaking news.” I remember a time when a bulletin would interrupt regular programming only for something truly significant, like the death of a president or the start of a war. If you lived through those years, you know exactly what I mean.

Now the news is not breaking. The news cycle is what is broken. It feels like whiplash. It is heavy, it is painful, and at times, almost impossible to comprehend.

Maybe part of it comes from my own news lineage going back to my days as a paperboy. I felt obligated to read the entire paper from front to back. It was my thing. But it only came once a day. Somewhere along the way, I realized I didn’t need the whole paper anymore. It made me wonder if knowing every single thing had become too much of a burden for any one human heart.

And I still wonder about that. Has the world actually changed as much as it feels, or is it the way we now cover it? I am not convinced life was meant to be lived as a series of sound bites or as a constant parade of headlines that show up as often as the hours on a clock.

I’m pretty sure our lives are not measured by the amount of news we consume. And I often question the difference between consuming and force-feeding.

We can’t live under a rock. I know that. But have you asked yourself any of these same questions? If so, why not curate what you take in? Why not become a better steward of your attention? I want to be the one who decides what enters my mind and what gets to stay there.

It feels like taking back the front page.

Maybe the better approach is to stop flipping pages out of habit and instead choose which aisles we walk down. I want the stories I read to feel like an emotional investment, not noise that tries too hard to steal the silence I work so hard to keep.

When I look at it this way, I realize that curating is not ignorance. It’s wisdom.

And I’ll take wisdom over breaking news any day. Wisdom stays with me longer. Wisdom earns its place.

No one is pretending the past was perfect. Even the old way of doing things came with plenty of room for improvement. But at least opinions were not caught in a twenty-four hour panic cycle. They were held close, guarded, and often became the seed of longer conversations when people actually met in person. Information felt more human-scale, didn’t it?

I don’t want to self-debate whether everything I hear or read is a story or a spectacle.

“The greatest felony in the news business today is to abdicate responsibility for the truth.”

— Carl Bernstein

His words feel even more relevant now, when the line between reporting and dramatizing grows thinner by the day.

For me, this means limiting my daily intake. Maybe that paperboy model of flipping the pages once was not such a bad idea after all.

I don’t think we were meant to hold the weight of the entire planet. Not knowing everything is a relief. Choosing what we let into our minds is even better.

Peace of mind is something that is curated, not delivered, and it certainly doesn’t come in the form of breaking news.

Maybe this week I can choose the aisles I walk down even more carefully than I did last week. Would you care to join me?

Perhaps the paperboy in me was always meant to grow up into a curator. Someone who knows how to pass over the headlines that don’t need an invitation into the space I now occupy.

The world is loud enough. I think you feel it too.

Something tells me we can lighten the load of a world that has become too heavy by doing a better job of reshaping our own.

Talk soon…

G