Ever since the lockdown, first thing in the morning, before I can even open my groggy eyes, I check the news. But no more.

There is a concept I first heard about on Joe Rogan’s podcast which was an eye-opener. We have our “circle of control” and our “circle of concern”. They occasionally overlap but mostly they don’t. We tend to spend far too much time roaming in our circle of concern and far too little in our circle of control. Reading about social distancing guidelines and your local situation falls in your circle of control and reading about health measures implemented by Uruguay and Mozambique falls in your circle of concern.

So I stopped reading news websites altogether, for almost a week now, and it feels great. I receive some news from podcasts, facebook, and youtube. But for these, I make an effort to see and read interviews involving experts, instead of opinions from journalists. Even seeing data and numbers is kinda useless as I am not actually analyzing it mathematically rigorously.

I receive my news in the old ways, half an hour every day. It used to be enough back then and I think it is enough today. Spending more than half an hour every day is just deceiving yourself, and honestly is nothing more than a socially acceptable way of wasting time, peeking under the bandaid to check the wound every few minutes.

I do not believe in the good ole days but I do think that our news delivery systems have degraded over time. We have prioritized quantity over quality. Used to be that every evening around 7 or so, there would be news in marathi for half an hour and that was it. That news would contain everything my parents needed to know to plan the future. Now the news is constantly on and hardly anyone has anything of substance to say. What hurts me more is that the same thing has happened to cartoons. Hannah–Barbara must be spinning in their graves.

How to block websites successfully?

The key is to be thorough. Once before, I have tried blocking websites on just my laptop but that hasn’t worked. You have to block all the websites everywhere. I use blocksite app on my laptop and phone. It syncs the list of blocked websites and it is free. (I am sure that it is selling my online web usage information, but at this point, this is a lost battle.)

It feels great to live without the constant bombardment of bad news from around the world.