A few years ago, I decided to live free from social media and television news. I wanted to eliminate sources of negative thoughts that I couldn’t act upon. To this day, I’m still using LinkedIn that I find mandatory for career purposes without having the app on my phone. In case I receive an important message, I will receive an email which is enough for me.
My connections to the outside world are intentionally limited: my wife, my workmates, my friends and Hacker News. I know that I can count on them in a scenario I must acknowledge a very important news, and they never miss. I’ve chosen to focus primarily on the tech world, as it doesn’t induce stress and provides information relevant to my job and my happiness.
It’s well-known that our brains create numerous potential problems that will never materialize, which is involving a lot of stress if we are listening/reading a lot news through social medias. But from this gigantic stack of news, how many of them can we have an impact on it? Almost none.
I really found that crazy the amount of stress we are generating compared to the potential action we can have to solve this stress. To not care is a really simple task, that is producing a lot of happinness in my life. That’s why I’ve made the decision to live a sort of modern exile.
There is one downside about this, and it’s about the strength of my politic viewpoints which stayed the same during these years - as I don’t really know what is happenning in the world. But when I compare this single drawback against the fact that I almost don’t use my phone with the possiblity to not care at all, the trade-off seems more than fair to me.