By Kelly Poon

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?” — David Foster Wallace 

Every morning, I wake up, and eight things are going on in the world that I do not understand. I open my eyes, and before I assess my quality of sleep, my neck, or even mentally catalog the events awaiting me that day, there it is—the News. The News of the day, conveniently at the tip of my fingertips without even having to turn on the TV, is there in bed with me. Honda and Nissan may merge… The GOP has decided… Trump and Biden… It is a shocking amount of information to process in one sitting. It defies almost every ounce of our evolutionary psychology. One that was not made for this nightmare of Neil Postman’s prophecy, where the immediacy and accessibility of news will degrade the criteria for what is considered information and who it should actually concern. I’m surprised we don’t wake up every morning to all this and grip our chests in wait for a heart attack. 

I believe that today, our mental capacity is divided between a physical bubble and an increasingly abstract digital bubble. While they are two separate entities, they’ve become codependent, and I’ve noticed we’ve allowed one to continue to dominate our lives. Our physical bubble, which has existed for millennia, has imbued us with the innate social abilities necessary for survival and community. It contains all the people and things we physically interact with in our everyday lives: our family, our coworkers, the strangers on the train, and even the train itself. For so many of us, just this alone is enough to cause bouts of stress and anxiety. Yet, in the last decade, it has been punctured by its supplement, the digital bubble. It contains our worries about the stock market, our superficial social media accounts, and the emails we have not yet sent.

But in this context, in which I believe it pertains to our morals, our civil values, and our humanity—I mean specifically and exclusively the News. At the risk of sounding selfishly nihilistic, the News simply bludgeons us with information that does not affect our everyday lives whatsoever and on which we have no effect whatsoever either. When I woke up on November 7th, shocked by our recent election results, I was even more shocked to find that I could still see traffic jammed along the highway, and I was craving Eggs Benedict for breakfast. In short, the world goes on in infinitum. 

For centuries, people have lived exclusively present in their physical bubbles, and any ‘news’ considered drastic or day-altering pertained to events that would actually physically affect their day. Yet, in recent years, we’ve increasingly shifted more of our care and attention to the abstract virtual bubble. The one full of broad and ambiguous issues that we’ll never get a definitive answer to. What should we do about homelessness? Are immigrants ruining our country? Last week’s statistics said they were, and this week’s statistics say the entire U.S. economy will collapse without them. So, I’ll do us all the favor of admitting that I really don’t know, and, quite frankly, I don’t think any of us actually know. What’s more is that none of us are ever really going to get the God-honest, hard truth about where we should stand on any of this. Because the truth has never mattered enough to rise above the deluge of information online, and any illusion that it ever has, has just been the Houdini smoke of vested interests.

So, I think that scares a lot of people and paralyzes them about who they are or how they should behave. So much so that it makes them lose their way around their morality. I don’t know if the rate of homelessness is an indicator of violence in a city, but I do know that my humanity extends far enough to understand that anyone sitting outside in below 60-degree weather is deserving of my sympathy. I’d like to believe that the experience of human existence is enough to break past any barrier the News is telling us to be concerned about. So, that’s why I got rid of that little, mighty News app. The news has never taught me how to treat people, and it’s never actually told me anything all that important. And to those who say I’m missing out on reality—well, I guess I’m just curious about exactly what reality they mean. 

I suppose the biggest reason I stopped reading the news was because I was afraid of becoming like the people I saw around me—walking out of church, talking on TV, posting online. People had strong opinions about which way the world was falling apart, yet as healthy and able individuals, they took no part in devoting any time or effort to fix anything around them. I understand that it is an arrogant oversimplification to think that abandoning the news will cure all of humanity, but this is how it cured mine. Below is a short list of what I have done since I have stopped reading the news: 

1. I volunteer twice a week at my local library’s adult literacy program. I work closely with a recent immigrant. I know what makes her laugh. I’ve seen her cry. We know each other as women. We understand each other as people. The urgency and influx of news about international crises made me forget all the local action I could take in my own neighborhood. 

2. I’ve gotten to know my neighbors. I have since substituted my morning coffee at the kitchen table reading the news for walks around my neighborhood. It is a conscious effort to build a community around you, and it requires you to also participate as a community member. 

3. I thoroughly researched and advocated for a candidate in my local mayoral election. It came as a shock to me when a friend I’d always known to hold loud opinions about every foreign affair sheepishly did not know any policies of our local candidates. I left her with a quote from the great Gloria Steinem: “…we cannot understand another country if we don’t understand our own.” 

I acknowledge that giving up the news is not a prerequisite to any of the above. I proudly know of people who can stay updated with the news and their neighborhoods. I also confess that I do still watch an hour of the nightly news, but that’s just about it. The news should be a tool, not a starting point for lived experiences. Lest we become a society where everybody knows everything, but nobody knows anything. Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can find all kinds of ratios about how much teaching a man to fish will feed him over a lifetime or all kinds of statistics about who’s coming to steal the fish in your lake. But if you really want to learn how to fish, you’ve got to get in there, stand by the water, and hold the line—really look into the depths of it.