Last week I was hunting in Utah with people who work in media, entertainment, and business. Half the fun of hunting is camp, where people come together in the afternoon and at night to sit around and shoot the shit. Cell phones don’t have service. There’s no TV or computers. Just conversation.
We all got talking about the state of the world and someone started rambling on about some perceived injustice in Washington DC. People began piping in and getting worked up. Neck veins began bulging.
I said nothing. Neither did another guy, a brilliant businessman who founded a gear company that’s completely changing the face of hunting.
He and I exchanged that knowing glance. We both had zero clue what the hell these people were talking about. Turns out we’d both stopped watching national news within the last few months.
Your Brain On News
The human brain is wired to crave information that offers a survival benefit. Think: Information that hints at danger or centers on wrongdoings. This is because humans evolved in an unsafe and uncomfortable world — focusing on potential dangers helped us avoid death.
But the world is now safe and comfortable, and much of this old machinery backfires. Constantly obeying our ancient drive to focus on the negative can make us miserable.
If it seems like the news is negative, that’s because it … is. Most estimates suggest that about 90 percent of news is negative. A recent study found that even brief exposure to this negative stuff has emotional consequences.
How We Got Here
It happened like this: In the 1800s, a dude named Benjamin Day had this idea to get rich. Newspapers at the time covered erudite and boring topics like business and politics. These papers were also expensive, at six cents a copy, which meant that only the rich could afford them.
Day planned to sell his newspaper for one cent, which put it in the price range of the masses. But by selling that low he couldn’t cover his costs.
To fill the financial gap, he decided to sell space in his newspaper to businesses. They could use the space they’d purchased to inform readers about their products and services. Which is to say that they could advertise.
But the thing about advertising is that it only works if people see it. Lots of people; the more people who see it, the better it works and the more you can charge for it. If Day could get more people to buy the paper, each square inch of the paper would become more valuable. In that sense, Day’s product wasn’t his paper. It was his readers, whose eyes he’d sell to his advertisers. More eyes = more profit from advertisers.
Now he had to amass those eyes. And he knew another uptight newspaper about politics and business wasn’t going to do it. He instead leaned into our evolutionary tendency to focus on the negative. He ran stories about suicides, murders, fights, lovers’ quarrels, high-profile court cases, public disagreements, etc.
The result: In less than a year he was outselling every other paper in New York and was filthy rich.
Nearly 200 years later, here we are. The media still works the same way: Shuttle negative info at people. Hack the evolutionary mechanism that grabs our attention. Then sell our attention to the highest bidder.
Just consider the formula of the 30-minute nightly news shows. Essentially: “Here are 29 minutes of commercials and heinous happenings and, at the very end of our program, we’ll give you a minute-long heartwarming story.” Sleep tight!
The Problem With News
So is the world as bad as the media portrays it? Is it 90 percent bad? I don’t think so.
The world isn’t perfect. But the average person today, for example, is anywhere from 40 to 70 percent less likely to be hungry, illiterate, poor, or die at a young age than they were in 1990. That’s in my lifetime! Now consider the progress we’ve made since 1890. Or 1790. And so on. Even just 100 years ago, life for most people revolved around breaking your back in a field or on a mortar and pestle in hopes to get enough calories to not starve and die. And that’s if you didn’t die in infancy, which was common.
Even the negative news we get hit with most often is likely overstated. American politics seems like a righteous shitshow, but it’s been much worse here. Like, Civil War worse.
Or consider the horror stories we saw around coronavirus. If I’m taking necessary precautions based on my risk tolerance, does tracking the insignificant daily fluctuations in case counts improve my life? Does hearing all about the exceedingly rare death of a person in my age bracket suggest anything about my own risk and how I should behave? Probably not.
Here’s a fun stat that shows you just how misguided news can be. Media run 20 times more headlines about murders than they do heart disease, yet Americans are roughly 40 times more likely to die of heart problems than they are homicide.
What To Do
Simple: Watch less news. That’s what I did. Am I missing some information I should probably know? Will you, too, if you join me in watching less news? Maybe. But I don’t know. Who does? To gather more eyeballs, the news is incentivized to position every negative story as “breaking” and critically important in your life. A sort of impending doom. We lack context cues to help us figure out just how important and impactful a given story is. Most stories probably won’t impact us. And each time we consume them, we get a twinge of negative emotions.
Once we’d exchanged looks, my friend I knew what to do. While our hunting buddies got red in the face talking about the news, we slipped away to go fishing.
