Mark: The average person spends about 90 minutes a day consuming news. That adds up to over a month of your year, every year. But what if that time isn't making you smarter? What if it's actively making you more anxious, less creative, and worse at making decisions? Michelle: Whoa. A month of my life, just gone. That’s a staggering thought. And honestly, it doesn't always feel like time well spent. Most days it feels like I’m just mainlining anxiety for no reason. Mark: That's the provocative premise of Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life by Rolf Dobelli. He argues that our news habit is one of the most destructive forces in modern life. Michelle: And Dobelli is an interesting guy to be making this argument. He's not some hermit living off-grid. He has a PhD in economic philosophy and was a corporate exec before he started writing. He actually quit news cold turkey over a decade ago. Mark: Exactly. And his personal experiment, combined with a ton of research, led to this manifesto. It’s been pretty polarizing. Reader reviews are all over the place—some call it a life-changing voice of calm, others find it way too extreme and impractical. Michelle: Which is exactly why we need to talk about it. Is he a genius or a crank? Let's find out.

Mark: Dobelli kicks things off with a powerful analogy. He says, "News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetizing, easily digestible and extremely damaging." Michelle: Oh, I like that. It’s instantly gratifying, you get that little rush of knowing something, but then comes the crash. The sugar crash of the soul. Mark: Precisely. And it starts with our evolutionary wiring. We have a powerful negativity bias. Imagine two ancient human ancestors, Species A and Species B. Species A is jumpy, always on alert, overreacting to every rustle in the bushes. Species B is chill, enjoying the sunset, assuming the best. Michelle: I’m guessing Species B gets eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. Mark: They get eaten. Species A, the anxious one, survives. We are the descendants of Species A. Our brains are hardwired to react twice as strongly to negative information as to positive information. And the news media, Dobelli argues, is a 24/7 buffet designed to feed that bias. It serves up shocking, scandalous, personal, and loud stories because that’s what our ancient brains crave. Michelle: That makes so much sense. It explains that feeling of "doomscrolling," where you know it’s making you feel awful, but you can't look away. Mark: And it's not just a feeling. It has a real physical cost. When you see a shocking headline or a tragic image, your body doesn't distinguish it from a real-life threat. It floods your system with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Your immune system weakens, your digestion is impaired, and you're in a constant state of low-grade fight-or-flight. Michelle: Wait, so you're saying watching the evening news is literally like giving myself tiny electric shocks all day? Mark: That's a perfect way to put it. And Dobelli backs this up with the classic psychological concept of 'learned helplessness.' He describes these experiments from the 1960s by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier. They had two groups of rats. Both groups received annoying, but not painful, electric shocks. Michelle: Poor rats. This is going to be grim, isn't it? Mark: A little, but the insight is profound. The first group of rats could turn a small wheel in their cage to stop the shocks. They had control. The second group had a wheel too, but it did nothing. The shocks were completely random and uncontrollable. Michelle: Okay, so one group learns they can solve the problem, the other learns they're powerless. Mark: Exactly. Now, here's the kicker. They then put both groups of rats into a new cage, where all they had to do was jump over a low barrier to escape the shocks. It was an easy solution. The first group, the ones who had control before, figured it out almost immediately. They jumped. Michelle: And the second group? Mark: They just sat there. They didn't even try to escape. They had learned that nothing they did mattered, so they became completely passive and just accepted the pain. They developed what we now call learned helplessness. Michelle: Oh man. That’s… that’s what scrolling through headlines about global crises feels like. You're exposed to all this suffering and chaos that you have absolutely no control over, and eventually, you just feel numb and passive. Mark: Dobelli’s argument is that this passivity spills over. After being bombarded with things you can’t influence—a coup in a distant country, a stock market crash, a natural disaster—you start to feel passive about the things you can influence, like your job, your relationships, or your community. You've trained your brain to be helpless.

Michelle: Okay, so it makes us feel bad physically and emotionally. I can get on board with that. But the whole point of news is to make us smarter, right? To help us understand the world and make better decisions. Mark: That’s the conventional wisdom, but Dobelli argues it’s the exact opposite. He says news actively inhibits thought. It creates an illusion of understanding. He points to a fascinating study on horse-race betting by Professor Paul Slovic. Michelle: Horse-race betting? How does that connect to news? Mark: Bettors were given five pieces of information about the horses in a race and asked to predict the winner. Then they were given ten pieces of information, then twenty, then forty. At each stage, they were asked two things: who will win, and how confident are you in your prediction? Michelle: I’m guessing their predictions got more accurate with more information. Mark: That’s what you’d think. But their accuracy didn't improve at all. It stayed flat. The only thing that went up was their confidence. With more information, they didn't get better at predicting, they just got more overconfident in their bad predictions. Michelle: Wow. So more news doesn't make us more knowledgeable, it just makes us more certain that we are. That's a dangerous combination. Mark: It's a cognitive funhouse. The news reinforces all sorts of biases. Take the availability bias. We make decisions based on what’s easily available in our minds. The news plasters our brains with images of plane crashes, terrorist attacks, and shark attacks. So we become irrationally afraid of flying, even though driving to the airport is statistically far more dangerous. The news makes the rare and sensational feel common. Michelle: That’s a bit like why we think crime is always rising, even when statistics show it's falling. The news just shows us the most dramatic crimes, over and over. Mark: Exactly. And this constant stream of pre-packaged stories, Dobelli claims, kills creativity. He says he doesn't know a single truly creative person who is also a news junkie. Creativity requires deep concentration and the ability to connect disparate ideas in novel ways. News, with its short, fragmented, and sensational nature, trains our brain for the opposite—for shallow, distracted thinking. Michelle: But hold on, what about serendipity? Don't creative people get their best ideas by bumping into random information from different fields? Isn't that what news is for? Mark: That's a common objection, and Dobelli addresses it. He says that kind of cross-pollination is vital, but news is a terrible way to get it. He argues we should focus on mastering our own 'circle of competence'—the area where we have deep expertise. For new ideas, he suggests intentionally exploring other fields by, say, spending an afternoon in a bookstore browsing magazines on architecture or biology, or having lunch with an expert in a different field. It’s about seeking quality and depth, not the random, shallow spray of the news. Mark: He even points to studies of London cab drivers. To get their license, they have to memorize 25,000 streets—a feat called 'The Knowledge.' MRI scans showed that the part of their brain responsible for spatial memory, the hippocampus, physically grew larger. Their brains rewired. But here's the trade-off: they performed worse on other memory tasks. Michelle: So by training their brains to be a human GPS, they weakened other mental muscles. And Dobelli is saying that by training our brains to skim headlines and consume bite-sized outrage, we're weakening our ability for deep, concentrated thought. Mark: That’s the core of it. We are literally rewiring our brains to be worse at the very thing that leads to wisdom and creativity.

Michelle: This all sounds very self-focused, though. "I want to be calmer, I want to be more creative." What about our duty as citizens? What about democracy? We can't just ignore what's happening in the world. That feels incredibly privileged and irresponsible. Mark: This is the biggest and most important objection, and Dobelli dedicates a lot of time to it. His response is a crucial distinction: he's against news, not journalism. Michelle: What's the difference? They sound like the same thing. Mark: He defines 'news' as the constant, short-form, sensational, breaking-story cycle. It's designed to be fleeting and to grab attention. 'Journalism,' on the other hand, is long-form, investigative, and explanatory. Think of the Watergate scandal. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein didn't break that story by reading headlines. They spent months doing deep, investigative work. That's journalism. It holds power to account. Michelle: Okay, I can see that. A 500-word article on a political gaffe is news. A 10,000-word deep dive into systemic corruption is journalism. Mark: Precisely. Dobelli argues that being a good citizen doesn't mean knowing the latest gaffe. It means understanding the complex, underlying systems. And news, with its focus on the superficial, actually prevents that deeper understanding. He argues that democracy thrived for centuries without a 24-hour news cycle. The founders of modern democracies were reading books, pamphlets, and having long debates in salons, not scrolling through a news feed. Michelle: But I have to push back on this. I read that some critics find Dobelli a bit hypocritical. He became famous for this idea, in part, because he wrote a viral article for The Guardian called 'News is bad for you.' He used the very news system he tells us to abandon to promote his book. Mark: That's a fair and important critique. And I think the answer lies in his argument about where we should put our money and attention. He's not saying these media organizations are inherently evil. He's saying their business model, which relies on free, ad-supported clicks, incentivizes the worst kind of content—the 'sugar'. His solution is that we, as consumers, should stop consuming the free, low-quality news and instead be willing to pay for the high-quality, in-depth journalism. Michelle: So, cancel the free news apps, but subscribe to a publication that does real investigative work. Mark: Yes. Support the model that produces the Watergate-style journalism, not the one that produces endless celebrity gossip and political outrage. By avoiding the daily news, you're not abandoning your civic duty; you're actually creating the space and demand for the kind of journalism that democracy truly needs.

Mark: When you pull it all together, Dobelli's argument is that news is a kind of triple threat. First, it's a threat to your personal well-being, hijacking your stress response and making you passive. Second, it's a threat to your intellect, distorting your perception of risk and killing your capacity for deep, creative thought. Michelle: And third, it's a threat to democracy, not because it exists, but because it masquerades as the civic engagement we actually need, which is deeper, more thoughtful, and more focused. It gives us the illusion of being informed while preventing us from becoming truly wise. Mark: Exactly. The path to a calmer, wiser, and more effective life isn't about consuming more information. It's about consuming better information. It’s a radical detox. Michelle: And he does offer a practical way to test this. He suggests a 30-day challenge. For one month, go on a strict news diet. Delete the apps, avoid the websites, turn off the TV news. See how you feel. Maybe you'll feel disconnected and lost, or maybe... you won't miss it at all. Mark: It’s a powerful experiment. It forces you to confront the habit. And it leaves you with a final, lingering question. If you got back that 90 minutes every day, that one full month every year, what could you do with it? What could you learn, create, or build with that reclaimed time and focus? Michelle: That’s a question worth thinking about. A lot more than the day's headlines, anyway. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.