Breaking Free from Breaking News

The Night is Full of Terrors and New York Times Breaking News alerts

I’ve been thinking about boundaries, and I know you have too. In the hour between when my son falls asleep and when I fall asleep I am disturbed by the New York Times. This is the only reliable time I have to read, and now it is full of chaos and despair: fires, white supremacy, pulling federal funding from mental health and diversity programs, I could go on. Although for now I am admittedly somewhat insulated from these things by geography or my race or status as a straight white man, these policy changes and stories have immediate impacts on my students and people I love. Reading these kinds of stories each night before bed is not exactly a recipe for sound sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well and although I’ve been trying to tell myself it’s coincidence, let me say it plainly: I think it’s related to the incoming Trump administration. So the other day I made a plan. But first I needed to understand why I had fallen into this pattern of passive consumption. I think many people have. Here's what I see as the big problems:

In the past decades, we've witnessed the transformation of citizenship into spectatorship. Many of us spend hours each day consuming an endless stream of catastrophic news and social media updates, our souls sinking, our hands idle. I was an early adopter of many Internet technologies and I remember the promise. The excitement! Social media platforms were poised to revolutionize social and political organizing. Social media actually did play a crucial role in movements from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. But today we are tired.

This time around there are no inauguration protests. There are no hashtags — on Instagram even the hashtag search feature has mostly been removed. Instead, we find ourselves in a situation where most kinds of digital engagement feel like a substitute for real-world action rather than a catalyst for it. This dynamic wears us down and deteriorates our mental health. What’s worse, our social media activity now also enriches the very tech billionaires whose political alignments many of us spend our days critiquing! This is nonsensical. Will you find me on Bluesky? Will I find you? I don’t know. What I know is that it’s not enough to simply watch an autocratic agenda unfold through our screens while despairing.

President Trump is the Spectator in Chief, modeling exactly what not to do in times of crisis: shock and blame. Just the other day when an American Airlines jet crashed in DC killing 67 people Trump’s response was not to offer consolation or condolenscences or measured or rational explanation. Rather, his response was first a tweet explaining that the crisis was “NOT GOOD!!!!” then blaming diversity policies on the crash without evidence. Like so many responses by the president, this seems both comically absurd and deeply tragic (not to mention stupid). But in the early days of this administration it’s also given me a chance to reflect on how I myself react to the news. Unfortunately, even for progressives this is the contemporary paradigm: we all often follow the shock and blame script in responding to crisis. As long as we are all spending our time in shock and blame mode, we aren’t spending that time working toward change. Perhaps, this level of distraction and action-less reaction is part of the right-wing strategy? I can do better. We can do better. We must do better for the sake of our mental health and our collective capacity to actually enact change.

Here I need to temper expectations. I’m an artist, not a federal judge or policy wonk. I started thinking about all this after posting about my nightly news anxiety on Instagram. The handful of responses were interesting, not because anyone had solutions necessarily but because everyone seemed to be struggling with the same thing. 'I don't know, I'm trying to figure this out myself' was a common refrain. I don’t have a perfect solution either. But maybe the strategy I’m thinking about (and what several others seemed to be pursuing) might help. Ya’ll, we are in for four long years of this administration. This is me trying to face the music; now is a good time to figure out ways to make news consumption and inspired action sustainable. If enough of us move from passive consumption to active engagement, we might begin to rebuild our collective capacity for change. Here’s what I will do.

My phone is now stripped down to its essential ontological function which is connecting me to people I love. I'll stay connected to my close friends through texts and group chats. These are the conversations that often lead to actual organizing and much needed emotional support, not just commentary. If you don’t have a group chat with a few trusted friends, start one.

You don’t need a “dumb phone”. Just make your smart phone less annoying and turn off all your notifications, especially news. No breaking news alerts. Just texts from friends and family, and my calendar. If something is truly urgent I trust I'll hear about it from someone who cares about me, probably through an actual phone call. Or I’ll hear about it through my university or town or son’s school alert system. This is easy enough and I’ve been doing something like this for years. I’m just tightening it up.

But my email is truly a mess. This is gonna require a bit more work. I'm setting up Gmail to batch deliver all those 'breaking news' alerts - they can wait. I am unsubscribing from a lot of less trustworthy news providers, and I am finally being more deliberate about separating out my work email from my other emails. The university already does a good job of articulating changes in federal policies and describing how those changes will impact students and faculty and staff. In a way, these university emails are a valuable built-in news aggregator (the other aggregator is my friend text group!)

That's the consumption side. But it's only half the equation, and here’s where they’re connected.

Rather than reading the news in the dark every night like I have been, I will read books. Then, I’m setting aside some time on Saturday (I tried Sunday but I need Sunday to relax) to read longer and more in depth news stories. I will read the New York Times, the Atlantic, and one conservative-leaning publication when I’m in a healthy and analytical frame of mind. And here’s the important thing. Each week I will identify one concrete thing I can do in response to what I have read. Maybe it's showing up to a school board meeting or PTA meeting in town, or helping an international student identify changing policies. Maybe it's as simple as taking someone else's suggestion seriously and acting on it. One thing probably sounds small but if I am consistent and deliberate about this, that will be hundreds of concrete things over the next few years.

The key is moving away from shock and blame as substitutes for action. While my emotional responses to the news are real and important, they are also draining. At the very least If I can tether my news consumption to action, then reading is no longer about despair. Reading becomes a foundational part of energized action. Reading the news is vital and important, it just doesn’t always feel that way the way we are doing it now.

If you’re like me this might sound a bit daunting. But let me be clear about this. This isn't about adding more stress! Or turning your to-do list (or mine) into a political manifesto. These actions can be small and should be small, even. Small action is better than a cycle of endless despairing spectatorship. We have little control over the outcomes of the Supreme Court’s hearings or an erratic president. But the lives and people and challenges that are right in front of us, that is where we are going to have the most tangible impact and derive the most meaning from anyway. Maybe it's helping a neighbor navigate changing healthcare policies, or contributing to someone's medical fund on gofundme, or just showing up to an event when a friend needs support. It’s likely that we are all doing one or two things a week already that are positive. So this could also be about simply taking a beat to recognize the impacts we are having.

It can be difficult to keep our focus on what’s in front of us against the raging inferno backdrop of the national news. But we must do that. It’s okay to admit that it’s where we start, in our communities and in our own beds. We all need better ways to stay informed and engaged without burning out or getting down on ourselves for clutching our phones in the darkness. So this is my attempt at a sustainable approach. What do you think? I'd love to hear what you're trying. We're all figuring this out together. Godspeed.