Stop Watching the News
Pictured above: an “expert” incorrectly identifies a pentagram as a “satanic symbol” during the height of the United States Satanic Panic (a completely fabricated media event).
If someone were to ask me what the dumbest possible use of one’s time might be in the year 2022, the answer, without hesitation would be watching the news. I would follow this promptly by saying that reading the news, anywhere (Meta, Reddit, your preferred social media platform, Google alerts, etc.), is probably the second biggest waste of your time (reading — even reading trash — is still reading something).
“But Dan, what about all those people who waste their lives playing video games, or doing drugs, or staring at the ceiling?”
Staring at the ceiling, or playing video games, or even staring down the oblivion of a drug induced stupor is still more productive than watching the news. At least in staring a the ceiling, or staring into the drug induced void, you have a slim chance of confronting your internal state of being. Video games increase hand-eye coordination.
The news, as far as I’m aware, offers none of those potential outcomes.
Yet, like the most addictive drug, many of us find ourselves unable to disconnect from the droning news outlets, insipid talking heads, or the gleeful sharing of tragedy and horror that lights up our living rooms, cell phones, and cafes. The News is an ever present energy vampire, here to siphon your attention while increasing your cortisol levels, inducing a stress response, and generally making you feel like garbage. And, its effect on your brain, body, and health is detrimental. The News takes us out of our grounded experience and reduces our ability to think clearly about the way in which events impact our lives.
“But if I stop reading the news, won’t I be unaware of what’s happening in the world?”
According to news outlets, only the best, most goodly citizens watch the news… which is a lot like asking the cigarette companies if it would be a bad idea to stop smoking. And yet, how often in our daily conversations do we talk about the “news”, the global events, or the latest antics of the politicians? How often do you groan internally when someone ruins a conversation, dinner party, or event by talking about “current events”? And, in many ways it is truly impossible to entirely avoid the happenings of the world around us. We absorb the details that surround us seemingly via osmosis — and we’re never far from the people who can’t wait to share their accounting of current events.
But the real benefits of cutting consumption of news are, of course, the magickal ones.
Somewhat astoundingly, when we disconnect from content designed to elicit a reaction, we begin to create our own thoughts and ideas. This process starts slowly, and is often uncomfortable. What do we do with all that time? What thoughts begin to emerge that replace the anxiety, the doom-scrolling, and… most disturbing of all… what happens when you realize that some of the thoughts you used to think, were never your own??? Jung one wrote that “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people”, and the true meaning of that statement becomes clear when we begin to recognize just how many of our thoughts were never our own.
The News as a media organization has spent decades crafting and weaponizing ideas. We sense this implicitly when someone expresses a different “news based” opinion than our own, but we rarely interrogate our own thoughts with the same vigor that we devote to “owning” our relatives at Thanksgiving dinner. When we turn a reflective and detailed eye to our own lives and communities, we find that reality rarely behaves as it should according to the news anchor. The things we are told are important by the “breaking news” banner hardly ever impact our actual daily lives at all. Even during the peak of the pandemic, our daily lives changed very little in day-to-day operation, despite hour-by-hour coverage of all the unknowns (of which, a great many remain unknown) and the panicked proclamations of those hungering for end-times sensationalism. While some would point to a vast conspiracy of “thought control” the grim reality is that the News (written on a fakebook wall or coming from the gleaming newsroom desk) is driven by ratings — what keeps people looking, sharing, watching, and tuned in. Nothing motivates those ratings like fear. And, while fear is a useful motivator in manufacturing consent, fear felt for prolonged periods of time over things that you cannot control is absolutely detrimental to your long-term health and wellbeing.
As occultists, witches, magicians, and magically operant practitioners, our job is to move through the world with clear eyes and clear heads. If we look to construct the reality that we desire, we must start by removing the things that are out of alignment with that reality from our conscious mind. Neville Goddard writes at length about the power of revision, the power of denial of a state, and the power of living as if you already are when bringing in a manifestation. What if part of the reason we feel like we are living on the edge of apocalypse… is because our News is so apocalyptic?
What if we are creating a world that we don’t want to live in… because we are addicted to telling/sharing/creating/BELIEVING the stories of apocalypse?
In short, once we stop telling ourselves the stories that the News perpetuates: that you can’t trust your neighbor, that the world is on fire, that a game-show host is the only good president, that a senile man is the only good president, that war is good actually, that your food is killing you, that the only safe place is inside your cheaply built home waiting out collapse… then we can start living again.