[V]arious acquaintances – and me too, in some ways – started doing what I called “living inside the news.” They seemed to view the world they accessed through news sites and social media as somehow more real than their immediate surroundings. The latter was a place they merely dropped into from time to time, before hurrying back to the main event.
[ . . . ]
Keeping your centre of gravity immediate and local is the opposite of all that. It means treating the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.
This is why I’m trying to keep to news-resiliency: there’s too much national and geopolitical news, and too much of it I cannot even meaningfully act on (except in a few ways). It’s not to claim ignorance; rather, it’s to reclaim my attention. The whole point of the flurry of terrible news and decisions is to consume all of one’s time, energy, and attention. Don’t let them take it from you.
