Justin Pot

The past month has been the longest year of my life. I’m sure I’m not alone on this.

It is impossible to ignore the onslaught of bad news, which I’m not going to highlight here. What I am going to do is recommend that you take care of yourself. If the world is going to get any better, it will not be because all of us spend every day panicking about five different things. We all need to pick a few things we’re passionate about and diligently work to make those things better in whatever ways we can.

With that in mind, I’m going to spend the next few weeks talking about ways to take care of your digital headspace during this clusterfuck of an era. First up: avoiding anxiety bait. 

The current media environment seems designed to cause anxiety and cripple our ability to think critically, mostly because it is. There are so many articles, videos, and other links that exist primarily to activate your anxiety in the hopes that you’ll click something. This has been the driving force of the Trump era, regardless of your political affiliation: the world is about to end and you need to click this link to find out how. 

Here’s the thing with clickbait: everyone complains about it but no one does anything about it. It’s time to change that. When you see a headline you want to click, stop. Breathe. Ask yourself: why do I want to click this? What does that say about me? Do I like what it says about me? And, most importantly, am I likely to learn anything? 

This is a hard habit to build, mostly because some of the most powerful corporations on earth are employing some of the smartest people alive to keep you from doing it. Try to do it anyway. 

Only you know whether you’re going to learn something from an article or not, and I’m not going to tell you how to make that determination for yourself. Here’s a rule I’ve started following lately: if the headline for an article makes some kind of sensational statement that I agree with, then I don’t read the article. Why? Because I already know what the article is going to say, and I already know that I’m going to agree with it. Reading the article, at that point, doesn’t accomplish anything other than making me feel self-righteous at best, or simply angry that no one has solved what I perceive to be the problem. 

Again: this isn’t a rule I’d give to everyone. It’s just a rule I have for myself. You should try to think up your own rules. 

My wife Kathy, who edits these posts, told me a rule she uses is avoiding predictions about the future. “If an article names some event in passing, then spends the rest of it just projecting the (usually worst) possible outcomes, I stop reading,” she said. “These make you feel like the outcome is predetermined and inevitable, but none of it has happened yet. The systems we’re talking about are immensely complex, and a quick news story doesn’t have time for that amount of context and nuance. And actions we and others take now can put things on a different course.” 

The point: there is so much content on the internet that makes us feel crappy without offering any actual information that can help you make the world a better place. When I’m taking good care of myself, I’m actively working to ignore such garbage, so I’ve been trying to make rules to remind me what I shouldn’t waste time on. I wrote last year about how I learned to ignore the worst of the web, outlining how ignoring stuff is a vital online skill. I highly recommend you try to notice what sorts of videos, news articles, or podcasts make you feel worse about the world, and do what you need to do in order to stop clicking. 

Reading bad news isn’t necessarily helpful. Being informed is. I’d love to hear tips from all of you on avoiding anxiety bait so leave those below. Next week I’m going to talk about the importance of not getting your news from social media.