How To Reclaim Your Wisdom

For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers.

You don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.

Social media increases general, not particularly useful awareness but destroys wisdom. If you want to gain wisdom, the best first step is to stop destroying it.

People don’t become wiser from social media.

Facebook’s former president — who made billions off our addiction — was blunter about social media: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

For this reason, and the general detached-from-reality behavior from its power-users, I have not used Facebook for years. I’m not very good at it, but Twitter-in-the-age-of-Trump consumes far too much of my time.

This NYT reporter, Farhad Manjoo, lays out three steps for avoiding “digital news”: 1) get news; 2) not too quickly; and, above all else, 3) avoid social.

I’m going to give these three steps a trial run.