Monday, ten past seven

It's ten past seven on a Monday morning and the alarm has just gone. Before your feet touch the floor you've picked up the phone, and before you've decided anything your thumb has opened the news. There's been a missile strike on a city whose name you couldn't have placed a year ago. Someone has been stabbed outside a nightclub in a town two hundred miles away. A minister is under pressure to resign. Economists are warning about the winter.

You read the first few lines of each and put the phone down. You get up with a faint tightness in your chest, which you don't connect with anything.

At the kettle you look again. The minister story has a new headline, which says the pressure is mounting. On the train you look twice. At your desk there's a tab that stays open all day, and you glance at it between tasks, perhaps once or twice an hour. There's a live page running on the missile strike, with a new entry every few minutes. Most of the entries say that details are still emerging. At lunch you read an opinion piece that makes you angry and another that makes you gloomy. In the car on the way home the radio gives you the headlines at five, half past five and six. You watch the ten o'clock news, which tells you what you already know, with pictures. In bed you look once more, in case anything has happened since the television told you what had happened.

If you counted, it would come to something like twenty-five looks. You've never counted.

Your partner Jo said at dinner, "You've gone quiet again." You said you were fine. You were thinking about the winter, and the economists.

Sunday had been a good day until about four o'clock. You'd been in the garden with the phone left indoors. You came in for a cup of tea, picked the phone up, and within two minutes the afternoon felt different. Nothing in your life had changed, and the garden hadn't either.

Your brother-in-law Neil doesn't look at the news during the week. He gets a weekly paper on Saturdays and reads it over the weekend with a pot of coffee. It's slightly annoying that when the family talks about what's going on in the world, Neil tends to know more about it than you do.

You'd call yourself well informed. You'd say that it's part of being a responsible adult to keep up, and you may think a little less of people who don't. You wouldn't say that you enjoy it.

I'll use a few terms throughout. Checking is looking at the news without having decided to find out anything in particular. The feed is wherever your headlines come from, whether that's an app, a website, a social network, rolling television or the radio on the hour. The jolt is the small alarm you feel on reading a bad headline. An update is a new headline on a story you already know about, which usually adds little. Being informed means understanding something well enough to explain it to someone else or to act on it. The appointment is a fixed time at which you take in the news on purpose, and it's what this book builds towards.

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

Nothing prompts it. You don't check because you want to know a particular thing. You check because it's there and a few minutes have passed.

You mostly read headlines. Most looks last under a minute and take in headlines and first paragraphs. You seldom read anything to the end.

It's repetitive. Most of what you see at four o'clock is what you saw at one, reworded.

It's mostly about things far away that you can do nothing about.

And it leaves a residue. Each look is trivial, and the day's total is a mood.

Try one thing before reading on. For two days, keep a tally of every time you look at the news in any form, including radio and television bulletins. At the end of each day, write down in a few lines what you learned that you didn't know the day before. Then note whether you did anything, or will do anything, as a result. Most people who try this get a larger tally than they expected and find they've written only a few lines.