What checking costs you

The last few chapters took the beliefs one at a time. This one adds up the bill.

You're paying in mood. On the evidence of chapter 6, each dose of bad news leaves you a little lower and more inclined to worry, and your day contains twenty-five doses. The mood you've come to think of as your normal temperament, a bit anxious and gloomy and braced for something, may be in part an effect of what you're reading.

There's a recent survey that bears on this. Bryan McLaughlin and colleagues surveyed a national sample of American adults about their relationship with the news. They identified a group whose news consumption they called problematic, which meant they became absorbed in it, were preoccupied by it, checked compulsively, and found it interfering with their lives. That group reported markedly worse mental and physical health than others. The difference held after allowing for personality and, importantly, for how much news people consumed overall. What mattered was whether the consuming had become compulsive. It was a survey, so it can't show what causes what. Anxious and unwell people may be drawn to the news as much as the news makes people anxious and unwell. Holman and Silver's work suggests that both are true and that they feed each other.

You're paying in accuracy. Chapter 4 showed that a steady diet of news makes people confidently wrong about their own risks and about the direction of their country. There's an old idea in media research, associated with George Gerbner, that people who watch a great deal of television come to see the world as a meaner and more dangerous place than it is. I'm giving that from memory of his work and not from a paper I've checked. The crime survey evidence points the same way. You're paying an hour a day to have a less accurate picture of the world.

You're paying in attention, as the last chapter described, and in sleep.

You're paying in presence. When Jo said "you've gone quiet again" at dinner, you were there in the room with your mind on the winter. The Sunday in the garden was a good afternoon, and two minutes on the phone ended it. Your own life is mostly made of things that are going reasonably well, such as a garden, a dinner, a person across the table. The news takes your attention off those and puts it on things that are going badly somewhere else. You can do something about your own life and nothing about most of the news, and you've been giving your attention to the news.

And you're paying in hope. A person who takes in forty pieces of bad news a day and almost no good news forms a view that everything is getting worse. Some things are. Many aren't. Across the last few decades, to take large examples, deaths of children under five have fallen enormously worldwide, and so has extreme poverty. Those are among the biggest stories of our lifetimes, and they're almost never in the headlines, because they happened slowly and nobody could put a date on them. I'm not telling you the world is fine. But you can't assess it from a selection made by what frightens you, and a settled belief that everything is hopeless has never helped anyone to improve anything.

I should put the other side. You have had things from the news. You know the names and the outlines, you can hold your own in conversation, and you haven't buried your head. Those are worth having. The argument of this book is that you can have all of them for a fraction of the price.