Apologies to anyone expecting a Last Week’s news update today. I’ve decided to take a bit of a blogging break. My body has been exhibiting some symptoms of stress lately, and I’ve come across some articles by people claiming that the news was making them stressed and they felt better when they stopped reading it. I don’t feel emotionally stressed, and I’ve always convinced myself that the news doesn’t make me stressed and it’s more of a hobby I greatly enjoy immersing myself in, but either way I’ve decided I have an unhealthy and unsustainable addiction to news anyway.
What started out several years ago as a lunch break checking of Google News has ballooned into multiple daily checkings of econ blogs, twitter feeds of economists and political commentators, user-submission sites like Hacker News and Reddit, raw weather data sites, C-SPAN streams…. It’s gotten to the point where I rarely go two waking hours without checking something. I can’t keep this up as a husband and now father, anyway, even if it’s not affecting my health. Do I really need all this information buzzing through my brain and forming into future blog posts as I fall asleep at night? How can I expect God to speak to me about fatherhood when I’m pulling out my phone to check Bloomberg’s commodities tab every time I sit down to poop?
So I’m going to take a break for a week or so and use the extra time to focus on both physical and spiritual exercise. I still think there’s value in being informed and informing others about what’s going on around the world, and I may come back in smaller doses.
I should emphasize that this is not a reaction to the NSA news or some newfound desire to reduce my online footprint. (Although those leaks were really exciting news for me, and I spent a lot of time consuming information about it, which perhaps helped awaken me to my news addiction.) Since I won’t be doing a blog post about it, in brief, the surveillance is worse than I thought, but still not as bad as many people think; we have hard evidence now of call logs, but as far as I know not evidence that actual calls are being recorded and analyzed. We have tech companies giving the government portal access to more easily get data on specific cases, but as far as I know not evidence that data is being full-scale exported straight to the Utah datacenter or whatever. I’m hopeful that this news and any further leak will lead to greater privacy measures. As always, be careful out there and call your Congresspeoples.
Enjoy your break. I gave up blogging for Lent one year, and it was a valuable experience. I was reading 200+ articles a day at that point and I was totally burning myself out. You get to the point where you’re just blowing through articles, looking for the rush of one well written good idea. To be honest, it may be about the time for me to cut back as well.
By all means, take care of yourself, but I will miss your thoughtful posts.
By all means, take care of yourself, but I will miss your thoughtful posts.
Enjoy your break. I gave up blogging for Lent one year, and it was a valuable experience. I was reading 200+ articles a day at that point and I was totally burning myself out. You get to the point where you’re just blowing through articles, looking for the rush of one well written good idea. To be honest, it may be about the time for me to cut back as well.