Related to reducing media exposure and the attendant increase in the sense of wellbeing, this is a lovely article by the Serbian / American poet Charles Simic,

Related to reducing media exposure and the attendant increase in the sense of wellbeing, this is a lovely article by the Serbian / American poet Charles Simic, about discovering how his dad had attained "Olympian calm": "Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day. My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Like any child growing up in an occupied city during wartime, I didn’t think much about it. I was as serene then as I will ever be, sitting among the ruins smoking my first cigarette, riding on a Russian tank with a friend, or watching our school janitor hang the portraits of Marx, Stalin and Marshal Tito in our classroom after the liberation." https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/