I have gone dark earlier, 5+ years ago, but not recently. It was very healthy. My experience was that surprisingly I often understood more about current issues

I have gone dark earlier, 5+ years ago, but not recently. It was very healthy. My experience was that surprisingly I often understood more about current issues than people that were constantly reading the news. Much of news is just noise. If you read all the news, all the time, you are acting as a noise filter. If you let other people work as your noise filter, and start listening what they say about the current events, the important things will bubble up, and you will know about them practically as soon as everybody else.