If you have to ask, you've passed the point where it is. Reading the news is the kind of thing you do to fill in interstitial time that is not fungible with ot

If you have to ask, you've passed the point where it is. Reading the news is the kind of thing you do to fill in interstitial time that is not fungible with other activities, not something you do for its own sake, or should ever "make time" for, or that is ever inherently important. There may be important news, but the defining property of news is not importance, but newness. I think that many here (and elsewhere) likely suffer from (to some degree) a kind of information-age malaise akin to scrupulosity (obsession over sinfulness). It's a condition where people feel anxiety over not being completely informed, or at least informed enough to have an opinion on every subject. How often do you read an article (or bookmark it, or InstaPaper it, or tag it "toread", etc.) not because you want to read that article, but you feel like you should know more about that subject? How many unread items do you have in your RSS reader that you keep thinking you're actually going to read someday? That's what I mean. It's an impossible task, but trying can very easily consume all of your time. You "just" have to learn to flip the switch from input to output without ever feeling "done".