Give up on that newspaper, not news. With a few exceptions (NYTimes, WSJ) newspapers tend to go just deep enough to distract, but not deep enough to inform. Re

Give up on that newspaper, not news. With a few exceptions (NYTimes, WSJ) newspapers tend to go just deep enough to distract, but not deep enough to inform. Read The Atlantic or Salon or other long-form stuff, read the more substantive news links off HN, but read. Your initial instinct was a good one, reading well enriches you. Not reading makes you boring. And while I think it's profoundly worth it in the long run, learning about the world isn't necessarily supposed to make you happy.