The news is not your life

Oliver Burkeman · by 16 Aug 2021

Oliver Burkeman did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
People cannot thrive while their primary psychological identification is with the news cycle rather than with their own lives.

Their wordsThe trouble is that human beings can't really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like "the news cycle" or "history" or "the course of world events."
Our reading
The answer to living inside the news is not to stop reading it but to move your emotional investment back into the part of the world you can actually affect.

Their wordsBut it is an argument for reducing your emotional investment in the world of the news, and reinvesting in your own.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.