Firewall for the Mind

Introduction

I recently read a compelling New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks called “The Self-Destructive Effects of Progressive Sadness.” It discusses the growing darkness of the national mood, which Brooks terms “maladaptive sadness,” and which he attributes to three trends: a catastrophizing mentality; extreme sensitivity to harm; and a culture of denunciation. The result, the author contends, is a decrease in one’s sense of agency, which causes emotional duress that can eventually lead to sadness and anxiety.

I was hoping the article would suggests ways we can work to mitigate this problem, but it didn’t get into it—that’s a whole other article. This post is me taking a swing at that other article.

Pay attention … or not

I believe the solution to this maladaptive sadness begins with deciding where and how—and, crucially, if—to focus our attention.

Let’s start with the catastrophizing mentality. Humans do have a talent for focusing on the negative. The late Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician and statistician, examined this in his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. This book explains why the vast majority of people—including scientists, executives of multinational companies, journalists, medical researchers, attendees of the Davos World Economic Forum, and others—have historically done really poorly on a multiple-choice test about the state of the world. In fact, people do worse than if they guessed at random; as Rosling explains, they’re “systematically wrong.” Out of nearly 12,000 people tested in 14 countries in 2017, “every group of people … thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.” Rosling identified ten key reasons people err, and one of them is “the negativity instinct.” To some degree, we’re hardwired for pessimism, which is exacerbated, Rosling explains, by “selective reporting by journalists and activists”—which accentuates the negative to create a sense of urgency. (Read this, quick! Donate now!) Meanwhile, he points out, people may feel that it’s heartless to acknowledge that the world is improving when there is still so much wrong with it. But then, naysaying doesn’t help, particularly when it depresses us.

I’m not suggesting that the solution to a widespread emotional health problem is simply to decide to be more positive. I acknowledge that a lot of our vulnerability is more psychological than logical. I can remember being a little kid and only just having learned to swim, and how I would be afraid to venture toward the deep end of the pool. Of course it’s no more dangerous over there; a person can drown in six inches of water. It just seemed more dangerous. As much as I reassured myself that the deep end was no big deal, the sight of that chasm opening up below me freaked me out every time. I finally got over this fear by simply closing my eyes when I got to the deep end. Without the visual stimulus, I could swim all the way across. The point is, “eyes wide open” doesn’t always reduce risk, and can introduce nonproductive anxiety.

Fast-forward a few years to when I’d moved on to bike racing. The Junior field (ages 16-17) in those days was pretty big—50 to 60 riders, typically—and fast. I remember the first road race of the season on a cold day with a strong crosswind, which meant lots of jostling around in the pack. I was feeling really intimidated, especially when I looked back at the large swarm of riders behind me, all of whom it seemed were saving their energy (in my draft) and could come flying past me at any moment. This was a major burden, psychologically, until I decided only to look at the riders ahead of me, and never allow myself to fall back very far. Each time I finished taking a turn at the front, I would only drop back a bit, and then get back into the line at fifth or sixth position. (To worm your way in, you look only forward, at the wheel you want to take.) This way, I was able to pretend I was already in a small breakaway with no swarming peloton to worry about. I did this for about fifty miles until I realized it was always the same riders ahead of me. Finally I sneaked a look back. The pack was gone—we’d dropped them! It wasn’t the size of the pack that mattered, but the quality of the riders near the front.

Far higher achievers than I have employed similar mind tricks. In this great interview, the cycling champion Andy Hampsten talks about the psychological rigor of beginning a pro career in Europe. So often, he was tempted to quit. He describes one such occasion, racing on a terribly cold, snowy spring day in Spain. He was shivering so badly he feared he might crash, and seriously considered abandoning. But then he found a way to deal with his fear: “a silly book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I thought of … where when the hero was in danger he had special glasses that would turn pitch black so he couldn’t see how dangerous things were. It’s best not to know … so I tried to apply that.” Instead of focusing on how frigid and dangerous this downhill was, he tried to look forward to the climb ahead, where he could warm up and the speed would be lower. His crisis of confidence hadn’t been driven by a fully reasoned assessment of the conditions; it was just negative self-talk. By choosing not to dwell on that negativity, Hampsten not only finished the race, finished the season, and made the transition to a world class professional, but grew his confidence and famously won the 1988 Giro d’Italia stage race by dominating a legendary mountain stage in a snowstorm.

Two circles

So, am I just suggesting we put our heads in the sand? That’s the whole trick, just ignore apparent threats? No, of course it’s more complicated than that. In his editorial, Brooks goes on to say, “People who provide therapy to depressive people try to break the cycle of catastrophic thinking so they can more calmly locate and deal with the problems they actually have control over” (italics mine). Societal catastrophes like climate change, systemic racism, and the vanishing middle class are all real problems, of course, but they have something in common: they are beyond the ability of most individuals to combat. They’re bigger than us, which is why we feel so powerless.

This brings me to a useful concept (which I’ve mentioned in these pages before, so bear with me if this is review): the distinction, as described in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, between the “circle of influence” and the “circle of concern.” Below is the author’s schematic. The idea is that we should spend most of our mental energy on what we can influence; for example, learning to manage our own stress. We should avoid spending too much energy on the circle of concern, such as the future of democracy, because that’s where most of us are largely helpless.

Did Hampsten’s team management emphasize to him how dangerous the race over the snow-covered Gavia Pass would be? Did they remind him that that no American had ever even finished on the podium of the Giro, which he now stood to do but only if he didn’t crash out in this dangerous stage? Did they show him a highlights reel of riders crashing on descents in bad weather? No, that would be pointless, and worse—and that would all be in the circle of concern. Instead, the team focused on what aspects of the race they could influence. They went around to all the sporting goods stores in the area and bought up all the cold weather gear they could find to equip their riders. They prepared Hampsten for success, and—since literally no other team had thought of this—in doing so they gave him an edge over his competition. (That stage of the Giro has become legendary; the tifosi (Italian fans) call it “the day the big men cried.”)

Why now?

Okay, so it’s best to separate what information is actionable, and what isn’t. But the Seven Habits book was published in 1989; if the matter is this simple, why is everyone’s emotional duress seeming to increase so much, and so fast, now? As reported by the National Institute of Mental Health, “more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (57.8 million in 2021).” If a growing sense of powerlessness can be linked to people spending more mental energy in the circle-of-concern space, what is causing that increase?

The Internet and social media are obviously implicated and I’m clearly not the first person to assert that. Even if we set people’s habits aside for the moment, the pace of bad news has accelerated, and it can feel like our reaction time has to be faster. Consider the meltdown of the Silicon Valley Bank: as described in this Charles Schwab article, “With the effects of rapid news flows, especially via social media, and banking that can be done quickly and via mobile devices, the bank’s collapse happened with lightning speed.” Much of the ripple effect across the economy has been due to sudden and unwarranted loss of confidence in the banking industry as a whole; as Schwab put it, “The main channel of contagion so far is more psychological than systemic.”

But where the mental health crisis is concerned, it’s not just the speed of the Internet at work; it’s how we choose to use it. Brooks cites a culture of denunciation. Sure, you can denounce others without the Internet but it’s a lot harder. I mean, unless you’re a professional whose work can get printed on paper, what are you going to do—pass out leaflets? Stand on a street corner braying? Collar your colleagues at the water cooler? No, when people are feeling fed up about vaccines, politics, or any other battle in the culture wars, they go post vitriolic comments beneath articles, or send tweets, or otherwise leverage the computer network that connects five billion people.

With all this bold negativity on display, it’s no wonder, as Brooks points out, so many people have developed extreme sensitivity to harm. In the parlance of the schoolyard bullying culture I grew up in, “they can dish it out but they can’t take it.” Well, maybe that’s not totally fair, but I think there’s something complicated going on around being a bully in one moment, and wanting to appear sensitive the next. The thickness of people’s skin, so to speak, is selective. For example, progressives criticize Jane Eyre because one of its protagonists participates (albeit “off screen”) in colonialism without the author denouncing him for it, so anybody who has experienced systematic oppression might find this triggering somehow. They say it’s best, therefore, to write the book off as “problematic” and not use it in schools. But then they go off and watch “Breaking Bad,” a show about a guy who cooks meth, or “Real Detective,” which repeatedly shows graphic footage of a young woman’s naked corpse. If challenged on whether this could possibly be healthy to take in, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just, you know, edgy.”

I have a scheme to help you navigate these waters and fight the tide of these increasingly anxious times. But before I begin: what follows isn’t for everybody. If you feel a strong need to grow your knowledge of the precise cause and extent of the world’s problems, and feel that proper virtue signaling can’t be achieved without sharing what you’ve learned, and that your personal identity depends on upholding a culture of personal punditry, you should just stop now. Go read something else.

What? You are still with me? You want to continue? Great! Let’s get started.

Opt out of the culture war

The first thing I’d like to establish is that in the culture war that’s raging, we should all be conscientious objectors. Why? Because this is a war that can’t be won. Our strong opinions are being weaponized, but we aren’t actual soldiers and we’re not being deployed with any battlefield tactic that can actually prevail over a known enemy. Political extremists and Internet algorithms are drawing out our built-in impulse to find someone to blame for the world’s problems, just to foment our opposition and thereby increase our loyalty. (The “blame instinct” is another of the ten reasons Rosling cites for people misunderstanding the world.) Unless we’re politicians or policymakers, we aren’t changing the world when we rail against it; we’re just collateral damage in a war that will never end.

I’m not saying we have no role in the world’s problems. Of course if we’re concerned about climate change we should try to walk, bike, take mass transit, etc., and vote for programs that address the problem. And those of us who are parents have a duty to educate our children and help them become responsible adults. But when somebody who isn’t a parent and hasn’t been a student in forty years wants to collar me and go on a tirade about the “crap” that “they” are teaching in “our” schools, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to run for the hills.

Take ownership of your attention

If a chain smoker complained to you that he was chronically short of breath, or a fast food junkie groused about how hard it is to lose weight, you’d probably be biting your tongue. Where our physical health is concerned, it’s easy to tie the willing consumption of a dangerous substance to the natural consequences it produces. Some of us are outspoken about this; consider the age-old cliché, “My body is a temple.” Fair enough, but what about our minds? We’re less likely to question the growing tendency we have to be glued to our screens, scrolling through our feeds. I do hear people confessing that they probably waste too much time on social media, but this is given with the half-serious, hangdog air of somebody acknowledging something fairly harmless, like a caffeine addiction. Nobody treats overconsumption of polemic Internet content as a big problem. But I believe this content is a pollutant, and possibly as dangerous to our mental health as tobacco or junk food are to our physical health.

I think it’d be easier to get people to agree with this concept if I took the partisan angle and said either that Fox News is toxic to the brain, or that NPR is, depending on my audience. But it isn’t so much the position itself that’s the issue; as Brooks, and the Seven Habits book, point out, the despair comes from railing against what we can’t solve (and guess what: blaming one party or another doesn’t actually help). So when we use platforms that track our interests, and that have learned how to push our buttons, we’re signing up for a steady diet of emotional unease. What’s needed is the wisdom to understand the threat here, and the discipline to shelter our minds from constant provocation. It’s realizing we can choose whether or not to peer into the chasm at the deep end of the pool.

Firewall for the Mind

In the realm of computer networks, a firewall is a device (or software function) that enforces rules about what communication, or “traffic,” is permitted. It filters out threats based on where content is coming from, what type it is, and so forth. Early firewalls had an access control list with simple rules like “allow [or deny] any traffic from [source] to [destination].” Modern ones are very sophisticated; for example, the one governing my home WiFi blocks all gaming, social media, and pornography, as well as any traffic from China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, or Syria.

I’m not suggesting you focus on creating a technical impediment to this or that Internet content. A firewall for the mind isn’t something you’d configure on any device, but rather a more general rule base you create and adhere to around how you’re going to use your brain and what you’re willing to focus it on. It’s about what information, news, entertainment, etc. you’re going to allow in, what you’re going to ration, and what you’re going to reject, whether it’s online, printed, broadcast, or spoken. I propose that instead of passively receiving what’s pushed toward us, we should each start with a general rule—“deny all”—and then make specific exceptions based on what will educate, entertain, or enlighten us without any side effects like frustration, existential angst, anxiety, or a feeling of doom and gloom. This should be highly personalized—never mind what everyone around you is focusing on. After all, that’s not working out so well lately.

As an adult I’ve never had cable TV; I was a late adopter of cell phones and smartphones; I eschew all social media. I also refuse to talk about politics with just about anybody. Those are aspects of my personal firewall, and my rule base has adapted according to what’s going on in my life. For example, when my wife was pregnant, I blacklisted the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which is a terrorist tract designed to terrify new parents. As I headed in to my third decade in corporate America I stopped looking at “Dilbert” because it was just too cynical. In the years following the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, with political polarization at a fever pitch, I stopped reading the political articles in The New Yorker precisely because they took me deep into circle-of-concern territory where, like all kinds of people across the political spectrum, I felt aggrieved but helpless.

Of course your own rule base can be whatever you decide, but you might start with a few general questions:

• Is this content making me happy?
• Is it making me money?
• Is it making me laugh?
• Is it edifying or entertaining?
• Is it satisfying my curiosity?
• If it concerns a problem or an issue, is there some specific action I can take that will actually help?
• Does this content dwell on bad news that occupies only my circle of concern?

Existing mental firewalls

It would be naïve for me to pretend this concept is entirely new, and in fact people have been building their own mental firewalls since the dawn of human existence. The problem is, the rules are often set up not around protecting our brains from sadness and anxiety, but around tuning out what doesn’t match up with our tastes and/or belief systems. Choosing between Fox News and NPR is part of a rule base, after all. Where things are going particularly awry is that cable TV programming, much modern print journalism, and in particular the myriad content providers on the Internet are tailoring their product to us. This seems like a favor except that the end goal is always to maximize our outrage and hang on to our attention for as long as possible. The circle of concern is their happy stomping ground—not yours. Good mental firewalls thwart these mechanisms.

In general, I go after content that primarily exists to entertain or enlighten me, not persuade me. Most fiction, for example, is free of any specific agenda (and when a work’s social conscience seems too prominent, to the point it’s just depressing, I reserve the right to withdraw). Where nonfiction is concerned I particularly enjoy topics that aren’t in the news, and which nobody is bickering about, such as (to cite a convenient example) this article on caterpillars in which I encountered all kinds of delightful, non-pressing information. For example, the “caterpillar of the silver-spotted skipper … uses an air-gun-like appendage in its anus to send its [feces] pellets soaring. This practice, known as ‘fecal firing,’ discombobulates parasitic wasps.” Stuff like this argues for a more nuanced model of attention involving a Circle of Delight.

This isn’t to say the caterpillar article was all rosy; it did explain how scientists are now seeing significant declines in insect diversity and population that could become an ecological crisis, based on how many plants depend on insects for pollination. So did I start combing the Internet for more information on this problem? Did I try to make it part of my feed? No. I don’t have a feed, I’m not a scientist, and this simply isn’t my problem to solve. That’s the kind of line that I have to draw … which I think you should draw, too.

[Speaking of drawing, the art at the top of this post is by my younger daughter.]

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Never Discuss Politics

Introduction

The frank discussion of politics among a governed people is absolutely crucial to preserving democracy.

Bullshit. I didn’t mean a word of that … I think it’s a grand sentiment but essentially untrue. In this post I explain why nobody should discuss politics with friends, family, or other lay people.

Why do people talk about politics?

I’d guess most people who talk about politics are doing so for one of two reasons. The first reason is a simple one: to showcase their deep knowledge to others, so as to gain admiration and respect. These are, I believe, the people who advance positions their audience shares—that is, they pontificate to those who already agree with them. Sure, you might say they’re looking for a real dialogue so they can learn more and have a deeper understanding, but I doubt it. Public policy just isn’t that interesting.

A second group comprises highly opinionated people who seem to want to rile others up, and be contrarian, and dramatic, and surprising. I suppose the goal in this case is also to increase one’s influence or stature (though more through bullying than persuasion). Perhaps some of these instigators simply find this kind of discord stimulating. I can only guess.

Recently I’m getting to understand why the outcomes of polarized political dialogue are so overwhelmingly bad. Simply put, when people challenge others about politics, they tend to break all the rules of effective communication. I took a Rhetoric class in college and we studied the three main tools for advancing an argument: logos (logic); ethos (authority); and pathos (feeling). As I shall explain, discussions of politics often fall down on all three legs.

The logos (logic) problem

In courses I’ve taken on management and leadership, the most interesting thing I’ve learned is how brain chemistry affects human behavior as we react to conflict. Managers are discouraged from criticizing employees, especially in a brusque fashion. The reason, we’re advised, is that humans evolved to constantly be on the lookout for threats, and “several domains of social experience draw upon the same brain networks to maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks use for primary survival needs” (as explained here). Thus, we have a limbic system (i.e., lizard brain) response to being challenged, a fight-or-flight reaction, which interferes with our ability to reason: when we’re challenged like this, the “resources available for overall executive functions in the prefrontal cortex decrease.” Studies have shown that criticizing an employee lowers his or her productivity for a significant period, and that’s one reason companies want to discourage it.

Talking about politics is similar in the sense of challenging someone in a negative way. By asserting something you know a person doesn’t agree with, especially if you’re emphatic about it, you’re essentially attacking him. You can’t expect a person to react calmly and rationally to that. It is pointless to put someone on the spot and expect him to suddenly reconsider his long-held opinions or values.

My political positions are decades old, built upon a fairly basic and predictable foundation, and I am not up for debating them. If my beliefs change at all it is due to the gradual influence of a collection of professional journalistic sources that I trust, not any individual person trying to ram ideas down my throat. I am perfectly capable of evaluating a good article in terms of its rational merit—when nobody is up in my face. That’s a lot different, though, from easily engaging when somebody is sputtering doctrine. Then I would rather just roll over and disengage. This isn’t because I’m lame. It’s because I’m human and my brain chemistry is subject to the same limbic override as everyone else’s.

The ethos (authority) problem

Okay, so where challenging political discussions are concerned, rational thought is vanquished. But the problem gets worse. Much of the time, the person who wants to discuss politics has very strong opinions. These can eventually become part of a person’s self-identity, to where pursuing a political credo can become kind of a hobby. The person may seek out openly biased blogs, radio shows, or podcasts or whatever, having decided that mainstream news is “fake” in the sense of slyly pretending to be non-partisan. The problem with these non-mainstream media is that they target, select, and nurture those loyal readers, viewers, and/or listeners whose natural skepticism can be made to decrease over time until it all but vanishes. The student pundits, having decided they’ve found the only trustworthy authorities, practically decide in advance to believe whatever they’re told by these sources.

This in turn changes their media consumption experience such that they’re not looking to actually tease apart complexity and appreciate nuance … they’re just looking for the punch lines, the basic talking points, the gist. This further undermines the role logic could have played in conveying their messages—that is, because these people weren’t themselves convinced through reason, reason doesn’t form the foundation of their arguments. Thus, when they set out to challenge those who don’t share their beliefs, they subconsciously encounter an obstacle: they themselves accepted their doctrine based on the (presumed) authority of their favored pundit, but the person they’re talking to won’t acknowledge this authority. A liberal blathering to a conservative won’t get anywhere saying, “According to this thing I heard on NPR,” any more than a conservative blathering to a liberal could gain traction by quoting Fox News. And yet, ethos is the basis of the arguer’s position, so they can’t just abandon it. So they cite sources very vaguely, talking about “top scientists” or “the guys who really get it,” or simply “the experts.” Of course, citing an unnamed authority is rhetorically useless.

The pathos problem

So when logos is obliterated and ethos falls down, what does the political crusader do? Well, for one thing, he or she gets frustrated, and thus his or her temper heats up. Meanwhile, stirred up humans have the tendency to use volume, emphasis, and repetition to get their points across, particularly when this is the literary or oratorical style their highly opinionated sources are constantly modeling. This style of persuasion can occasionally be powerful, like in the hands of a master orator (think MLK). But this only works when the audience already agrees with the speaker. Pathos (and its cousin, the one-sided argument) is useful when you’re trying to whip a crowd into a lather, to galvanize them into action, but it’s not very helpful when you’re trying to change somebody’s mind about something.

Meanwhile, most people simply aren’t master orators, and their pathos is a blunt, ineffective tool. Too much of the time such talk comes across as harsh, unwelcome braying. The listener feels attacked and may wonder where this aggression is even coming from. This of course compounds the lizard brain response: the unwelcome pathos obliterates our ability to rationally weigh our opponent’s words.

The result

What does this scenario feel like for me? It’s a sense of horror at the conversational morass I’ve suddenly stepped in, and dread at how long I might be stuck there. And this scenario isn’t limited to traditional party politics. Due to the bizarre politicalization of the COVID-19 pandemic, most discussion of vaccination, masking, and other realms of public health policy becomes as annoying and unwelcome as an election year partisan diatribe.

You might reasonably wonder why I’m blogging about this instead of just telling certain people to bug off when they try to involve me in a political discussion. After all, most of my readers will never have the opportunity to talk to me about politics (or anything else). The reason is, I want everybody possible to understand how this kind of talk can damage their relationships with friends and/or family.

How? Well, I’ve already mentioned how frustrating and pointless it is to argue about this crap with someone whose prefrontal cortex has been temporarily crippled (i.e., anyone who doesn’t agree with you). Either this person takes the bait and gets into an acrimonious debate with you, or they sort of go limp, and make little noises like “hmmm,” and “oh,” or whatever, hoping they can minimize the duration of the dialogue and somehow guide the conversation back to safe ground. Out of tact, they sort of humor the antagonist. This might be the saddest scenario of all, because having to humor someone is the opposite of enjoying and preserving closeness.

What makes our friends our friends, and what determines whether we’re close to this or that family member? It’s rapport. This is why close friends and family have great conversations: they get each other and there is a huge reservoir of goodwill built up. Trust tends to grow as well, which is what makes our friends and family so valuable when we do reach out for help or advice.

This foundation of goodwill can see a relationship through difficult times, which is a godsend, because sometimes it’s appropriate to challenge those close to us. For example, if I were to worry that a good friend of mine were drinking too much, I might take it as my responsibility to try to intervene somehow. Of course I would have to proceed carefully, knowing that this would be a very delicate matter. It might take all the built-up trust and rapport we have for the friendship to withstand such an intervention, but I would have reason to hope that friend would respect my intentions (perhaps upon reflection, when the grip of his amygdala had relaxed). But why burn up rapport frivolously, just wasting it, by throwing a political harangue in someone’s face? If you have fifty topics you could bring up to your friend or family member—most of which celebrate what the two of you have in common—why on earth would you choose politics, a topic that is either boring or divisive?

Why even indulge strong opinions?

This brings me to my final point, which is that I cannot see why anyone should be immersing him/herself in highly opinionated political news to begin with. What is the point? What actions would any of us ever take based on all this information? I suppose there’s some attraction in the idea that once you’re versed in these ideas you can share them with others, and thus bring those people out of darkness … but as I’ve tried to make clear, I think the chances of this playing out successfully are pretty remote.

There’s this widespread idea that to be good citizens we need to be well informed. Well, perhaps that’s true, but there’s probably a such thing as being too informed, and there’s certainly a such thing as being too polarized, and too stirred up, and too influenced—or harassed—by those with an axe to grind. I saw this bumper sticker that said, “IF YOU’RE NOT ANGRY, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!” I hate that. It’s ungrateful. It’s suggesting that the person lucky enough to live in a rich country and own a car and have the right to free speech is a bad citizen if he doesn’t go around in a constant state of anger. I think if the bumper sticker has to exist, it should say, “IF YOU ARE ANGRY, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!” That is, if you’re angry in some general way, you’re not grateful for how good we really have it. Think of the asshole responsible for this graffiti:

Too much news

How much news is enough? Well, I think we should be sufficiently aware of the goings on in the world to be able to react when necessary. This means using less water during a drought, not traveling during a blizzard, and having enough information to participate in democracy every two years. It means satisfying our curiosity about things. I don’t think news should be a hobby, and it shouldn’t be a way to become a mouthpiece. If somebody wants the news, I let him get it himself. I don’t rebroadcast anything unless I’m recommending an article to somebody because I think he’ll appreciate and enjoy it.

I really believe that too much news, and the wrong kind of news (i.e., that which is infused with opinion and especially that which is soaked in vitriol) is bad for one’s health. When we are made aware of a terrible situation (e.g., the end of democracy, the world being doomed, the bad guys winning), and we have no means to change the situation, we feel helpless and hopeless. This is no way to live.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People differentiates between our “circle of influence” vs. our “circle of concern.”  Below is their schematic. The idea is that we should spend most of our mental energy on what we can influence; for example, the rapport we have with others. We should avoid spending too much energy on the circle of concern, because that’s where we’re largely helpless.

It’s possible to expand one’s circle of influence slightly, but that’s a lot of work. I mean, honestly, if you hate this or that politician, what can you really do about it, beyond the one vote you can cast against him? And when you wield that one vote, couldn’t you have decided on it without spending umpteen hours fanning the flames of your discontent? And what good is complaining about this stuff to family and friends? What do we expect them to do about it? Drop everything and join a campaign? (This isn’t a bad idea, of course, but if your friend were to decide to commit to this, it surely wouldn’t be because of anything you said.) So why immerse ourselves in this crap? There’s no good reason. Ignore the highly opinionated columnists, radio hosts, and podcasters. Don’t let them have their way with you.

I don’t read much news, and to the extent that my favorite magazine has become more political in the last couple of decades, I spend less time with it—not because I disagree with its writers’ views, but because I just don’t care. There is a world of better reading out there: novels, short stories, memoirs, general interest nonfiction, humor writing, all kinds of good stuff. It does not make me an irresponsible citizen to read all that instead of the news. It makes me a happier, more interesting person, and it mitigates the stress in my life. And when I talk to somebody, I want more of the same: curiosity, fascination, wonder, humor. I don’t want discord, and I don’t want to have to humor anybody.

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