Today, I received Tom Loughlin’s newsletter, A Poor Player. Tom is struggling about what to care about as he ages and how to interact with today’s world, especially with today’s news, media, and politics. So am I, so Tom’s thoughts are of great interest to me. We often take very different routes while winding up at similar destinations.
On December 11, he wrote the following:
Underpinning my current effort to get more control over my news feeds was, as mentioned, the realization that I was not reading probably 75% of what I was pulling into my feed reader. Beneath that was the further realization that, to be frank, I don’t care much at this stage of life about current events or editorial opinions. All I need are the simple facts of what’s going on, and I only need a few key sources for that.
Expanding on this even further, I’ve also found that there is no good news to be had at scale. I’m not talking about those “feel good” stories where some person overcomes obstacles to defeat some difficulty in life. I’m talking about good news about the general state of humanity. News about poverty being eradicated, wars and conflicts ending, hunger being significantly reduced, wages that are double the rate of inflation, climate control and environmental success. There is no good news anymore. Oppression, the stripping away of rights and freedoms, the vast economic divide - this is all that constitutes the “news” these days.
To top it all off, at my age, I do not believe I will see any of this turn around within what’s left of my lifetime. All the problems in today’s world will take several generations to resolve, and I do not have several generations of years left. The issues are intractable, deep, and widespread, and it’s conceivable that nothing will fix what’s wrong without a complete collapse akin to the 1929 crash, which brought an end to the “robber baron” era and introduced the New Deal, the pillars of which are now corroding and being relentlessly hacked at by today’s oligarchs.
The internet is awash with think pieces, while the world burns. I just need to know what’s happening. As Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet, “Just the facts, ma’am.” I’m hoping to reduce my news intake to “just the facts” so that I can decide for myself what course of action to take. Those are the kinds of newsletters I’m now pursuing. I don’t think I need the internet to do my thinking for me anymore.
I see this as a legitimate attempt to carve out a philosophy, and I don’t want to bomb into his comments to take issue, or worse (as someone already has done), to offer advice. There is such a strong desire in our culture to make sure everybody is chipper and cheerful at all times, and to worry about anyone who isn’t. When did half empty become such a sin?
Nevertheless, I feel like examining his ideas in order to ask myself, as Goethe would have said, “Is this true? Is it true for me?” So let’s work my way through this.
TOM: “I don’t care much at this stage of life about current events or editorial opinions. All I need are the simple facts of what’s going on, and I only need a few key sources for that.”
I’m on board with this. It seems to me that two things happened, one in 1980, and another in 2006, that makes this attitude almost inevitable today. The year 1980 is when CNN began broadcasting, ushering in the 24-hr news cycle; 2006 is when Twitter was born. Prior to 1980, each major news network had an evening news around the dinner hour, and then before bedtime there was local news; there also were morning or evening newspapers. The world was not awash in news, especially political news. If something particularly bad happened, the networks would interrupt our “regularly scheduled program” to quickly fill us in, and then quickly bow out. In other words, national and international politics was a small part of our otherwise locally-focused day.
In 2006, Twitter linked peer pressure to the onslaught of news “content.” People could easily share a link to a news story, along with their 128-character (the brevity enforced superficiality) knee jerk response, with friends, family, and followers. Whereas previously, a newspaper delivery boy would toss a newspaper onto our front porch in the early morning or late afternoon, now everyone you knew could throw news on your electronic porch anytime they wanted, thus burying you in political outrage. The result is that news (along with commerce, which is the other thing that Twitter was good at) has assumed a primary place in our daily thinking. In 1992, James Carville famously said to Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid;” after 2006, he might have said “It’s the Tweet, stupid;” and for the past decade, it’s been “It’s the stupid.” Period.
Once it was determined that one might monetize (horrible word, monetize) one’s stupidity by designing your headlines and “content” to provoke outrage, thoughtfulness was doomed, divisiveness reigned, and we became ripe for Trump’s idiocracy. Welcome to the last 10 years.
So I’m with Tom: I want to keep up with the basic outlines of what’s going on in the world, but I want to go back to the days pre-1980s, when the national news was balanced by the local news, on TV and in the newspaper, and it was distributed daily by the spoonful, not the fire hose.
CNN’s single-minded focus on the national and international news (because there is no locality to CNN, it is distributed throughout the media sphere) shows up in Tom’s next paragraph.
Tom: I’ve also found that there is no good news to be had at scale. I’m not talking about those “feel good” stories where some person overcomes obstacles to defeat some difficulty in life. I’m talking about good news about the general state of humanity. News about poverty being eradicated, wars and conflicts ending, hunger being significantly reduced, wages that are double the rate of inflation, climate control and environmental success.
In 1973, E. F. Schumacher declared that “small is beautiful,” and seven years later (i.e., the year when CNN began broadcasting) Kirkpatrick Sale warned about the dangers of a world where bigness took precedence over “human scale.” Twenty years after that, Robert Putnam announced that we were “bowling alone,” and and Ray Oldenberg bemoaned the disappearance of “third places” that stood between the workplace and the home. Neighbors migrated from the front porch to the back deck, and eventually to the air conditioned comfort of the TV room. The pandemic nailed that trend in place. Today, most people don’t really have a connection to the place where they live, and as a result they think that the most important problems are global, not local. As a result, nothing counts unless it eradicates a problem completely on a global scale. We need look no further than the appearance of the word “systemic” as the constant companion of the word “problem” for confirmation of what we value. As Tom notes, to solve a problem for an individual (i.e., “some person”), or even a handful of individuals, just doesn’t “count” anymore. Go big or go home. So most of us just go home and watch superhero movies.
At the same time that Schumacher and Sale were warning us of the dangers of gigantism, psychologist Martin Seligman et al was doing experiments with lab rats exploring what he called “learned helplessness.” Writing on the website Simply Psychology, Charlotte Nickerson defined learned helplessness as “a psychological state in which an individual, after repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events, believes they are powerless to change their situation, even when opportunities to do so arise. This leads to passivity, decreased motivation, and a sense of hopelessness, which can persist even when circumstances change and control is possible.” She concludes,“ Learned helplessness is often associated with depression.”
In my opinion, our culture is suffering from a bad case of learned helplessness as a result of the media teaching us to focus on national or global problems that are so large that we can’t even see much less appreciate little victories, local victories, even individual victories. Instead, we feel a sense of powerlessness because we can’t conceptualize anything we could do to make a difference on a such a large scale. Thus, we are made constantly aware of the dire consequences of failing to solve these problems while simulatenously told that nothing an individual could do would really matter.
To combat this temptation to slide into nihilism, I am personally trying to focus more on what is happening on a local or regional scale – even on a personal scale – lest I fall victim to the depression of learned helplessness. For instance, I taught for many years at area prisons in NC, and still keep in touch with many of my former students. I can’t eliminate the prison-industrial complex, but I can make a difference to a handful of individuals with whom I correspond, and to whom I provide encouragement and money so that they can use their tablets to take online classes, watch movies, or simply communicate with the outside world through messages. This means I have to reprogram myself to focus on small-scale contributions, which goes against the current in our global society.
TOM: To top it all off, at my age, I do not believe I will see any of this turn around within what’s left of my lifetime. All the problems in today’s world will take several generations to resolve, and I do not have several generations of years left.
This is Part 2 of the focus only on large-scale problems: enormous change takes too much time. When I was teaching freshman colloquium classes at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, one year the reading was Ross King’s fabulous book Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, which was about Florence’s Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. Begun in 1296 and completed 140 years later in 1436, the book’s primary focus was on Brunelleschi’s architectural breakthrough in building the cathedral’s dome, but in many ways King was writing about perspective and patience in the creation of something lasting. Entire generations of craftsmen and artisans, not to mention church leaders, died without ever seeing anything even resembling a completed building over the course of their lifetimes. And yet they continued, day after day, to do the work.
I’m just a couple years younger than Tom, and I find there is something strangely comforting about seeing yourself as a “short timer.” My in-laws, who lived into their late 80s and early 90s, for years would say when they encountered something that should be fixed in their home, “Well, that’s for the next owners.” Likewise, at my age, I don’t have the energy to undertake many projects, but I can make contributions and send encouragement. My mother-in-law worked with her fellow churchgoers to sew quilts for the poor until a couple weeks before her death at age 94. Poverty hadn’t been solved, but a few people were a bit warmer thanks to her efforts. That ain’t nothing.
None of that is about how much media one is allowing into one’s life, but again it is about having a local focus, celebrating small victories, and making small contributions to move the flywheel even one click.
At the same time, I willingly and happily acknowledge that one of the tasks of being and elder is to turn inward, to seek wisdom, to deepen understanding, so move from “age-ing” to “sage-ing,” as Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi wrote in his book by a similar name. For this task, current events are a distraction except insofar as they provide ways to illustrate one’s insights.
It is in this sense that I willingly follow Tom down the road to minimizing internet punditry and outrage posting in favor of bare-naked facts about events in our society, especially political events. Unlike Tom, I’m a bit more interested in “think pieces,” but mainly within a larger philosophical context (my interest in pundits’s thoughts on the latest grotesque pronouncement of our current president is nil). In my case, my reading is shifting toward deeper works of fiction and nonfiction, many written in eras long ago.
When all is said an done, Tom’s end result and mine are similar: disconnection from the toxic global soup that feeds the internet. Long ago when the internet was young, somebody wrote that the most valuable job of the future would be curating what we now call “content.” While I suspect today a majority of people would agree, few curators have stepped forward, perhaps because the size of the job has become too large, but mostly because we just leave it to the algorithm to feed us things that we like. Nevertheless, each individual can do their best to focus their reading to those things that enhance their understanding of themselves and of the world.