As individuals, we trade two major currencies: cash and time. Today I intend to make you richer by asking you not to spend any time watching, listening or reading the news. It’s all a waste of time. Here’s why:

1. The purpose of the news is to sell advertising time. If you are not the client, you are the product. Take any regular event and you’ll see it magnified by the media, you’ll see those sound bites being played and played again. Whether the news is true or not is not even relevant, the media will twist the truth in a way that will create a bigger drama. If they get caught lying, this is good too, they get to come back, admit the lie and that will increase their ratings even more. The main purpose is to retain your attention so that later on they can sell advertising spots. You are the product; advertisers are the client.

2. Other than entertainment, the news has no real value. We are told about all these terrible things that happen every day, in our neighborhood, or far away. “Someone had a car accident and two people died”, how does this enrich your life? “A man gets his hand cut off in the Middle East after stealing some food,” “A woman gets 100 slashes for being raped”. All these stories add no value to your life (in fact you would be so much better off if you never heard them), yet you get emotionally involved. When Princess Diana died, so many people cried real tears for her. Thousands of other people die every day and we are totally indifferent. Wouldn’t you have been better off not knowing about all these things that are irrelevant to your life?

3. The news is bad for your health. Bad news sells more advertising than good news. When you get the constant avalanche of bad news every day, the murders, the rapes, the natural disasters, it brings you down morally. When you are down morally, your immune system is weakened to the point that you can get sick very easily.

4. The news is bad for our personal finance. We become prey for advertisers. Inevitably advertisers will sell us soft drinks, junk food, luxury items, etc. Ads are created by very smart psychologists that know how to turn wants into needs. I have seen how many people are controlled by Apple advertisers. They spend $2000 for the latest “Mac”-to use  Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube which could be used in a $200 computer.

5. The news will take away your civil liberties. All of you remember President Bush saying that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction even though he knew that it wasn’t true. The people were totally manipulated into backing a war for false reasons. There were many other “real” reasons that were never reported in the news. People were sold lies and later, excuses that gradually chipped away their civil liberties. Now, in the U.S.A., the land of the free, people know that their email and web browsing are being monitored by their National Security Agency. Novelists like John le Carre and Tom Clancy used to portray communist Russia as the only government that would do this kind of thing to their own people, well now North America has its own version.

How to give up watching the news

Just go cold turkey. Eliminate all the news from your life. If some piece of news is really important it will eventually find its way to you. It will be filtered down from the pile of irrelevant news that has nothing to do with your life. Here is where to start.

1. The best gift that you can give to yourself and your family is to throw away that television that you have in your living room, don’t dare give it away. You will be creating harm to someone else. All of a sudden, you will have more space in your living room, you will be forced to have real conversations with other members of your household and you will have all this extra time to think, read, learn or be creative.

2. Don’t pick up that newspaper. The headlines are written by expert copywriters who have honed their craft over many years in order to be able to capture your attention and sucker you into reading one more irrelevant story with some advertising on the side.

3. Don’t listen to the news on the radio, listen to nice music, a podcast, or an audiobook.

4. Don’t read the news on your computer,

Good luck. Please let me know if you are succeeding or if the news habit is more powerful than you.

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