Defence Strategy: Keep a strict media diet
“Our capacity for calm ultimately depends on our levels of expectation: if we suppose that most things normally turn out to be slightly disappointing (but that this is OK); that change occurs slowly (but that life is long); that most people are neither terribly good nor very wicked (and this includes us); that humanity has faced crisis after crisis (yet muddled through) – if we are able to keep these entirely obvious but highly fugitive thoughts alive in our minds, then we stand to be less easily seduced into panic.”
Alain De Botton
If so much of the media is like junk food then what would be the closest thing to a healthy news regimen? If you ask Nassim Taleb, the answer would be something along the lines of an elimination diet in the sense that we should not be consuming news in any form. He argues in his book Fooled by Randomness that if any world event were that important he would hear about it, so there’s no need to obsess over it on CNN all day. Keep in mind this is coming from a risk analyst who has made his fortune investing in the markets. If you know anyone who invests you will know that they obsessively pay attention to current events, hoping to time their next trade perfectly. Taleb says, don’t read the newspaper, delete your news apps, and don’t watch news on TV unless absolutely necessary.
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