Back in the day, prior to the internet even (!), I was a subscriber to the local (daily) newspaper in a decent-sized town because I wanted to be kept well informed. In addition to that, I purchased the big fat Sunday paper of one of the major metropolis’ nearby so that I could read the in-depth stories that were only printed in those kinds of esteemed publications.
The daily paper I read had about five sections to it, there was national and local news, sports, social and leisure activities, financials, and classifieds.
I started with the national and local news always and in doing that I was kept appraised of the goings on at a national level as well as the happenings within the local government and area. As well, I was informed about criminal activity and apprehensions, of which there seemed to be a lot.
The sports section was always a lively place, full of meets, playoffs, matches, statistics, schedules, and analysis. Always involved reading there, for those who were interested.
The social section was hit or miss, some of it was interesting, some not, but it was worth a looking over, at least.
Ditto the financial pages. Stock info wasn't all that exciting to me but what was interesting was reading about all the stuff that was going on in The Economy, be it local, national, or global. How anybody could figure that mess out was beyond my comprehension. Though many tried to shed light on the subject that light, unfortunately, never dawned in me.
The classifieds (pre-Craigslist) contained small type, which was worth perusing if you wanted to check out the local job offerings, cars for sale, furniture, etc. It was all there. The Sunday classifieds carried the best job offerings and descriptions of jobs so the Sunday classifieds were always worth a look.
What happened to change all this? The arrival of the internet? No- what happened is I started to fall behind. I got busy with life, with other things during the day, and I wasn't able to fit reading the newspaper in so I set it aside to read it 'later'.
This became more and more frequent and before I knew it I had a whole pile of newspapers to read, which I did, and it was a chore but a necessary one for one had to do this to keep informed, right? And I was very informed.
My head was full of trivia. I never knew I could pack so much in there, and how little that information was doing to actually serve me. The more information I read the less it seemed to matter! Maybe the notion of being 'well read' and 'well informed' was the newspapers' way to keep me pursuing some sort of preposterous level of overall understanding, this only attained by consuming superhuman amounts of content.
Over time, the local and national news seemed to be throttled and stale renditions of 'life'. This was also true about the crime section, where no matter how many bad guys and gals got busted and taken off the streets, more seemed to crop up,
In the sports world, things got ever more involving as leagues expanded pretty much across the board,
The social and leisure scene events had a repeating seasonal theme to them, which I recognized over the years,
I found I never could make sense of the financial world, no matter how many of their columnists and pundits claimed to have their fingers on the pulse of things,
and the Classifieds seemed to be the same old same old week in and week out.
All those words gotta mean something, right?
Waldemar Brandt- Unsplash.com
The big Sunday issues I could spend hours reading, which is something you could do to while away a Sunday afternoon, but after whiling away enough Sunday afternoons I started to want to read them less and less because, like the dailies, they weren't that enlightening.
Back and forth I went like this, for well over a decade, seeing the pile of papers accrue, tackling it, watching it build again, taking a day off to read through it, skim through it, whatever it took to say I got caught up and then.....
...one day I just let things slide completely out of control and the pile grew and grew until it was two stacks of newspapers, each stack rising knee high from the floor. "Enough! I'm not going to read that!" vowed I, and I didn't.
For what had started as a pleasure had become a chore and a duty, which was so sparse on payback as to be laughable.
And then along came the internet. With this a news junkie could get his fix twenty four hours a day, and didn't have to wait for it to be delivered. Ka-boom! What great news this was!
But now my news was all over the place. Different sites ran different content. Local stuff was a little bit here, a little bit there, or wasn't even being covered at all. I started to miss newspapers and still do to this day because with newspapers, everything was in one place.
Those days aren't coming back though, no way. However, through my experience with the amount of data in newspapers, I know of the impossibility of 'keeping up' and 'keeping informed' so The World is just going to have to turn without me knowing every damned detail about what is going on. And this is true for everybody else too. Nobody knows or can know it all, there's just too much and most of it is fluff. Filler.
Added to that, who's editing this internet stuff? Newspapers used to have credibility. They had pro editors. Sure, the papers had 'slants' to them, many were privately owned, but if they ran a story it was similar to the ones other papers ran. With interent 'news' you don't have a clue. Could be a guy that shot a video in his back yard, or a montage of images doctored to look real. Use your imagination!
So this is where intuition comes in. You need it now more than ever. Bypass the fake stuff and the filler and let your guidance bring to you that which you absolutely need to know. Got a better system? I don't. All I need to remind me to apply intuition to this issue is to think about those piles of newspapers laying on the floor of my living room begging for my attention and what a waste of time tackling all that 'data' was. I'll take a short cut to what passes for 'news' any day if it leads me to a clearer and far less laborious conclusion.