Don't Ask, Don't Tell

I stopped following the news a few weeks ago. It was the election that did it—but I didn't stop so I could get away from politics, I did it so I could focus better on politics.  
       Not the media version of politics, that Frankenstein of sports reportage and fabricated hysteria, but the politics where I can actually do something useful: phone banking, door knocking, whatever. The news industry depends not only on keeping us seat-belted onto the roller coaster of anxiety but also on keeping us transfixed on details, on poll numbers, momentum, and supposed turning points, on graphs and gaffes, like a chicken on a snake. No, not a snake. Snakes pose active problems to chickens that require responses. Most election news is just a finger-drawn line in the dirt that the poor dumb bird—and I—only think is a snake.

       The one newsy website I've allowed myself periodic visits to, when I want a soft-spoken overview that calms me down instead of churns me up, is Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. As Silver points out, his statistics-based, algorithm-driven forecasts for the winners in the presidential election for every one of the fifty states are exactly the same now, on November 1, as they were when he rolled out this year's model on June 7. We won't know for a few days if those forecasts are right, but it suggests how little all the blips in the news cycle and squiggles on the poll graphs have amounted to.

       When I let myself worry about those blips and squiggles, when I start following the hyperlinks like bread crumbs endlessly into the tangled woods of information, I become less effective. Maybe I slack off because I think I know the future or maybe I freeze up because I think it's too much for me to handle, but more likely I just fall under the spell of the Need to Know. No matter how much I learn, I become convinced that if I read that one more op-ed or one more poll analysis I'll capture that last piece of information I need to make sense of it all.
       Which isn't innately a bad thing. Except that the time I spend reading or watching or listening to the news is time I'm not spending making a phone call or offering a carless voter a ride to the polls. And, although I may sometimes fool myself into believing the contrary, that information isn't going to inspire me to new action or tell me what I need to do. I know what I need to do. News geekery is just geekery, and geekery is for when there's time to kill. 
       I got some vindication for this when a friend of mine who's been helping with big fundraisers asked one of the campaign's main finance people how he stayed so cool and upbeat in the midst of all the post-first-debate hysteria about tumbling poll numbers and shifting momentum, and he said, "I just don't pay attention to it."

       I've decided that there are three reasons to learn a thing. One, because it helps me do something I want to do. Two, because it enables me to have conversations I want to have. And three, because it's just fun to know. 
       But following the news cycles doesn't help me do anything but follow more news cycles. And I'm sick of the conversational cycles that cycle around the news cycles—after a couple of weeks there's nowhere they can go but hand wringing, impotent fuming, and sighs of despair. And I finally caught on that the roller coaster of information was only making me anxious. Which is a problem, and not just for selfish reasons: I'm a lot less effective at everything, but especially at encouraging other people, when I'm anxious than when I'm upbeat, energized, and focused on what matters.
      It would be different if something I learned from the news might change my mind about the big issues, but I don't have to go searching for that. I mean, if anything happens that's big enough to make me want to see a different party in the White House and Senate (I don't know what that could be, but if), I'll hear about it without clicking on Google News six times a day. What I need to know is what my job is right now, and for that the news won't help me at all.
       So I guess if I'm going to spin out a life lesson from the last few weeks, it would be this: It's good to know the big stuff that shapes your goals and the little stuff that tells you what to do next. It's the in-between stuff that'll kill you.