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| | Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive? | |
333 points by somishere on July 24, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 215 comments
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| | I've been offline since last Wednesday, driving and camping throughout northern outback australia (escaping the vid!). I have a second rate carrier and tonight I hear my phone ping for the first time since I left. I've had reception before, but usually only while driving, usually passing through a larger town. This time I'm sitting next to the fire, near a town called Nhulunbuy in East Arnhem, aboriginal land, one of the more remote regions on the planet. I'm on a small red cliff overlooking the ocean, I've spotted a largish croc on the sand below only an hour before, and I can see the entire milky way above me (it's a new moon). As i'm writing this I just looked up and saw a satellite. The sky's been pretty similar the last week, but still it's spectacular. Anyway my phone pings and I pick it up and I end up reading the news and checking HN (for the first time in two weeks .. same old stories). What gives? |
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"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/
Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life..."