Upāsaka

Frankology tells us to stop reading the news and to stop having conversations by email, and I couldn't agree more.

There are a number of reasons why reading the news is not helpful for someone who wants to improve themselves, whether from a personal development or a spiritual perspective. Steve Pavlina's list in “Overcoming News Addiction” is one that I always refer to when explaining my position. Among other reasons, he says that news is predominately negative, addictive, myopic, shallow, trivia, irrelevant. The one that stood out the most was that news is not actionable. It goes in one ear, possibly makes you angry or depressed, and goes out the other.

Dhamma Wheel, a Theravada Buddhist discussion forum, once had a section for “News, Current Events & Politics”. It was opt-out: you could check a box that said “No News Is Good News” if you did not want to see that section. There is no need for the checkbox anymore since that section of the forums has been closed.

I recall reading an interview with a monk, and he said that during his time at a monastery, which was measured in years, only two major pieces of news reached the monastery.

In general, it appears that those who are serious about following the Buddhist path eventually find that reading the news is not a wholesome use of their time.

In regards to email, I once listened to a monk give a talk, and at one point during the talk he described how he does not use email due to the unnecessary noise that it creates, or something along those lines. While most of us don't have the luxury of abandoning email in the modern world, we can certainly reduce our contribution to email noise. And that means taking the advice of Frankology and putting it into practice. “Use it to send what was previously sent by post or courier.”

Email takes a surprising amount of time. It's easy to pile up a queue of conversations to get back to because the nature of email doesn't require a person to respond immediately, unlike a phone call. Before you know it, thirty minutes have passed while searching for answers for someone, marking certain emails to be read later, glancing at others, and quite often being notified about things you either already know or frankly don't need to know. Cutting that down to ten minutes would free up twenty minutes, which could be used for meditation.

Cutting news and useless email out of one's life are wonderful, practical actions that benefit the meditation practice.

Thank you for the frank words, Frankology.