Modern technology has given us a glut of information. There’s too much to pay attention to, so we live in an exhausted state of information overload. That’s even truer at a time when politicians intentionally “flood the zone” with a ceaseless flow of new initiatives.
Plus, as I’ve written before, digital tech is designed to fragment our focus, which degrades our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately. Just think of all the times you’ve seen an article in your Facebook feed about anguished people desperate for help only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it.
The problem isn’t just that our attention is limited and fragmented — it’s also that we don’t know how to manage the attention we do have.
Being subjected to a torrent of information can leave you confused, disoriented, and ultimately just desperate to get away from the flood.
Instead of trying to take in as much info as possible, we should try to take in info in a way that serves the real goal: enhancing, or at least preserving, our capacity for moral attention.
That’s why some thinkers nowadays talk about the importance of reclaiming “attentional sovereignty.” You need to be able to direct your attentional resources deliberately. If you strategically withdraw from an overwhelming information environment, that’s not necessarily a failure of civic duty. It can be an exercise of your agency that ultimately helps you engage with the news more meaningfully.
But you’ve got to be intentional about how you do this.
I’m all for limiting your news intake, but I’d encourage you to come up with a strategy and stick to it. Consider identifying one or two major news sites that you’ll check for ten minutes each day while having your morning coffee. You can also subscribe to a newsletter, like Vox’s The Logoff, that’s specifically designed to update you on the most important news of the day so you can tune out all the extra noise.
It’s also important to consider not only how you’re going to withdraw attention from the news, but also what you’ll invest it in instead. Be careful not to cocoon yourself exclusively in the realm of the personal. Though you shouldn’t engage with the political realm 24/7, you’re not totally exempt from it either.
One valuable thing you can do is devote some time to training your moral attention. There are lots of ways to do that, from reading literature (as philosopher Martha Nussbaum recommends) to meditating (as the Buddhists recommend).
I’ve personally benefited from both those techniques, but one thing I like about meditation is that it can be a practice that changes how you pay attention to the news.
Even as a journalist, I find it hard to read the news because it’s painful to see stories of people suffering — I end up feeling what’s usually called “compassion fatigue.” But I’ve learned that’s actually a misnomer. It should really be called “empathy fatigue.”
Compassion and empathy are not the same thing, even though we often conflate the concepts. Empathy is when you share the feelings of other people. If other people are feeling pain, you feel pain, too — literally.
Not so with compassion, which is more about feeling warmth toward a suffering person and being motivated to help them.
When we feel empathy, we feel like we’re suffering, and that’s upsetting. Though empathy is useful for getting us to notice other people's pain, it can ultimately cause us to tune out to help alleviate our own feelings of distress, and can even cause serious burnout.
Amazingly, compassion — because it fosters positive feelings — actually attenuates the empathetic distress that can cause burnout, as neuroscientist Tania Singer has demonstrated in her lab. In other words, practicing compassion both makes us happier and helps us make other people happier.
So, how can you practice compassion while reading the news?
A simple Tibetan Buddhist technique called Tonglen meditation trains you to be present with suffering instead of turning away from it. It’s a multi-step process when done as a formal sitting meditation, but if you’re doing it after reading a news story, you can take just a few seconds to do the core practice.
First, you let yourself come into contact with the pain of someone you see in the news. As you breathe in, imagine that you’re breathing in their pain. And as you breathe out, imagine that you’re sending them relief, warmth, compassion.
That’s it. It doesn’t sound like much — and, on its own, it won’t help the suffering people you read about. But it’s a dress rehearsal for the mind. By doing this mental exercise, we’re training ourselves to stay present with someone’s suffering. And we’re training our capacity for moral attention, so that we can then help others in real life.
