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. As the tech ethicist James Williams writes, “the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information…but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.”
Consider a game of Tetris, he says. The abundance of blocks raining down on your screen is not the problem — given enough time, you could figure out how to stack them. The problem is that they fall at an increasing speed. And at extreme speeds, your brain just can’t process very well. You start to panic. You lose control.
It’s the same with a constant firehose of news. Being subjected to that torrent can leave you confused, disoriented, and ultimately just desperate to get away from the flood.
So, more information isn’t always better. 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. Instead of a slightly haphazard approach — you mention “the stuff that leaks into my social media” — 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. You mention spending more time on hobbies and the people around you, which is great. But be careful not to cocoon yourself exclusively in the realm of the personal — a privilege many people don’t have. 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 you can do it in real time even while you’re reading the news. In other words, it doesn’t have to be only a thing you do instead of news consumption — 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.
In a study published in 2013 at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, researchers put volunteers in a brain scanner, showed them gruesome videos of people suffering, and asked them to empathize with the sufferers. The fMRI showed activated neural circuits centered around the insula in our cerebral cortex — exactly the circuits that get activated when we’re in pain ourselves.
Compare that with what happened when the researchers took a different group of volunteers and gave them eight hours of training in compassion, then showed them the graphic videos. A totally different set of brain circuits lit up: those for love and warmth, the sort a parent feels for a child.
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.
In fact, one fMRI study showed that in very experienced practitioners — think Tibetan yogis — compassion meditation that involves wishing for people to be free from suffering actually triggers activity in the brain’s motor centers, preparing the practitioners’ bodies to physically move in order to help whoever is suffering, even as they’re still lying in the brain scanner.
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 multistep 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 instead of resorting to “the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself,” as Weil put it. And we’re training our capacity for moral attention, so that we can then help others in real life.
I hope you consume the news in moderation, and that when you do consume it, you try to do so while practicing compassion. With any luck, you’ll leave feeling like those Tibetan yogis in the brain scanner: energized to help others out in the world.
—Sigal Samuel, senior reporter
