Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.

> ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if you’re experiencing it all the time and become overwhelmed by it.

I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it. Outrage itself is a reaction, just not a positive one. There's no shortage of people reacting to things.

> Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most.

Agreed. I personally believe that checking the news everyday is akin to something like a ‘news overdose’. There’s nothing wrong with spending just 15 minutes per week. At least for me, that’s a far healthier dose.

Indeed, 40 years ago, if we weren't getting our news from the TV, we quite often got it via weekly news magazines and Sunday newspapers.

Someone I spoke with recently mentioned that it used to be that you could read a newspaper end-to-end and feel like you were informed. Now, it's an endless stream of information. I would posit that our brains weren't intended to consume that much information, but I'll leave that as uninformed speculation.