I think I read way too much news. I tried to control my new sources to make sure they are more accurate, but most of all the stuff news shares on a day-to-day basis is just noise.
I think the news organizations have gotten incredibly good at being entertainment organizations and trying to hold our attention for hours a day. In reality, the useful news that affects us could probably all be consumed in 15 minutes or less a week.
The goal I think we have in watching the news or reading about the news is to help us make better decisions in our lives. Make better investment decisions, understand threats to us or opportunities we can take in various ways. Or maybe just to learn about something that will be a useful skill to us.
A lot of the stories they talk about can be enraging, like if someone robbed or killed or raped someone. It really doesn’t help me make better decisions in my life though.
A lot of the stories don’t give me any tools to live my life better. There are items that may affect me, but that I would have no control over. An example of this would be the invasion of Afghanistan. I have no control over whether or not happens, but it does impact me because I would pay higher taxes to pay for the war. It may affect investment decisions since more money may go into defense and oil companies. But I can get that information in one 5-minute news story rather than watching the news for an hour a night for an entire year.
A lot more stories are just noise. A good example of this is the endless political debates in Congress that never actually end up doing anything that impact me. I would be a lot better off just reading news articles that only showed actual policies that were passed, rather than reading about all the drama involved in the possibility that something might get passed.
All of these new stories every single day about stocks and the economy generally just muddy the waters and make it very difficult to see what the economy is actually doing. That is one of the reasons I’m building my program, so that I can take my personal emotions out of it and just make decisions based on what is a good value company or not. Eventually, I would like to have my program taken to account macroeconomic indicators to help determine where to invest too.
I would rather spend my time with my family or doing fun activities like skiing or visiting friends then watching news stories for several hours a day.
If I am going to watch something, would have been trying to do recently is to watch educational YouTube videos by experts. For example I’ve been watching home builders going through all the steps of building a house, I watched videos on how to build an electric fence, I watched videos on how to build a kid’s playset, and I’ve watched videos on interactive brokers trading tools available to me. Or maybe watch something genuinely entertaining like a comedy show or something like that.
I would like to find ways to reduce the time I spend watching or reading any news, and find ways so that if I do read news it’s only useful news to me. I don’t need to see 15 different talking heads opinions on what’s going on. I just want to see the actual facts. Then I can make my own opinion. If a tax cut is passed for example I just want to see the new story about that without any opinions and only the relevant facts. So they might say taxes went from 33% to 28% for the $100,000 and above tax bracket. That’s all I need to know. I don’t need to hear what every Republican senator thinks and every Democratic senator thinks and every opinion of every news anchor out there.
What do you think?