I hereby unsubscribe

Or my love-hate relationship with news media

I’m was feeling quite relaxed today, and this newsletter is going out a bit later than usual. I’m also hot, as in warm. I’m too old to be sexy. The sort of hot where I wish I didn’t have leather sofas. If you own one, you know exactly what I mean.

I was scanning through the home page of the Guardian this evening (park your judgement for my choice of news outlet, I’m a lefty). There’s a drought coming and glaciers melting. A lot of stuff around energy prices going crazy. Peter Jackson wishes he could wipe his memory of Lord of the Rings, and McDonald’s is reopening some stores in the Ukraine.

Fuck me, I was relaxed until I cast my eyes across that horror show. For a moment I thought it was the end of the world. I’d always imagined that I’d be wearing some sort of Mad Max outfit and driving around in an armoured pizza van at the apocalypse. Turns out I’m in a pair of shorts and a tropical themed vest, sipping a Florida Orange. I told you I was hot.

I read a couple of articles and then noped out of it. There was a part of me that I could feel being pulled into the drama tornado that had been laid out before me. With a swift psychological chop I had to sever the connection.

All of the things I’m reading about I have no control over. I can’t reverse climate change. I can have an opinion about it, but I ultimately have zero influence over the global fossil fuel industry and the use of said fuels.

Likewise, I can’t make it rain, relieve billionaires of their greed, or wipe Peter Jackson’s mind.

What I had to remind myself was that there is only one thing in this Universe that I can control. and that’s me and how I respond to what I experience. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think these things are important. It just allows me to manage how much mental energy I expend on worrying about it.

It’s an idea I caught from reading work by the Stoics. They’re all about personal responsibility and accountability, and talk heavily on the boundaries of our sphere of influence.

Seneca, a prominent Stoic born in Spain in 4BC, talks a lot about self control and emotions in his letters to Lucilius. He says that we must meet change with calm and balance, rather than allowing our mind to be overruled by what he called the passions.

When he says passion, he means it in the sense of powerful, natural emotions that arise that can feel overwhelming. If I’d allowed myself to fall into that vortex of despair by reading all of those news articles and attaching to them, I can say with some certainty that I’d be feeling quite a lot of anxiety right now.

Instead, as Seneca also talks about, we have to employ our will, our volition, to recognise when these emotions are coming up and to allow our rational mind to temper them. That’s not to say we must disregard these feelings or bottle them up. Far from it.

We have to honour them, but we must also ensure that they are serving us in a way that meets our needs. My spiralling into a ball of quaking anxiety about the future is not going to help me do my work tomorrow, or be there for the people that I care about. It’s not serving my needs.

Our volition is an important and powerful tool in our wellbeing kit. It takes practise to use, but it’s all about catching those passions when they arise and asking ourselves does this serve me?

If the answer’s no, then breathe it in and let it go. You might not feel like you have enough agency over your own fears and worries to be able to do it, but I assure you that with practise you will. Next time you feel yourself being overwhelmed by concerns over something you can’t control, take a step back from it for a moment and ask yourself that question. Does this serve me?

Behave as though your mind is your kingdom. Treat it well, instruct it properly, and rule over it fairly.

Much love
David

---