Staying off the news roller coaster
Today marks about seven months since the coronavirus drove us all into the safety of our homes. My last day in the office was March 12, a Thursday.
When I left the building that evening, I didn’t know I wouldn’t be back before spring and then summer had come and gone, nor that the autumn leaves would fall without my having returned.
Had I known back then what I know now, where would my thoughts and worries have taken me? So far, nothing bad has happened to my family or close circle of friends and coworkers, thank God, but so many millions of others have suffered. The shared pain and worry can feel like we’re all living under a heavy, wet empathy blanket. It was getting to be too much. I finally had to rip off the blanket and, more literally, turn off the news.
Those early weeks of the pandemic were a blur of hyper-awareness. As I worked from my home office, I kept the TV turned to news channels, watching the COVID-19 counts and the stock market. At first, the two were moving in opposite directions: as the number of cases rose, the stock market plunged. A measurable piece of my future sits in both those numbers, and in a bit of self-delusion, I believed by following the data I could somehow control it.
Of course, there is no such inoculation.
The news was taking me for a ride. To make my anxiety worse, I kept a thermometer on my desk, to check for fever every hour or so. As the market went down and the tally of sick people went up, my temperature stayed the same. Some days, that reptilian number on the digital screen was my Xanax, keeping the anxiety in check.
But a girl can take every breath with the news reports for only so long before burning out, and that day came around mid-May, when I realized the case count will do what it will, whether I’m following along or not. As for my 401K, it will do what it will, and besides, I’m not qualified to start fiddling with my stocks and bonds.
And so I unplugged, turned from the news to gentler things like reruns of “Little House on the Prairie” and “The Waltons.” The fact that I’ve seen all the episodes many times turns out to be helpful. In a time of great uncertainty, there’s something soothing about knowing what’s going to happen.
I’ve also stayed off the social media echo chambers. I use Facebook only for messaging friends now. I eschew Twitter and Instagram. Nothing good can come of exposing oneself to the parade of noisy opinion.
Finally last week, having gone TV news-free for several months, I tuned in to the first presidential debate.
And promptly shut it back down.
I used to be a news junkie, back in the early days of my career when I was reporting the news. In the next phase of my life, the part where I was raising kids, I followed events as best I could, but there wasn’t much time to keep track.
And now, shut in at home and with the biggest story of my life unfolding in real time on my TV screen, I can’t stand the drama. I follow just enough to get the big headlines, then I go back to my life. I choose not to ride the news roller coaster any more.
For me, it’s a better way to ride out this crazy year.