I don’t read news.

News is useless noise in our daily lives. Yes, I think so. Think about how often you visit various newspapers everyday just to scroll mindlessly through the headlines without reading anything. Then move on to the next newspaper. Your life does not change by reading fresh news every day. When I tell people that I do not read news, they immediately ask in shock; "How do you catch up on important events around the worlds?". My answer is that I’ll always learn about it somehow, if the news is important enough and affect me. My life will not be different if I get to know of some terror attack ten minutes after the incident compared to waiting a day or two. My life will probably be worse by learning of it right away as there are very little confirmed information and lots of unanswered questions. More knowledge and less impulsive feelings are the main reasons to why I like to read about events after the incident has happened.

Well, I sort of lied, I do read lots of publications on internet, but not national or local newspapers. Instead, I subscribe to the RSS feeds of blogs and niche websites that I find interesting, usually related to my work in tech and hobbies. For example, I subscribe to 6 comics, 4 economy related blogs, 5 personal blogs like mine and 5 Norwegian technology websites. I am also a Quora reader, where I subscribe to many of the same topics and can read interesting, fun and reflected answers about all kinds of topics.

Analogy to music

People often say: "Music was sooo much better in the 60s/70s/before. Music nowadays is just trash". It’s easy to agree with this argument if you listen to Spotify’s top 100 playlist and then listen to “Best of 60s” playlist afterwards.

Every day reportedly 60 000 songs are released to Spotify (Spotify Stream On - YouTube). Out of these songs, a tiny fraction of them will end up being remembered next year, even next month. It would be impossible to listen to all the songs, and it would probably be a painful experience as you would probably skip close to all of them. Most of these songs are therefore noise on the path to finding the good music released this year. The same numbers could be applied to number of news produced every day.

Importance in investing

Noise in the daily life can easily push people to buy and sell certain investments. But for long term investors daily news is just noise. Which in the end usually results in less profit because of frequent transactions and jumping out of their own plan to follow the next big thing. Day traders will on the other side usually benefit from closely following news as the market is always reacting someway to daily news.

Conclusion

I must say that news are no worse than any other thing we spend time on, news are perhaps better than most things. So please continue with reading news, BUT only if you find that you like to do so, and it gives a positive impact to your life. I think us others should try to read less news, and rather spend time on learning about how and why previous events occurred or something else you enjoy spending time on.

Full list of news sources I follow in my rss reader Feedly:

Thanks for reading my second blog post, my writing and thought process is already maturing. I feel like there could be much more written about this topic. Maybe I will revisit this topic some time later with better visualization of news and maybe show lots of “big news” from the past that nobody remembers.

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