Perhaps you’ve seen the trending anti-news article that’s gone viralish over the past week.
It deals with news versus reality, specifically, deaths as reported in the news versus the deaths people actually die from.
The article compared data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to news reports of deaths in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news website of Fox News.
Some of the results:
First, there wasn’t much difference between the three news outlets, in spite of different political leanings.
Second, there was a big gap between which deaths get written about and which deaths actually happen.
On the over-represented side, murders were 43 times more reported than their share of deaths. Terrorism deaths got 18,000 times more coverage than their share of actual deaths.
On the under-represented side, deaths from things like stroke and heart disease were underreported in the news by a factor of 9 and 10, respectively.
I personally don’t watch or read the news, and this kind of stuff allows me to be smug. “You see,” I imagine telling some imaginary debate partner, “I haven’t been missing anything.”
The fact is, the news doesn’t represent reality, meaning stuff that happens out there. The only reality it represents is what biases exist in the human mind, across time and across space and culture:
Our cravings for novelty… for low probability, high-impact events… for negative rather than positive outcomes… for individual dramatic stories rather than statistics encompassing millions of data points.
But though I personally ignore the news and even like to be smug about it, it’s not just cynical and self-serving news outlets that do this to us.
We do the same thing to ourselves, all the time, because of habit but also because of our inborn neurology. We focus on the negative… the low-probability… the high-impact… and we weave stories about such things that often have little to do with the reality of of our existence.
This all sounds kinda depressing, and I don’t want you leaving my email that way.
So let me share a resource I’ve shared multiple times over the past year and a half.
It lays out a simple process that has allowed me to see reality more clearly and to challenge stories my brain likes to tell itself.
This process worked for me when I first read about it and tried it a year and a half ago. It’s working for me still.
Maybe most importantly, following this process opened up some sort of a gateway in my mind that’s allowed related ideas and practices to flow in, which have made me more happy and resilient these days than I have felt my whole adult life.
In case you want to get informed about reality: