*a quick promise to you: our newsletter will always only ever be written by humans and never by robots. we wish we could say that this is out of love & respect for writing & the environment, and while those are both true, it’s mostly that we really tried a couple years ago for months on end to get the robots to write in this very weird (but always hilarious, obvi) tone and it just…has not delivered. easier AND funnier to keep it highly manual and we are very okay with that. thank you for your understanding.

while normally how a mansplainer gets his water, “well, actually” will explore the different angles of an argument or conversation & favor celebrating nuance & complexity over the short-term satisfaction of “hot take culture”.

Last weekend, I had the unexpected pleasure of being able to log off of social media and not really pick it up all weekend, tending to a family issue that required my full attention.

When I came back on Sunday afternoon to check what I’d missed…well, reader, it was a lot.

We canceled Sabrina Carpenter maybe? There is a whole new acronym that a lot of people are very mad about.¹ A man who was tired of not being paid a living wage set fire to a paper goods warehouse where he worked. Actually, wait, there were like, four more warehouse fires. POTUS had a lot to say about war and hostility while hanging out with a life-sized Easter bunny. His wife wanted to let us know, apropos of nothing, of course, that she has never been buddies with Jeffrey Epstein. A US representative? Two representatives? are being accused of or investigated over allegations of sexual or physical assault. Everyone’s favorite inept father Sam Altman is being accused again by his sister of sexual violence, a bombshell release from the New Yorker showed that no one really likes him at all, and someone threw a molotov cocktail at his house, and all these events appear to be unrelated.

Oh, and then there’s whether or not Jesus got his MD and is actually licensed to practice medicine with the Red Cross.²

Guys, I was gone for like, two seconds. (Okay, four days, but STILL.)

What I found most striking about this was how quickly the internet seemed to demand I have an opinion and take a side in each of these situations. Like, I just got here. Now I’m supposed to leave my favorite blonde pop star behind or face the consequences of being A Bad Person Forever? It feels like…a lot of responsibility.

It got me thinking about how Chronically Online so much of our society has become, and how easy it is in that Too Online space to believe that this is how everyone else lives, too. There’s a name for this: the False Consensus Effect. At its core, it’s the false belief that the way we live our lives must be how most people live theirs. It’s easy to understand why people would default to this; it lends credibility to how we live our own lives, it makes us feel not alone, and honestly? It’s just easier to digest. It’s a lot more challenging to think through the differences between how we live and how others live, so believing we are all doing the same thing is just simpler.

There is also something called the Availability Heuristic, which basically assumes that whatever knowledge a person possesses on a topic, it is The Whole Extent of Knowledge To Be Gained on the topic. It also leads to something I like to call Convenient Amnesia or Revisionist History That Makes Me Look Better. You may recognize this, how some people seem to forget that there was ever A Time Where They Did Not Know This Thing, whatever This Thing is…even if they just learned about it a week ago. Once, my husband asked me to explain some trend that he’d seen online. The next day, a friend asked about it at happy hour and my husband jokingly rolled his eyes, saying, “I can’t believe you don’t know what that is,” so I had to be the asshole that said, “Bitch you just learned about that YESTERDAY” (I’m really fun at parties.) The point is: We tend to forget that a) there was ever a time where we also lacked this knowledge and needed someone to teach us, and b) there might be additional knowledge about this topic we are not yet aware of.

You basically have to exist on the internet for less than five minutes these days to be confronted with an online contingent who will chastise or demean you for Not Knowing Things. To Not Know Things is to not be paying attention and that, they tell you, is your PRIVILEGE SHOWING. The only reason you would Not Know Things is because Those Things Do Not Affect You, and therefore, you’ve decided that you don’t care. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention” is the status quo, except have we talked about the outrage is eating us from the inside out?

Look, I’m here to poke fun and pull back some curtains, but I’d be lying if I pretended like I hadn’t been this person in my past, with a desperate need to stay informed on all headlines and current events. But as the years have gone on, I’ve wondered: Yes, I want to stay informed…but at what cost? A dear friend in journalism once told me that I was the most informed person he knows who DOESN’T work in politics or journalism. While my Teacher’s Pet Personality wants to bask in what a good grade he’s given me in Staying Informed, what has it actually gotten me? This newsletter, health issues triggered out of dormancy by anxiety and overwhelm, and mounting stress that I can literally feel leaving my body with each passing hour I’m away from my phone. 

This feels like a raw deal.

But there’s a lot going on in the world that affects people, and we SHOULD care about those things, right? Yes, absolutely, I don’t disagree. But do we need to stay informed about EVERYTHING? I’m not convinced we do.

First, we were not meant to live this way. No one even 30 years ago could have accounted for how rapidly and increasingly connected we are. We believed that unbridled access to information would make us better, but research repeatedly shows that it makes us worse, in part because of what I call the Cheesecake Factory Menu Problem. There are simply TOO MANY THINGS and TOO MANY INFORMATIONS, so what do humans do when presented with them all? We order the chicken fettuccine alfredo because we got overwhelmed and we know what it is for sure. We gravitate to confirmation bias because there’s simply too much going on. No matter how informed we are, there is still more we are missing; we are living in a modern-day flash flood of information, and it’s really fucking with our bodies and our brains.

Career activists will even tell you how important it is to take breaks and step away: Activism is one of those careers with an unfortunately high suicide rate, and that is because it is painful to be so informed of all the injustice everywhere all the time and feel so overwhelmed by how much there is to do. Breaks in the chaos are necessary.

I know that there are readers of mine out there who will feel anxious reading this. They will start to feel like maybe it’s okay that they take a break, but then they will worry: Are they indulging their privilege by looking away? But the context matters.

Is it privilege to look away and not pay attention because you literally do not care since you won’t be affected by it? Even here, the context matters. Is the thing you don’t care about Ashley Tisdale’s toxic mom group woes? (It is for me.)³ You do not have to be hyper-aware of beef held by a former Disney child star. If the thing in question is affecting whole groups of people in really bad ways, then yes, looking away may be indulging in privilege.

It is NOT privilege to step away when the context is that your brain and body are hurting, or when it is overwhelming your life and your ability to function. Mental health issues and neurodivergence are disabilities. Taking care of your conditions is not privilege, because there is no privilege in having them to take care of in the first place.

I once had a coworker who told us loudly and often that she did not pay attention to any news because it always just made her feel sad and she didn’t like feeling sad. Feeling sad is not harm. It’s just uncomfortable. We have to be able to sit with the discomfort of sad things in order to motivate us to make change or practice empathy. But not wanting to ever feel sad is not the same as struggling to get through the day because you can’t stop doomscrolling. 

This immediate assumption that not knowing is indulgent of our privilege is a lie that needs to die a quick death. At the beginning of this, I told you why I was taking an internet break: An important family issue required my full attention. There are SO MANY OTHER REASONS for people to log off that have nothing to do with apathy or antipathy. 

This week, practice being just a little less informed. If that idea makes you anxious, like you might miss something and Become A Bad Ignorant Person, it means you especially need this advice. Practice sitting in the discomfort of not knowing and see how it feels in your body. The remedy is not going back to the information drug, it’s learning how to live without it sometimes. And for my fellow keyboard warriors, remind yourselves that someone not knowing all the things you know isn’t often a measure of how much they do or don’t care. There is a limit to how much we can process, and even our survivorship bias can’t save us, since each of us actually knows far less than we think we do. 

The weather is getting warmer, the sun is coming out, and you don’t need to care about whatever Ashley Tisdale is doing (none of us do, honestly). Go touch grass and remember a time when opposable thumbs were used for inconsequential wars and not a perpetual scrolling motion.

¹tbh i think they’re mostly mad bc they don’t know what all the letters mean
²please tell me we aren’t buying this
³no shit, i actually had an ENTIRE running joke about how inconsequential and unimportant Katy Perry is, instead of this Ashley Tisdale bit when i originally wrote the piece. then, TODAY, as i was putting links and finishing touches on things, i saw that Katy Perry was just accused of sexual assault by Ruby Rose so i took it out and had to find another mediocre celebrity replacement. the irony in becoming more informed on accident.

danielle has too many tabs open, but she swears they’re mostly interesting.

a statistic that made us go “hmmm” (likely not written on a bathroom stall) & some color to explain it.

*Based on an estimated 5 trillion Google searches that will be done in 2026, 10% of which will contain incorrect answers based on the current Gemini modeling

in an effort to try to be less addicted to your phone, i’m going to recommend NOT getting your news from social media. there are SO MANY independent journalism orgs today that are doing really excellent work delivering news without so much of the editorial spin. if you really want to stay informed and you’re looking for facts more than talking heads, 1440 media is a place i’d recommend.

Every day, 4.5 million readers turn to 1440 for their factual news fix. We sift through 100+ sources to bring you a complete summary of politics, global events, business, and culture — all in a brief 5-minute email. No spin. No slant. Just clarity.

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each week, we’ll end our newsletter with action item(s), or “what TF are you supposed to do about all this now?” we hope they help. 🤞🏻