After getting into an argument on linkedin recently,
I immediately regretted some stuff I said online.
I said I didn’t care much about world events because I don’t watch the news, which promptly earned me the label of “privileged”.
Maybe they were right, it was a poor choice of words and there’s a lot of suffering out there.
It’s not that I don’t care.
It’s that I only have so much attention to give,
and I’m not willing to give it up to a news cycle focussed on negative hyperbole.
So I then learned about a concept I wished I’d known sooner that would have saved me some trouble…
“Hitchens razer”, named for an author, states that:
Anything asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence
This has since saved me from many pointless arguments online.
I don’t need to engage with everything I see.
How many hours have I lost crafting arguments online?
Or wasting my best energy on imagined comebacks to arguments that have already faded into the past?
Or spent all day stressing about news I can do nothing about?
The thing is I should know better!
In fact,I’ve already written about this myself
In life by design ep40 I was talking about cultivating an information diet of selective ignorance,
Which massively improved my wellbeing AND gave me improved ability to focus.
