For the last several months, in addition to my continuing disengagement in Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (the current big three in terms of damage to the human soul), I have been actively avoiding the news. It’s not a total unawareness of current events, but a general decrease in the sources of information about those events. In particular, I’ve whittled my news intake to one extremely pretentious one hour podcast, Monday through Friday. The Briefing from Monocle, is a look at the global news by hipsters more concerned about the production of aged cheese in Montenegro than the plight of Syrian refugees or the war in Yemen. But they try. I get what I can out of each broadcast then go back to reading about fly fishing, Zentangling, or my new hobby of playing the classic card game Skip-Bo with my wife while listening to jazz.

The greatest part of this is that I seemed to have missed nothing. Especially concerning the on-goings in America. The other day Trump apparently visited the DMZ for a photo-op with Kim Jong-Un. Of course, because I don’t usually get to my news podcast until the next morning, I was unaware of this. No doubt in years past I would have been surfing between multiple news websites and scrolling through Twitter like a madman trying to follow the news. Instead I watched The Handmaid’s Tale and learned how to make Doenjang-jjigae on Maangchi’s YouTube Channel (even if you don’t cook you should check her out).

The world amazingly kept on spinning without my eyeballs tracking the news cycle. Step away from CNN everyone. Half an hour of daily news is probably all anyone ever needed.