I’ve written about this before, but as a kid I was actually pretty well up on current events. I enjoyed watching the news. I liked being aware of what was going on.
Somewhere as time marched on, that flipped. I don’t know exactly when it started. Maybe it was 9/11, watching the same footage over and over. It probably started even before that. But for a good stretch of time now, watching the news, or anything news adjacent on television, has just been depressing. More recently, reading it hasn’t been much better.
The problem is I do still want to be aware of what’s going on. I want to know what’s happening with certain topics. So say I’m reading something benign, like Apple news, because I buy Apple stuff and want to know what they’re announcing. Then in that same feed there’s a story about prices probably going up because of something going on elsewhere, and now I’m doom scrolling to figure out what that something is. Because I want to know. Which is never fun.
So my engagement with news has gone through cycles. I stop cold turkey for a while. Then someone at work mentions something, I go check the BBC, and suddenly I’m reading a whole pile of stuff because once I start I can’t really stop.
That cycle is made worse by the fact that I don’t really do social media anymore. I have a Facebook account that exists purely to auto post this blog, and maybe once a month I check whether anyone’s messaged me. I think I have a Bluesky account and a Mastodon account somewhere, I’m not sure. Definitely no Twitter anymore. No Instagram. So it’s basically just Facebook and LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is really for work, and even there I probably should be interacting less.
I’m glad I stepped away from social media, for a bunch of reasons I’ve written about before. But news has stuck around as this lingering thing I haven’t solved. The challenge is I find real value in some news and none in a lot of the rest, and figuring out which is which has been the whole problem.
Over the past year or so I’ve wanted to try curated news properly. Apps like Curio, or having ChatGPT put together a daily summary. The issue every time was the same. I couldn’t stop it from throwing in topics I explicitly didn’t want to see. So after each attempt I’d abandon it, stop reading the news for a week, and then want to check my feed for something and get sucked right back in. It can really turn into a doom loop.
Given everything else I’ve been building with AI lately, I’d been curious what it could do about this problem too. But the other stuff I was building felt more tangible, so I kept pushing this one off. Then recently I noticed I was doom scrolling more, and not feeling great about it right after I did it. So with a bit of time to actually focus on it, I decided to see what I could do.