Why the News Leaves You Worse Off

An hour goes into the day's events and something odd comes out of it. The number of things known has gone up. The sense of understanding what is happening has not, and often it has gone down. More has been taken in and less has settled.

That combination is worth looking at directly, because the usual explanations for it — too much bad news, not enough discipline — do not quite account for it. Chapter 47 offers a different one, and it is phrased so bluntly that it is regularly mistaken for a recommendation to know nothing.

The Line That Sounds Like Anti-Intellectualism

"Without going outside his door, one understands all that takes place under the sky; without looking out from his window, one sees the Tao of Heaven. The farther that one goes out from himself, the less he knows" (chapter 47, James Legge, 1891).

Read quickly, that is a case for the shuttered room, and there is no shortage of readings that take it that way. But the third line carries a qualifier the first two do not, and it changes the subject: the distance being described is not distance from home, and not distance from information. It is distance from himself. What degrades is not the person who learns a great deal. It is the person who is a long way out from their own position when they do it.

That is a claim about vantage point rather than about quantity, and it can be tested against an ordinary morning. The events being followed are, almost without exception, ones the reader has no position in — no relationship to the people involved, no ability to affect the outcome, no way to check any of it against anything they have seen themselves. The material arrives fully formed, and it is received from nowhere in particular.

Information Is Not Understanding

The two get treated as the same substance in different amounts, as though understanding were what accumulates once enough information has been added. Chapter 47 separates them, and the separation is the useful part.

Understanding involves a relation between what is known and where the knower stands: it can be checked, corrected, acted on, and revised when it turns out to be wrong. Information has no such requirement. It can be held indefinitely without ever touching anything — and material held that way does not stay inert. It becomes an opinion, because an opinion is what the mind produces when it is handed a situation it cannot test.

This is why the intake can rise steadily while the sense of clarity falls. What is being added is not partial understanding awaiting completion. It is a growing stock of positions on matters that will never be checked against anything, and holding a great many of those is a genuinely tiring condition, distinct from being upset by any one of them.

From the Tao

The farther that one goes out from himself, the less he knows. — Tao Te Ching, chapter 47 (James Legge, 1891)

What the Intake Is Actually For

If the reading does not produce understanding, it is worth asking what it does produce, because something keeps it going and it is not stupidity.

Following a situation closely is the nearest available thing to acting on it. It has the shape of responsibility — attention paid, developments tracked, the matter taken seriously — without the part where anything can be done. For events that are genuinely out of reach, and most of them are, that shape is the whole of what is on offer. The reading continues because stopping feels like indifference, which is a decent instinct pointed at a place where it has nothing to work with.

Naming that plainly is most of the relief. The alternative to following a distant situation hour by hour is not not caring about it. Those two got welded together somewhere, and they come apart on inspection.

Where the Position Still Exists

Chapter 47 is not counselling withdrawal, and the rest of it makes that reasonably clear: the sages "accomplished their ends without any purpose of doing so." Ends are still accomplished. The chapter is describing where the accomplishing happens.

It happens in the places where a person still has a vantage point — the street, the workplace, the family, the specific institution they are actually inside of. In those, information can be checked against something. A view can be wrong in a way that shows up. Something done makes a difference that is visible to the person who did it.

This is not a claim that the wider world is unimportant, and it should not be read as one. It is a claim about which knowledge is available to a given person: the near case can be known in the full sense, and the distant one mostly cannot, however many hours are given to it. Time moved from the second to the first buys understanding at a much better rate.

A Smaller Thing to Try

For one week, when a piece of news lands, ask a single question before reading further: is there anything I could do about this. Not as a challenge, and not to arrive at no — sometimes there is something, and it is worth finding out.

Where the answer is no, the reading can continue. What changes is that it is no longer mistaken for a response. That mistake is what makes an hour of it feel like a duty discharged, and its correction is what makes the hour available for something with a position in it.

The chapter's promise is modest and it is not really about news at all: what can be known well is knowable from where you already are. Everything else can be followed, at a price, and the price is worth knowing.