It's lame how a timeless Buddhist principle is derided as "privilege" by contemporary leftists. So closed minded and presumptuous towards something so effective and universally applicable.

My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.

Not "privilege" per se, I think that's the wrong word. Republican or Democrat, left or right, rich or very very rich - there is a lot of self-selection bias in judging the world from a pool of people who decided to go on vacation to the Galapagos...

can a poor person not disconnect in the same way? I think plenty already do without meaning too, lots of tech-illiterate truck drivers and construction workers with flip phones.

It's definitely privileged to take a trip to the Galapagos, but I don't think it's privileged to ignore the news. A lot of poor people ignore the news. They may be too busy, or they may feel powerless to change anything. I think the real question is what exactly this entirely content-free statement means: "I’ll be focusing more on stories that actually matter instead of chasing the flash-in-the-pan ephemera that nobody remembers the next week."

"The news" is hardly reality either, and nor does it record most of the political conflict in the world.

It's important to have principles and to speak up for them around others, and to get your information from sources of truth.

But it is not important for most people to be plugged into a news mainline every day to read about the latest absurdity of our flailing country. Until or unless there is mass unrest and sustained protests or a general strike, the only thing we can do is vote and boycott, and if you live in a swing district or state, write a politician.

I think "escaping the internet" by stopping news consumption most of the week would benefit most of us, rich and poor, all races, unless you need realtime updates for your safety.

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