I switched to a weekly subscription of Economist (print) and it has been great. I haven't seen then news in a year (on phone, or TV). If there's something really important happening, then people around me generally tell me. At that point I check what's happening online, but that doesn't last more than a day or 2.

It has allowed me to escape the news cycle. I am yet to find an equivalent of the Economist for India (where I'm residing right now). As a result, I'm currently quite oblivious to the day-to-day in India, but honestly that hasn't been of much consequence.

Use Firefox with maximum tracking protection and use a PiHole with FTL as your DNS to block advertisement. Add uBlock Origin for the occasional cookie and WebRTC denial.

Then social media will be so broken, you'll automatically get so annoyed at it that you will just stop using it. Even youtube forces you for around 10 seconds to wait in a loading loop every damn video, just because they use anticompetitive measurements against Firefox users.

For the important things that you want to watch, I recommend minitube. It's using yt-dlp and mpv behind the scenes, and its interface is designed so you have to actively subscribe to everything or actively have to search for everything (e.g. when you want to learn about something there's no distractions on the way there which is super neat).

My smartphone is stored next to the toilet during the day, in airplane mode. This way I use social media only while pooping. After all, shit has to go where shit belongs, right?

you don't need to keep up on the news. reject the premise and be free. honestly we wish we could be more ignorant. how do you stop learning about the news when it is everywhere?

tl;dr - Heather Cox Richardson!

My original mini-essay (heh):

It hasn't 100% worked for me, but it's been progress for me to:

- turn on grayscale - don't use any social media - turn off all recommendations for the two indulgences I do have (YouTube, Reddit)

The no recommendations has been especially helpful because I only have my subscription feed, and I can curate that.

As far as news goes - Economist is a good one imo. Weekly news is a fast enough cadence that also filters out noise and nonsense from the knee-jerk, instant reaction news cycles. I've also found the New Yorker to be pretty great, since their pieces are so long that they're usually about events that happened weeks to months ago.

But +1 to others' comments: maybe you don't need to know everything, either. Reading books about history, even recent history, has been a great way for me to fulfill my need to understand our society.

Despite all that I've typed above, if you really want to get regular news consumption, I highly highly recommend Heather Cox Richardson. She distills the daily news and often adds historical context.

One probably needs an assistant that tells one news that said assistant knows is important to... one. What news actually is important? E.g. if Bitcoin is crashing? (Probably not just important for crypto-bros, but could affect the broader economy). If you're planning trip to Sicily and Mount Etna just erupted. Or if you have relatives there..

I guess the assistant should know whether a piece of news can be important or not, but if something happens to be a slow-boil (e.g. the fascist takeover of the USA), it could end up as a surprise.

Perhaps one of those planet-burning text generators can be one such assistant...

Just keep it in the front of your mind that most of the stuff you're reading is ephemeral bullshit. If you come across something that you think is important, make a note of it. I keep a small journal of stories I find notable and that may be important in the future. Everything else is lost to the wind.