Well that is simple. I don’t really. I have got the log in from a friend for the gopress database and once a week I catch up with De Tijd (the Belgian financial newspaper). Reading it with a delay reduces the time necessary to be caught up significantely. Because, when you read a weeks old newspaper you quickly realize how much is utter drivel not worth your time to read at all.

I am not alone in this. Mr money moustasche has a great post about it. He calls it the low information diet. The magazine Humo had an article about it a few weeks back. My parents still have a subscription on it. They keep them and when I visit I take a bunch of them with me. The girlfriend reads them. Since there is always one lying about at the toilet I might leaf through it when I didn’t remember to bring my smartphone with me.

The reason I do this is not to save money but purely to improve my quality of life.

The news is hardly news anymore. It is a lot of speculation about what might happen or what might be the consequences of what just happened combined with a lot of opinions about what happened, or why it happened. At best, reading this is just a waste of time. At worst it will annoy you and sour your mood for a few hours or even a few days (some Belgian politicians have developed an unique talent to deliver in 5 second soundbites such complete and utter ridiculous proposals that any sane person needs a week to just barely regain some of his mental capabilities).

Since the news hardly contains any worthwhile information. It wastes a lot of my time with other stuff that is not news and in most cases delivered information that had no impact on my life or I couldn’t change even when it does impact my life (short of leading an armed revolt to topple the EU leadership and found the Republic of the Sloth, all hail the sloth!). And on top of that it annoyed me more often than not! So I stopped reading newspapers, magazines, watching the news …

This doesn’t mean I do not read or get new information. But now this is on my terms and for subjects I find interesting or will improve my life. Informative sites or blogs about finance and technology mostly. Some fun things on boredpanda or a fun/absurd thread on reddit. Basically I want to either be informed or entertained and the internet can provide both of these in spades at no cost. The classic media offers very little of either and then has the guts to charge money for it! One wonders why they are in trouble …