ByErik Sherman,
Senior Contributor.
There was an interesting essay — Inside the Ostrich Effect: How Ignorance Has Become a Survival Strategy — in the weekend edition of Bloomberg. (It’s a gift link and should be good for a week. After that, I’m afraid you’re on your own.)
Alex Stone wrote about having “tuned out” of the regular “parade of headlines and commuted to a chorus of political podcasts, the buzz of alerts drumming through my day like a nervous heartbeat.”
He stopped the regular rush of “market updates, the climate alerts, the breaking stories that never stopped breaking.” Stone had been, as he described, reacting to burnout. He also pointed to a study from the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford’s 2025 Digital News Report that, in passing, pointed to “growing numbers of people selectively (and in some cases consistently) avoiding the news.”
