The ancient Stoics believed that philosophy is a way of life. Like other ancient philosophers, the Stoics thought that philosophical principles could make your life better if applied appropriately.

What were the main Stoic lessons? Stoics like Epictetus emphasized focusing on what’s in your control and ignoring the rest. Here’s one of the first passages from Epictetus’ The Enchiridion (“The Manual”):

The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, in the power of others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men.

Epictetus’s question is: why concern yourself with things outside of your power? It won’t do you any good and it’ll probably do you some bad.

The Stoics overstated the point. It can make sense to concern yourself with things you can’t change, like the death of a loved one, say. But they did have a point nonetheless. Focusing on unpleasant things that are outside of your control is a recipe for unhappiness.

Now, if you take Epictetus’ arguments seriously, you shouldn’t read the news. Why not? If you’re a libertarian-ish person or a liberal, then the daily news is dreadful. It’s filled with unpleasant stories and events. Rising populist movements, terrible treatment of foreigners, intensifying war, and so on. To slightly twist David Hume, the daily news makes it appear that the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind are ordinary events.

Why is the news so terrible? One reason is that humanity has likely evolved to pay more attention to bad news than good news. And we’re easily influenced by vivid events rather than underlying base rates. Stephen Pinker notes:

Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

The media eagerly capitalizes on our biases to deliver us a daily dose of misery and scandal.

Here’s where the Stoic insight comes in. The daily news is unpleasant. More than that, you can almost never do anything about it. I can’t do anything to stop right-wing populism, the Syrian civil war, or the North Korean nuclear program. If you think you can do something about these things, you’re either self-deluded or utterly exceptional. The Stoic’s counsel seems clear in this case: stop reading the news. Reading the news won’t make a difference and it will probably make you worse off. It’s an exercise in masochism and leads you to find fault both with gods and men.

You might say: “well, I’m curious about the world and I need to read the news to satisfy my curiosity.” But that doesn’t seem like a good reason to read the news. That’s a good reason to read books like Enlightenment Now or routinely scan websites like Human Progress and Our World in Data (if you don’t like those, wikipedia is, of course, great). This will tell you more about the true state of the world than the news. If you just read the New York Times, you’d probably develop a wildly inaccurate picture of the world.

You might say: “But sometimes I can do something about the bad things I see in the news. For example, if there’s a natural disaster, I can send donations to the victims.” That’s also a bad reason. You don’t need to read the news to help other people effectively (as a side note, donating to the victims of natural disasters is often ineffective). You should read the GiveWell rankings and donate accordingly.

I’ll end with another gem from Epictetus:

Work, therefore, to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first and chiefly by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.

P.S. For a related case, see the great Bryan Caplan. And, after writing this, I noticed that the Daily Stoic has similar reflections.