"The via negativa...is about recognizing that when you don’t know the right way forward, you might succeed by focusing on what you know to be wrong...."

"For example, after a weekend at the beach with your family, you can probably list the irritations far more easily than the pleasant aspects, even if on balance the trip was all right.... When you get home, you’ll have a list of things you experienced, and you can easily name the ones you didn’t like and don’t want to repeat next time (for example, bringing your brother-in-law). In contrast, the things you might add (such as a different guest, who, you hope, won’t get arrested) are hypothetical. Subtractive knowledge is practically guaranteed to lead to improvement, but additive knowledge is often just a guess. "

Writes Arthur C. Brooks in "Make a To-Don’t List/When you’re feeling stuck, focusing on the things you hate can help" (The Atlantic).

This is consistent with my adage Better than nothing is a high standard. And the famous saying Less is more. 

Brooks assures us that following the negative way does not make you a "negative person." I feel sorry for anyone who's governed by the fear of negativity. How cluttered your world must be!  

"I have challenged a number of friends overloading on politics and permanently 'bad' news to try reading nothing but science and technology news for a week or two, then compare it to what they had read or watched prior to that."

"Almost invariably they found the science/tech news was quite positive and uplifting while 'regular' news was negative and a buzzkill."

Wrote DCE in the comments to "Start with a politics cleanse: For two weeks — maybe over your August vacation — resolve not to read, watch or listen to anything about politics."

The post title is a quote from the NYT op-ed by Arthur C. Brooks, "Need a Politics Cleanse? Go Ahead and Treat Yourself/Overwhelmed by current events? You can skip a few weeks without losing track of the plot."

Yesterday, we were talking about the demise of Upworthy, a website that was founded on some sort of idea of presenting news stories in a way that would meet psychological needs for the warm and fuzzy (while delivering a liberal, activist message). As the NYT columnist David Carr wrote in "New Site Wants to Make the Serious as Viral as the Shallow" (2012):

... Upworthy... is using strong visuals along with arch, but serious, curation to find the sweet spot between things that are both “awesome” and “meaningful.” Among the memes they’d like to start, the “17 sexiest pictures about income inequality.”

If that sounds too cute by half, remember that these are the people who took a monthsold, earnest video about gay marriage and helped it go viral with 17 million spins on YouTube by putting a clicky head — “Two lesbians had a baby and this is what they got” — on what was essentially a video of Congressional testimony.

The founders of Upworthy had their own ends, and your psychological needs were part of their process of achieving their ends. Of course, everyone writing on the web is serving interests of his own, and you need to look after your own interests (including which of the interests of others you're going to pay attention to). You can choose what websites to visit and which stories to read, making selections moment by moment and getting good at deciding what not to click. I suspect what happened to Upworthy is that readers got better and better at resisting clickbait. What worked for the site originally became deadly because the clickbaitiness was obvious.

If you're reading this blog, perhaps you can sense that I've been writing all along — since 2004 — for the intrinsic value of the experience of finding things I want to read, writing about them in real time, making a space for other people to join me in writing about the same things, and selectively reading what you write. If this blog gives you something that you select to read, thanks! That's part of the intrinsic pleasure.

ADDED: Though I write this blog continuously, I also take breaks all the time. What I do, you can do too: I make different selections. For example, yesterday, I went wandering around in The Utne Reader and wrote about hopelessness and forest bathing. Meanwhile, there are many prominent stories that I won't read beyond a glance at the headline. For example there's something about a Russian woman that has something to do with Trump troubles. I refuse to figure out what looks like a complicated tangle that the news media are promoting because it might turn into something that could hurt Trump.  If it ever does, I'll be able to get up to speed in 5 minutes. It will become simpler. But it might just as well melt away into nothing, and if I'd learned about it, I will have forgotten what I knew.

I have good skimming and selection skills, so I have a lot of control over my time and my psychological wellbeing. I won't sit in front of the television letting CNN or Fox or MSNBC control the time and continually tell me to worry about this and then this and then, after the break, this. I know what they're doing because I overhear some of it when Meade watches. I'll sometimes ask how he can watch it. He says finds it amusing, so okay. I'm very sensitive to the awful aesthetics. Like the other day, I did sit down to watch CNN with him for a few minutes and the main thing I saw — the only thing I talked about — is that the background CNN put behind all the talking heads was slanted. Slanted to the left, by the way. An unintentional metaphor. What was intentional, I'm sure, was the creation of a sense of anxiety — of a world out of kilter. They'd like that to work only subliminally, but I won't let them do that to me.

"Start with a politics cleanse: For two weeks — maybe over your August vacation — resolve not to read, watch or listen to anything about politics."

Writes the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur C. Brooks, in a NYT op-ed.

Don’t discuss politics with anyone. When you find yourself thinking about politics, distract yourself with something else. (I listen to Bach cantatas, but that’s not for everybody.) This is hard to do, of course, but not impossible. You just have to plan ahead and stand firm. Think of it as ideological veganism. On the one hand, your friends will think you’re a little wacky. On the other hand, you’ll feel superior to them....

Afterward, with a bit more perspective, you can come back to current events. Three predictions: First, you’ll find that politics is a little like a daytime soap opera, where you can skip a couple of weeks without losing track of the plot. Second, you’ll see the outrage-industrial complex in media and politics more clearly for what it is: a bunch of powerful people who want to keep you wound up for their own profit. Third, like any reformed addict, you’ll see how much time you were wasting and how much you were neglecting people and things you truly love.

After you come back from your politics cleanse, how can you keep from falling back into your old patterns? Resolve to pay attention to ideas, not just politics. They aren’t the same thing. Ideas are like the climate, whereas politics is like the weather....