Underneath this need to amuse ourselves to death is the fear of missing out. We want to know all the things right now. But Jason Fried, CEO and co-founder of the project management software Basecamp, said (on the Tim Ferriss Show) that we can avoid all that by reading, of all things, the newspaper for news.
“For the most part I’m not trying to find out what happened an hour ago. And that, to me, is actually the real advantage to something like the newspaper where you simply cannot find out what happened an hour ago. Because what happened an hour ago in most cases doesn’t matter.”
Fried recognizes there could one day be an urgent need for real-time info, like, for example, a natural disaster near you and your family, but the information treadmill can't be justified 24/7 for something that could possibly but probably not ever happen any time soon.
“To say that I need to be informed in real-time about anything that could possibly happen any time because that one thing might happen once, that’s just a recipe for anxiety and I try to avoid that at all costs.”