Comment

Stan Grant
Obliviousness is bliss

I was recently talking to a dear friend and one-time mentor of mine, a legend of Australian journalism, who asked me if, like him, I barely read news beyond the headlines anymore.

More than that, I said, I try to avoid the news completely. I am not alone.

News organisations globally report falling audiences. Oxford University’s Reuters Institute says people of all demographics are tuning out because news is doom and gloom, untrustworthy, and people – especially the working class – do not feel accurately represented.

News fatigue is particularly prevalent among the young, many of whom long ago gave up on so-called legacy media – newspapers, television, radio – and now are even beginning to abandon online sources of news.

A couple of years ago the University of Canberra released a study showing almost 70 per cent of Australians avoid the news at least some of the time. Our numbers are if anything higher than most other parts of the world.

There is still a place for news, but we have way too much of it. I am discerning about what I consume and I am no less informed.

Journalism’s problem is of journalism’s making. The 24/7 news cycle has flooded the zone. All perspective is lost in hyperventilation and hot takes. To hold our attention, each hour must be more dramatic and dire than the last.

My reasons for no longer engaging with news are less about fatigue and more that I simply get little out of it. Before consuming news I ask myself, do I need to know this? Am I learning anything new? Will it help me better navigate the world? More often than not, the answer is no.

As much as I shun it, though, news follows me around. News pollutes the air. It is in shops, buses, cafes, airport lounges, in eavesdropped conversations.

It invades my inbox. My phone pings incessantly with news alerts. Not that there is always news, mind you; we just write about everything more.

I am bombarded with headlines trying to panic me into clicking on the various news sites. It is not hard to resist the bait, but I cannot so easily escape the anxiety.

This past week has been worse than most. The combination of the fallout from recent protests in Australia and Chinese president Xi Jinping’s gathering of tyrants and tyrant-adjacent tourists in Beijing has tipped the journalistic hyperbole meter into the red.

I did not need to read any of this news coverage to know that the various threats are both real and hyped. The media is typically trying to scare us. Take China. I reported inside and outside the country for two decades, during which pundits told me the nation would either collapse or tip us into world war. Neither has happened.

Now I get headline alerts breathlessly comparing Xi’s military parade to the Nuremberg rallies. There are legitimate questions about China’s military expansion without this overreach.

Hitler is a go-to for journalists looking for a shortcut to shock. Invoking the Führer’s singular evil should be a sign the argument is specious. Yet today the spectre of Hitler is everywhere. In Australia, news outlets would have us believe a handful of ignorant neo-Nazis rings the second coming of the Third Reich.

Under the guise of “news”, media outlets profile these individuals and platform their hate, amplifying their voices and exaggerating their influence. This is exactly what these sick people want.

Oh, but of course, this has nothing to do with news. It is clickbait. It is about numbers of reads, engagements or whatever metric jargon we use now.

This is the ideology of information. Academic Lowry Pressly says it “is the idea that information has a natural existence in human affairs, and that there are no aspects of human life which cannot be translated somehow into data”.

It was supercharged with the invention of the Gutenberg press.

The proliferation of books and information and the rapid spread of literacy was a blessing and a curse. Societal divisions widened, people were radicalised and violence spiralled into the Thirty Years’ War.

Some blamed books for crime and murder. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later lament that books, once “religious oracles … degraded into culprits”.

Fast-forward several hundred years and our new scourge is social media. Scholars of radicalism point to the internet as a site of propaganda, brainwashing and recruitment.

The ideology of information is a cornerstone of modernity. We cannot escape the noise. There is nowhere to hide. We are filmed walking down the street, we are constantly being recorded and with our incessant, reckless posting of photos and personal information, we have lowered the threshold on privacy.

Today information is more than data. We are the sum of our information. We are our data.

Information is our currency. It is our individual brand. We stake our place in the market with our posts, likes, uploaded photos. The market rewards us for being constantly plugged in, ceaselessly talking.

We raise our voices above the level of the noise in our heads. There is no choice to be quiet. Our morality is measured in volume. In the face of the world’s atrocities, silence, we are told, is violence. It is a pithy, meaningless phrase.

If silence is violence, we have entirely lost the meaning of violence itself.

That’s another hallmark of the ideology of information – words become empty. It is a consequence of a dominant strain of Western epistemology that grows out of the idea that we are our thoughts. The cogito is greater than the soul.

Plato told us that absent an integral myth – a higher truth – we lose the ability to talk. What we have instead is the mere imitation of speech.

In a world of relentless becoming we crisscross Heraclitus’s river, evermore strangers to ourselves and each other.

By the 18th century, David Hume suggested there was no necessary connection between cause and effect. In crude terms, cause and effect is a trick of the mind. How then do we communicate reality?

In a world awash in thought, and all thought uploaded into a cloud, our speech becomes incoherent.

These are not concepts we are likely to hear discussed in news programs favouring heat over light. Public discourse becomes idle chatter.

Oh, for oblivion. We think to be oblivious is to be ignorant or naive, but the Latin root oblivio means forgetting. Pressly argues for our right to be forgotten. To be forgotten, he says, “means that the world is oblivious to your existence”.

Is there a more countercultural idea? A world of constant information feeds the need for constant recognition, affirmation and self-adulation. For so many people, to be forgotten is to cease to exist. They want to be celebrated.

Pressly says that acts of oblivion may be a relief, a chance for contemplation, to reset our souls. He says to be oblivious is to “seek to enforce a norm of interpersonal comportment that leaves certain matters unarticulated in human affairs”.

In other words, can we just be quiet for a moment so we can think?

I haven’t stopped reading or watching news to withdraw from the world. I want to shrink my world to a level of understanding. That’s what so many of us are telling the media. We can’t cop the cacophony.

This is the paradox of the modern age: it compels us to speak, yet we crave quiet. Once the dopamine of public recognition has dissipated, there is a comedown of futility, regret or complicity.

There is only so much anger, outrage, fear and despair we can take. Enough with Hitler – leave that monster in his own cold place in history.

The people who are turning away from media might be saying: we want to be forgotten for a while. In the words of poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, to “speechlessly gaze through the break in the mist at the vision of life and love merging from the tumult of profound pain and joy”.

The human soul requires repose. In our interiority we find our humanity. I might not change the world, but I can change my place in the world.

For those who have read this article, thank you. Now, go for a walk and forget it.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 13, 2025 as "The bliss of oblivion".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.

RELATED READING