You Don’t Always Have To Be Up To Date On Everything

You Don’t Always Have To Be Up To Date On Everything

According to local news reports, an area man stopped checking Twitter for a few minutes yesterday and promptly died because he wasn’t up to date on the haps. Except that didn’t happen. It never happens. So don’t worry like it does.

Photo by BuzzFarmers.

Personal finance site The Escape Artist raises the cogent point that sometimes it’s better not to be up to date. Not just in a “you darn kids and your mobile phones” kind of way. Rather, staying up to date on everything means that you become exposed to new problems. The more TV shows you feel pressured to keep up on, the more they take up your free time. The more you obsessively stay up to date on the latest smartphone, the more you’ll feel the need to replace your current one. For your own well being, it might be better sometimes to simply ignore the fact that there’s new information out there:

If you want to get rich whilst improving your mental health, I suggest you stop watching TV news, adverts and infomercials. How will you cope if you don’t know what some politician said? Or what is fashionable in Milan this spring? Or who won X Factor? Or what the latest igadget is. Hint: Probably pretty well. If something genuinely interesting happens, someone will bring it to your attention via good old fashioned word of mouth. And, unless you are a diplomat, general or world leader you probably don’t need to watch distressing footage of natural disasters, terrorism or foreign wars.

The problem with staying up to date on everything is that it will never end. You’re a mortal person with a finite number of hours in the day and the world is doing more than you can keep up with. Every time you decide to read up on some story, or spend your time catching up on some major event, that’s time taken away from other tasks. That’s great if you’re paying attention to something that interests you, but if you’re only doing it because you feel left behind otherwise, maybe you’re better off missing that train.

You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned [The Escape Artist via Rockstar Finance]


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