There are days when you wake up and feel like the whole world has aged in an instant. Not because of wrinkles or gray hair, but because of the noise. That constant buzz of red headlines, alerts vibrating in the palm of your hand, voices chiming in with 280-character bursts of opinion. As if your soul were waking up drenched in anxiety before you even open your eyes. Does that ever happen to you?
I don't know when we allowed information to become a constant, unregulated diet, without schedules or time for digestion. Before, news arrived in the form of a newspaper or television news program, with a beginning and an end. It was read sitting down, with coffee, like someone observing the world from the prudent distance of the dining room table. Today, however, we live with the world glued to our faces, bombarding us with data, misfortunes, and fury every second. A kind of emotional dripping tap that slowly erodes our serenity.
I remember an afternoon in the south of France, in a village with no cell service. A woman offered me homemade lemonade while I tried, with clumsy gestures, to explain that I needed a connection to check some emails. She looked at me as if I were listening to someone speaking from another planet.
“Here the dead wait until Monday”
He said, smiling. It took me several minutes to realize he was talking about the local newspaper, which only came out once a week. The news would wait. Life wouldn't.
Now, every time I read a headline promising urgency, I think of that phrase. Because perhaps it's not that the world is more terrible, but that we have it too close. Like someone looking at a painting with their nose pressed against the canvas, everything is smudges, everything seems chaotic. Only by stepping back do we discover the meaning, the nuances, the form.
There's something unhealthy about this compulsion to know or have everything instantly. As if ignoring a crisis for a few hours were an act of irresponsibility. As if we should have an urgent opinion on everything: a war, a reform, a cancellation. Ready-made opinions, as quick as instant coffee, as hollow.
We've become addicted to outrage. We need to be angry to feel alive, to feel like we're not indifferent, to feel involved. But this emotional adrenaline doesn't build anything up, it only wears us down. Like someone who lives permanently with a clenched fist, without remembering why.
Information anxiety comes at a price. It robs us of silence, transmits negative energy, steals our time, and turns us into powerless spectators of tragedies we don't fully understand. It fragments our attention, disconnects us from the present, from reality, from what we can actually touch, change, and sustain.
I miss those days when you didn't know everything. When mystery was part of life.
Back when conversations didn't start with "Did you see what happened in...?" . Back when you could look at the sky without thinking about satellites, missiles, or weather data. Back when the news carried the weight of what was important, not the hysterical pace of competition.
Perhaps we need to relearn the art of not knowing . To choose temporary ignorance as an act of mental health. To cultivate a more humane, slower information diet. To turn off notifications, to read with intention, to remain silent when there is nothing new to say.
Because the truth is that we are not made to know everything and our hearts were not designed to beat to the rhythm of all the tragedies on the planet.
Our spirit needs pauses, respites, spaces free from upheaval. It needs, perhaps, to look at the world again as it did before: from the window, with a coffee, while outside the birds continued their song, unaware that the markets had crashed or that the algorithm had changed.
If you're reading this and you also feel weighed down by the world's hum, do yourself a favor this week. Disconnect for a few hours. Not as an escape, but as an act of self-love. Go for a walk without headphones. Look at the leaves, listen to the footsteps, talk to someone without looking at your phone.
The world won't stop turning without you. But perhaps you'll finally begin to turn with it, not against it. As the old woman in the village said: the dead can wait until Monday . And so can we.