Most of the time I tend to get sad when I see the news. For a long time I viewed news as entertainment. News outlets inflate stories to have a few more eyeballs. The consequences of their actions is outrage. I wanted to be informed and entertained. I did not leave. I decided to watch more of them and from other countries.
My thesis was that people outside of my country can be more objective of what happens inside. They are a third party. They should be able to tell fact from fiction.
I gravitated to see the world from another perspective. Not my own or my cultural view on topics. As a side product, the news that happened away from me seemed more like a story. A narrative that is fun to watch and easy to keep track of.
Watching these new “stories” changed my news consumption and I did not want any of my depressing local stories. I wanted news from other places.
I realized that I could filter the news that I viewed and I could get only news from other places.
This new media consumption hobby made me look informed because I was the only one talking about the different topics that impacted the world. I knew the natural and political disasters of a lot of countries but my own. I could have an opinion about US politics. But for my country, I could only tell you the name of the current president.
I realized media cycles have other purposes. They are informed about the news but they talk a lot about their culture. I was learning about holidays, museums and important cultural figures.
I got tired of only learning about countries from news sites. So I decided to subscribe on Youtube to people from other countries and understand more of their views. I was living in Mexico but spending four to ten hours a day in other places. With the internet I could travel, and I wanted to explore.
I could go anywhere in the world. Even if I was not getting the entire picture. When you get there, you understand these people and how they express the views of the country they live in.
All of this came with a price. The cost of getting all of this new entertainment and culture became apparent in the lack of my knowledge of my own place.
This gave me a tiny cultural crisis. I felt like I did not belong anywhere. But I realized that it was not important. Because I had become something new that maybe people back in the day with books could experience it. I felt like a cultural nobody.
I decided to quit. Viewing other countries and cultures this way is not sustainable. I am no longer receiving news from other countries, and I stopped watching the news on my own. I decided to go outside and experience the country I live in by going outside.