Why I finally started following the news again after 20 years.

For 20 years I’ve stayed away from the news. At first it was by force, because I was travelling in Asia in times long before internet was omnipresent, when finding a newspaper in a language I could read was rare, and internet-cafés were sparse.

During my travels I started volunteering on remote farms or in small villages, staying with a local family or renting a simple house. I haven’t lived in a house with TV for almost 20 years now.

By default, I stopped keeping up with the news, and pretty soon I was completely out of the habit of trying to find out what’s going on in the world.

I actually found it a relief to not follow the news. I had more time to do other things, and I felt over-all happier. News is mostly bad news, and it always makes me feel upset, sad, angry, powerless, frustrated or shocked. It is also mostly news that I cannot do much about, since it happens far from where I live, now already for 13 years on this tiny speck of an island in the Caribbean Sea.

For years of my life I had let the news drain my energy, when I was younger. Once I discovered how much better I felt when I didn’t know all that news, without ever feeling that not knowing what’s going on in the world threatened my well-being or my life, I made it a point of not keeping up with it, period.

When on April 19 of this year peaceful protests against a change in the social security system here in Nicaragua resulted in hundreds of injured and dozens of dead people thanks to police violence, I was still in the “I don’t want to know this”-mode. I didn’t look up any news online, only listened with half an ear to the reports of a friend who is a news-addict, and was constantly scouring the internet for the latest updates.

The story about a journalist being shot through the head by a police bullet while doing a Facebook-live video himself, was shocking enough, but I didn’t try and find it after my friend told me about it.

I was still of the opinion that nothing would change for the better when I’d watch that video or get updated on all the news. I cannot revive the man, and I cannot change the government either.

I had to read back through my journal, to find out that it took me 5 days before I even mentioned the upheaval happening on the mainland in my daily musings.

That day we had had a little dinner party, and talked about the situation in a very light way. On our island we had literally experienced zero impact so far. We didn’t really feel connected to the dire reality of Nicaraguan people on the mainland dying for their democratic rights, yet.

We speculated about how soon the island would run out of fuel for the town generator, which would leave us without electricity. We joked about the many dinner parties we would have, to finish off all the food that would be soon rotting in the freezers of the restaurants, starting at our friend’s place, which has the best food on the island.

We congratulated ourselves for living on this little island, far removed from the violence. We could even see ourselves fleeing on a boat, to Costa Rica or the island of San Andres, Colombia, both quite close; joking — again — about becoming boat refugees. We decided we were sitting in the right spot, and moved on to the next dinner-topic.

Such was our disconnection from reality, in those first few days, that we made light of it all.