11 Seconds
The Front Page Hates You
War in the east. A minister lies. House prices up. Liverpool striker sold. Cancer breakthrough. Mandelson files. Henry Nowak. Pensioner freezes. Heatwave coming. Trossard’s wife leaves him. Tax raid on the middle class. A new war. Outrage.
That was the front page. You read it in eleven seconds.
How do you feel?
You don’t know. That’s the answer. You feel everything, which is the same as nothing but something. On the edge of your conscious awareness; you are however aware of a faint electrical hum behind your eyes.
This is what the Telegraph does to you every morning before you’ve finished your tea. The same is true for The Daily Mail. The New Yorker. The Times. The New York Times. The Guardian. The BBC. Not the articles. You don’t read the articles.
The front page is all that’s needed.
Each headline drops a different frequency into your mind. Grief. Angst. Appetite. Dread. Envy. Mild curiosity. And your attention doesn’t move between them like a person walking between rooms. It gets yanked.
Snapped from one to the next before the last one has resolved. And each time it snaps, it leaves a piece of itself behind in your neural wiring.
By the time you close the tab, you are no longer just a single reader.
You are a dozen abandoned half-concerns. None of which you chose. None of which you can do a single thing about. All of which took a cut on the way past, leaving the residue.
The residue is the point.
You close the tab.
That is not a failure of the paper.
The paper is working perfectly.
Every headline competes with the one beside it for the half-second of alarm that makes your eye stop. The page is an auction. The currency is your nervous system.
The winning story is not the one that matters most to your one finite life. It is the one that spikes your nervous template the fastest.
Read this way for a year and something begins to set. You become a creature of the scan.
Skim, spike, move on, forget, and you take that rhythm out of the paper, and you run it on everything.
On books. On your wife or husband talking. On your own quiet mind, when you finally sit down and try to hear it and find only the emotional residue of the headlines still playing behind your eyes hours after you had closed the tab.
The whole time you were reading the world’s front page news, you weren’t reading yours because of ‘the moral duty to be aware of world events’.
You stayed informed about everything.
And missed the small print of your life; the one line that mattered.