 Most people say that 2020 was the worst year of the last decade, and I won't outline all the bad things the media pushed into our feeds forcefully, but we'll only say that our ability to process all the news dumps we are receiving daily soon may be reaching a dangerous critical limit. And I've been doing some research and learned that our brain is indeed an amazing device, possibly the greatest computer we have at our disposal right now. Even if we haven't learned how to use it properly yet, but we do get closer every day. There's research out there telling me that the brain can actually store a lot of information. And comparing it with the storage capacity of a computer, research says that the brain can store up to 2.5 million GB. But the reality is that storage might not be our real problem. The problem is processing power. Imagine that time we wanted to buy a new smartphone and chose power over storage capacity, and the reason why our brain processing power matters and will soon reach a critical point is because our limited ability to perceive, read, process and then come up with a conclusion. And I was thinking about how the start of 2020 felt like a battle to avoid fake news and fake media, with the avalanche of information flooding our brain and also being emotionally taxing. We also forgot about time and space, as being fully immersed in the information stream created by our TVs, radios and the cherry on top, which is the internet, is something really hard to fight against. And if we are making computer analogies, we can go deep into the underground world of hacking and compare this situation with the hacking operation the news is trying to do on our brains and emotional states. Because this really feels like a DDoS attack. And in computing, a DDoS attack stands for Distributed Denial of Service, which is an assault on a computer network or a simple server. The aim of the assault is to disrupt the ongoing operation of that particular system. The attacker does this by flooding the poor target with a constant and steady flow of information traffic until the target breaks and collapses. And coming back to the physical impact in the real world, we can say that media is the hacker who's globally trying to do a DDoS assault operation on our minds and make us collapse and allow them in as well. So what can we do about it? Keeping up with what's happening on the news is becoming harder and harder. Over the years, social media has shortened our attention spans, making us more like golfers. And now the media is leveraging that and sending an avalanche of news out every day, knowing that we are not capable of keeping our focus on a particular piece for long. In the past, a mission to launch someone into space would have kept our news busy for weeks, but nowadays this can be easily conquered by a political scandal or a death, or even a new song. The best way to combat breaking news is by delivering more breaking news. It's flooding, but it's best. And the outcome is that people become overwhelmed on a macro level, with the strong fighting to avoid the news, and the weak yielding to the stream altogether and finally becoming part of it, part of the news machine. Because the weak will also help propagate the news without applying critical thinking to each piece, as the propagator's processing power is probably not enough to help him digest everything he receives. And constantly watching the news makes the user feel more insecure, anxious, stressed out, and even depressed. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. And there's no surprise that subjecting yourself to incessant, heartbreaking headlines and flickering images of surgical masks, busy hospitals, morgues, and crowded parks is pretty damn bad for your mental health, unsurprisingly. And news exhaustion is a relatively new term that has found its place in our mental health manuals, but how can we fight back? First we should be more mindful about how we operate this meat machine we are rolling in called the human body, and also the human mind. And stop being connected all the time and checking our phones while on the toilet or before sleep. And I do understand the concept of fear of missing out, but this is something I think about more like a superpower, not being connected all the time. The second thing you can do is really understand that good news takes time to write. You cannot create a scientific paper filled with resources and accurate data on a daily basis. Hard work takes time and time is a commodity. And if we give ourselves enough time to process and comprehend a piece of news, either a well-crafted article or scientific paper, it is going to be more likely for us to apply critical thinking to it and come up with a conclusion. This will also push us one step closer to the real deal. And with the constant DDoS attack on our minds, even the people who fact check run out of time to do their job. And I kind of miss the good old days where everything we had to pay attention to was the rogue Friday news dumps, i.e. releasing bad news or documents on a Friday afternoon in an attempt to avoid media inspection. Hopefully that the weekend will wash that out, and we can go on with our lives. But now we are getting those every single day. While life goes on, the human's brain adaptability to constant and multiple flows of news will soon require more and more processing power. And while we might have people like Elon Musk with initiatives like Neuralink trying to transform us into superhumans with highly improved cognition and unlimited connectivity, we still need to act on a micro and do our part in trying to limit and change our media and news. Consumption.