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To follow the news, or to avoid the news, that is the question; whether one has a duty to engage with mankind's inhumanity to man, or whether there is no point in plunging oneself into despair by staying informed about daily horrors and atrocities we are powerless to prevent.

The news is presently so sickening that those of us who are news-addicted understand and envy the growing legions of folk who successfully observe the sanity-saving, despair-avoiding practice of news avoidance.

"Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June 2025," The Guardian has reported. .

"Forty per cent of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29 per cent in 2017."

And everywhere the main reason the surveyed gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that they found the news unsettlingly nightmarish, that it gave information they, the surveyed, could do nothing with.

Your columnist has had a long, news-mongering working life in journalism and so often lacks the willpower to ignore news. News tempts me in the ways that all vile temptations tempt the weak-willed. And so the phenomenon of news avoidance is an occasional theme of this column.

I return to it today and not only because today's news (especially of Trumpian wars and of the USA's accelerating descent into fascism) is so grotesque. My other reason is that a new idea about us and our news-consumption has just alighted in my inbox. This is column of ideas, not of news, which is why so many of you, dear readers, instinctively turn first to it when you open this otherwise distressingly news-obsessed newspaper.

In his piece "Main Character Syndrome" for Paris Review, Julian Castronovo plays with the idea that the distress we suffer when we follow the news has to do with how insignificant it makes us feel.

"I have begun to suspect that I am not the main character," he agonises.

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"I spend my days watching history unfold on the screen of my phone. History, of course, is a story; a narrative sequence of causes and effects. Right now it seems to be a story about intolerable violence, something from which I am, I know, profoundly remote ... This is not very protagonistic of me. Main characters, surely, do not feel the world to be distant and bewildering in its senseless horror. Main characters, after all, drive the plot."

Castronovo goes on, exquisitely, to expand this idea. He notices with envy how Kamala Harris is so protagonistically the main character in her just-published 107 Days. It is her memoir all about her 2024 presidential campaign (in which she lost to Donald Trump, certainly his own main character) but is actually, utterly, all about herself, Castronovo shows. He wishes he could star in his own life as fully, glitteringly, action-dominatingly as Harris does in hers.

Those of you, dear readers, who subscribe to this column's and Socrates' motto that "The unexamined life is not worth living" might like to use Castronovo's idea for some self-examining. What if some of your seething dislike of some always-in-the-news international and national public figures (Australian public figures this columnist seethingly dislikes include Anthony Albanese, Angus Taylor, Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce) has to do with their being central characters in the world's drama/history while you are an unimportant, media-ignored nobody?

Alert readers will have noticed how today's column opens with a respectful parody of Hamlet's soliloquy in Shakespeare's Hamlet. This has been Oscar week and the speech looms large, spoken by Paul Mescal as a Hamlet-like Will Shakespeare, in the much-discussed, Oscar-nominated movie Hamnet.

But also, thinking about this week's column's theme of whether to follow or to deliberately not follow the news, I found myself comparing this modern dilemma with the very one the tormented Prince of Denmark thinks aloud about.

Everyone except the occasional exceptional Shakespeare scholar thinks, mistakenly, that the great soliloquy is about whether or not to commit suicide. Hamnet the movie makes this mistake, with a tormented Will doing his to-be-or-not-to-be stuff perched on a brink above the deathly Thames.

In fact, and as Shakespeare authority (and wit) Robert N Watson has just explained, discussing Hamnet the movie in the latest Los Angeles Review of Books (see his "To Be, or Not to Be, Misunderstood"), the prince is not having suicidal thoughts at all.

Shakespeare's first audiences easily understood this because words in the soliloquy (and especially the word "suffer") meant things to them they no longer mean to us.

Watson explains Hamlet is not discussing a stark life or death choice. Rather he, Hamlet, is saying something like "Should I give my life to the important but seemingly impossible task of saving our world from everything that's wrong with it, or should I instead focus on trying to carve out a decent little life for myself and my family, and try not to be angry and miserable in the time I have here?"

See where I've gone with this, readers? The probing question the soliloquising Hamlet asks himself is eerily like the question we ask ourselves when we agonise over whether to follow, or not to follow the news.

Exit the columnist, pursued by a kelpie.

Ian Warden is a regular contributor.

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