The best way to know if something happened is to talk to your neighbors about your neighbors. This is called gossip—or, if you are respectable, local news. When the conversation begins to fade, widen the circle and talk about other people’s neighbors in other people’s neighborhoods: people that have no impact on your day-to-day but still might have some interest for the sake of keeping this neighborly conversation going.

Once, local news that rippled beyond its immediate neighborhood to find a national audience was only disseminated by legitimate, reliable news sources, like the NY Times. Now, local news is disseminated by neighbors themselves, via twitter. The feed is the town square.

For ordinary people living in their own neighborhoods and minding their own business, spare time only comes in the margins—those moments between having a fruitful and busy personal life. In these spare moments when a personal, ordinary thought is no longer sufficiently entertaining, many of us instinctively reach for a hit of media—an image, a video, a tweet. Not to learn something, but to feel something.

In those spare moments and against my better judgement I don’t consume news, local or otherwise, to simply “stay informed.” I consume news to feel outrage. I then use that outrage to inform my neighbors that they are wrong.

“Staying informed” is a phrase invented by parents and teachers to guilt teenagers into developing unnecessary opinions about events that hold no relevance outside their immediate lives. It is an attempt to make the teenager “worldly.” Now, local news is poisoned with bias, and opinions formed by consumption divides neighbors, replacing lived responsibility with moralistic performance. Worse, they make social situations awkward. The news cycle feeds on the boredom of ordinary people by luring them with a cause for justice.

Frankly, these people would be better off watching the playoffs.

My compromise is self-imposed limitation. “Staying informed” means reading occasional headlines, and using my local library for access to twitter—or whatever it’s called—once a week. I cannot control myself otherwise. The feed is engineered to erode restraint.

The local library is where I saw that viral investigative Nick Shirley video in my feed, and I watched it both to test my attention span and the quality of the reporting. The video was 42 minutes in length, but I got the message after 15 uninterrupted minutes: Somali immigrants have been operating empty daycares in Minneapolis, knowingly funded entirely by the Minnesota State Government, and the American taxpayer. The video exposed a conspiracy without a hint of sophistication. Furthermore, it was only possible to be this stupid because the government was complicit. The investigation conducted in the video was simple as knocking on the daycare’s locked doors during operating hours. When caught, Somalis immigrants aggressively told the reporters to leave.

No surprises there.

Outrage achieved and opinions vindicated, I moved on with my life with gratitude that my neighbors were not Somali pirates aided by corrupt state officials.

By now, the video is weeks old and Nick Shirley (the kid who made the video) is an e-celebrity on the conservative podcast circuit. Everyone who has seen the video agrees that fraud is objectively bad and should be punished lawfully. The video speaks for itself, and I could contribute nothing more besides my personal experience when working with Somalis in social services, which is neither interesting or relevant.

I went back to whatever is going on in my life, until the legitimate news media started talking about it in the headlines I sometimes read.

A domino effect occurred in the background of my life: Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. Trump announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would descend onto Minneapolis to arrest illegals, and paid anti-ICE protestors/agitators met them to stand in the way. The protestors weren’t exactly peaceful about it. When an ICE agent aggressively demanded a lesbian protestor “get out of the fucking vehicle” impeding an ICE raid, she instead stepped on the gas pedal and he fired three shots into her face, killing her.

I scrolled for longer than I should have last Saturday, and watched a couple clips of the police body cam footage and some ring doorbells security footage, and honestly couldn’t keep up with what happened. The echo chamber told me what they thought in between tweets about the playoffs. Apparently a lot of discourse was happening on twitter while I was busily living my life.

My echo chamber supported the ICE agent. Any factoids I have about the incident are from the tweets from my echo chamber, and the slowed down footage of the ICE agent’s body cam. Seemed pretty cut and dry: don’t impede federal raids and you won’t get shot in the face.

I tried to keep a distance, but the feed was relentless. My echo chamber posted videos of politicians lying about the incident, and liberals crying and calling her a poet—as if the raid occurred at an open mic. It didn’t. Stop lying. She wasn’t innocent. She got was she didn’t know she was asking for because she was too privileged to think anything bad could result from her behavior. And no Somalis shed a tear.

I had no choice but to have an opinion on something avoidable that happened in a neighborhood 800 miles away.

I fell into the trap.

Now that I am informed of national news that is not a good conversation, or even topic for debate, I really hope the Bills beat the Broncos this Saturday night!