Fairy Tales # 3: A Man Who Fed on the News

A man in a certain town decided not to waste time on food and began to feed on the news.

In the morning he ate the headlines, at lunch the comments under the headlines, and in the evening he finished off whatever someone had generated overnight. He filled up fast. Half an hour later he was hungry again.

A month later he grew an anxiety. A small one, but noticeable. He carried it around with him like a briefcase.

Two months later he began to understand other people’s affairs better than his own. He knew who had quarrelled with whom in another country, but forgot why he had left the house.

After three months he discovered that everyone around him was living better than he was. It was written everywhere, and he believed it. Though everyone around him was reading the same thing and thinking the same about him.

One day a neighbour brought him bread and a book. Ordinary bread and an ordinary book. The man tried them and was surprised: after the bread he didn’t want more bread, and after the book a thought appeared in his head that was his own. He turned it over and put it on a shelf.

Since then he has eaten bread and read a book. The news he still eats now and then, but like sunflower seeds, not like lunch.

That’s all. There is no moral here.

Although no, there is one: we fill up with something all the same. Every day. So the question is not “with something or with nothing”, but simply, with what.

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The subtext. Buddhist thought: attention is food, and the mind becomes what it eats. News fills you quickly and not for long while the anxiety grows; bread and a book return you to your own thought. This is sometimes called mindful consumption: watching what enters the mind as carefully as what enters the mouth. Skip your feed once today and notice what fills the pause.