To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must t... — Aleister Crowley

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

Author: Aleister Crowley

Insight: It's easy to dismiss this as pretentious—the quote of someone who thinks ordinary news is beneath them. But there's something genuinely useful buried here: the idea that attention is finite, and we're constantly choosing what not to read. Every hour spent scrolling headlines is an hour not spent on something that actually changes how you think. The real sting isn't about newspapers specifically. It's about the automatic, low-resistance content that fills every gap in your day. We're drowning in material designed to be consumed quickly and forgotten just as fast. A news app notification, a trending video, something that feels urgent but dissolves the moment you look away. The friction for this stuff is so low that we often don't realize we're choosing it over the harder, slower reading that actually builds something in your mind. The tricky part is that some regular news matters—you probably should know what's happening in the world. The real discipline isn't abstinence; it's being honest about the difference between news that's genuinely important and the endless scroll that just feels like staying informed. That takes more willpower than just refusing to read anything current, which is perhaps why Crowley's point still needles us today.