In Praise of Ignoring

So, I don’t know whether or not you’ve noticed it, but the world is in kind of a mess right now, not that that’s anything new. It’s starting to feel like the idea of ignorance being bliss is quite a wise philosophy to adopt, and if you agree, you’ve come to the right place.

You may be familiar with the concept of willful ignorance, which has a couple of different meaning or implications depending on the context, but which can generally be considered to be a not good thing. We’re not advocates of willful ignorance here at the Gazette…but allow me to suggest a different approach that might sound similar but really isn’t: critical ignoring.

I first learned about this term from an article published early this year in the Wall Street Journal. It’s an interesting concept, and possibly a bit counterintuitive — one key component is the importance of realizing that critical thinking can become a trap in the current age of nonstop “information” — but here’s the argument for it in a nutshell:

…it’s up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit. In an age in which information on the internet is so abundant and so low-quality that it’s essentially noise, job number one is to fight our evolutionary instinct to absorb all available information, and instead filter out unreliable sources and bad data. [Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2026; Christopher Mims, author]

Proponents of critical ignoring want to remind us that our attention is a scarce resource, and we should attempt to be good stewards of that resource, i.e. focus on what’s really important, and ignore what isn’t regardless of how enticing external forces make it seem. Also, as I wrote at the top of the page, ignoring isn’t the same thing as ignorance.

So here’s where I’m going with this. Develop some critical ignoring skills — start with the talking heads on TV, regardless of their political leanings — and go outside to see some really cool stuff that you may have never before focused on. You’ll be surprised at how a little curiosity about your surroundings can push a whole internet/airwaves full of noise into the background. As my good friend, Sam, and I often tell each other, all you have to do is look (AYHTDIL).