My father had a simple ritual. At 6 a.m., he would read the New York Post and Daily News cover to cover. At 6 p.m., he tuned into the evening news — an hour of straightforward reporting, not commentary.

He formed his own opinions, and then he moved on. The news didn’t dominate company picnics or poker nights with the neighbors. A staunch Republican, he didn’t shun his Democratic relatives in Scranton. He stayed informed without being consumed.

That balance feels almost quaint today.

Instead of a daily digest, Americans now live inside a 24/7 outrage machine. We spend an average of two hours and 24 minutes on social media every day, check our phones 159 times a day and will collectively log 4 trillion hours online this year. Nearly half of us say we now watch more user-generated content than TV or streaming. Information is available and, quite frankly, unavoidable.

The results are corrosive. Every story is framed as existential, and every disagreement is a loyalty test. Unlike my father’s poker table, where the stakes were bragging rights and a few bucks, today’s debates play out before an invisible audience of strangers in all caps and fury.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Dad didn’t have to choose between competing realities. Everyone argued from the same facts. Today, news is no longer a shared resource but a marketplace of outrage: 24-hour cable channels fighting for loyalty and algorithms on Facebook, X and TikTok feeding us headlines designed to reinforce what we already believe. It feels like information, but it’s really affirmation. And the more affirmation we consume, the less empathy we extend.

That distortion has real-world costs. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox urged Americans to “log off, turn off, touch grass. Hug a family member.” He said it after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated and the U.S. recorded its 45th school shooting of the year. The juxtaposition was hard to miss: Online talk of civil war collides with headlines of real violence. And yet, in the communities where we actually live, most Americans behave very differently than our feeds would suggest.

At a Mets game I attended this summer, thousands of fans of every background and political persuasion stood together to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” In my neighborhood, many are MAGA supporters. We don’t pretend otherwise, but our daily conversations are about work, tennis, children, and who’s bringing dessert to the holiday party. When my husband had COVID-19, one of those neighbors — a Donald Trump voter — was the first to text and check in. When my mother-in-law was sick, another ran down to sit with her while we were out. These are not the actions of enemies on the brink of civil war.

That disconnect — between the civility of daily life and the hostility of digital life — tells us more about warped incentives than it does about the character of the country. Social media platforms don’t profit when we feel at ease with one another. They profit when we fight.

Of course, none of this is an argument for ignorance. Democracy requires informed citizens, and there are moments when it is irresponsible to look away. But being informed is not the same thing as being consumed. And right now, we are confusing one for the other.

So what’s the alternative? I call it the 6 o’clock rule — my father’s discipline, adapted for a digital age:

Time-box your news. Get what you need once or twice a day. No alerts. No midnight doomscroll.

Cross-check. Read one outlet you’re inclined to agree with, one you’re not and one that gives you just the facts.

No comments. Learn; don’t perform. Resist the temptation to treat every headline as a personal referendum.

Skip the algorithm. Buy a local newspaper. Algorithms reward outrage. A print paper, or even its website, forces you outside your echo chamber.

Model it for your kids. Children learn media habits by imitation. Set shared house rules (no screens at meals, charge phones outside bedrooms) and narrate your own cross-checking so they can copy it.

It sounds small, but it’s not. After a month of following this rule, my screen time was down by a third. I still knew what mattered, but I also got back into reading for fun, started biking and, ironically, felt more informed and more hopeful.

Democracy depends on informed citizens, not exhausted ones. We need the discipline to step back if we want a country that looks more like our neighborhoods than our newsfeeds. The 6 o’clock rule is a good place to start.

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Kellie Walenciak is the chief of global marketing and communications for Televerde.

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