Staying Informed and Not Overwhelmed in 2026

Katrin Bennhold, journalist at the New York Times, asked in a newsletter the readers of the New York Times to share their tips for coping with the news:

What a news year 2025 has been. Donald Trump returned to the White House, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza raged, Israel attacked Iran, artificial intelligence was seemingly everywhere and Leo XIV became the first American pope.

All that was part of the reason we started this newsletter, The World. We wanted it to be a guide to understanding the news without feeling overwhelmed. It’s still early days for us, but we hope we’re meeting the challenge. Now, as a new year is about to begin, we want to hear from you. How do you cope with all this news? 

Do you have tips for staying informed about world events without tuning out? Without feeling stunned, swamped or distraught? What’s your mental strategy to combat the overwhelm? We’d love to hear from you.

My feedback to Katrin:

‘In 2025 I decided to stop following social media like Facebook, X and Instagram, deleted alerts form my mobile phone and following the news by reading newspapers, background articles en books. I also spend more time directly interacting with others and become member of a local community of people interested in art and philosophy. This helped improving my ability to reflect on what’s happening worldwide and see this in a broader perspective. Having being online for years did not help me becoming a better person, directly engaging others did.’

There is a lot happening nowadays and the world is in transition without knowing in what direction we are going. We only know things are changing rapidly and the stability of the last 80 years will be replaced by a new world order where big tech and large countries are in the lead. For a lot of people this means they will have no influence on what is happening on the word stage but in the meantime this transition will have impact on their daily life.

The key problem we now encounter is the lack of a moral compass of our leaders. The leadership in Russia, China and the US but also in the big tech companies worldwide is not driven by moral values but transactional and creating economic value for the powerful elite.

Leaders like Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama used to live their lives based on moral values which were an example for all to live by. If we would all live with the values of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi we will have a world where we are all trying to make the best deal for ourself.

2026 will probably be worse than this year, changing the current trend and finding our moral compass back will not be easy and take time.