The Opposite of Urgent

An essay by Chad Schomber

There’s a kind of rot that sets in when the only thing you read is the news. You start to confuse noise with meaning. Think scrolling through a megaphone. Everyone yelling. No one whispering. No silence between the sentences where the truth might’ve stretched out and cracked its back.

I’m not saying don’t read the news. I’m not that stupid. But reading only the news is like eating nothing but salt. After a while, it dries out your brain. Makes you brittle. Everything starts to taste the same. Crisis. Update. Outrage. Forecast. You sit in the glow of it all, jaw tight, eyes darting like you're waiting for a siren.

I tried it for a while. Thought I was staying informed. Thought I was being a responsible participant in this grand, rickety machine of a society. But really, I was just feeding the same hungry part of myself that checks if the stove is off four times before bed. Not out of logic. Out of compulsion.

So I started reading other things. Anything, really. A stained takeout menu. The warning label on a bottle of drain cleaner. A manual for a blender I don’t own. One time I read an obituary for a man I never met and found myself tearing up because he loved plum trees and collected miniature windmills. There was a strange comfort in knowing someone like that had existed. Still might. Somewhere. Even if the news had never once mentioned him.

I read a paperback someone left in a FREE pile at the library. Whole thing smelled like spilled beer and dryer sheets. Plot was nonsense. But there was a sentence on page 143 that felt like it had been written just for me. “He didn’t know where the sound came from, but he turned toward it anyway.” I underlined it with a ballpoint pen that barely worked. That’s the thing about books. They wait for you to notice them. Unlike the news, which kicks your door in and demands attention like a raccoon in your kitchen.

Reading things that aren't the news gives your brain permission to wander. To idle. That’s dangerous, in a good way. That’s when ideas sneak in. When your own thoughts, those ones buried under headlines and hot takes, finally get to stretch their legs and maybe, if you're lucky, take you somewhere.

A few weeks back I found an old instruction booklet in a drawer. From a IKEA chair that broke ten odd years ago. It had diagrams with cheerful arrows and tiny stick men smiling while assembling bolts. I had written “DON’T TRUST PART C” in pencil in the margin. That made me laugh for a solid five minutes. Not because it was hilarious, but because it was so specific. I had fought a war with Part C and lost. And felt strongly enough to warn myself or the next guy. That’s human. That’s a kind of news too, just delivered slower and with more humility.

You can learn a lot from reading things that aren’t designed to alarm you. Things that don’t make you feel like you’ve just missed something urgent. Novels, for instance. Or letters. Or old cookbooks with grease stains where someone clearly got distracted mid-recipe. Or a page from a calendar that never got turned. It’s still September 27th, according to the abandoned desk calendar in a “old” job box.

There’s a rhythm to reading outside the churn. You pick things up. Put them down. No guilt. No alerts. Just words. Just you and whatever lives between the lines. The air between sentences. That’s where the weather lives. The real weather. Not just temperature, but mood. Memory. The fog of a Tuesday afternoon you half-forgot but can still taste.

I once spent a half-hour reading graffiti scratched into the plastic walls of a bathroom stall. It was a whole conversation between strangers, carved letter by letter with whatever dull metal they had on them. Crude, sure. But oddly philosophical. One guy wrote “We are here briefly” and someone replied underneath “Speak for yourself.” It was crude existentialism. But it worked. Still thinking about it.

Reading anything besides the news reminds you that the world isn’t only what’s happening now. It’s also what happened, and what might. It’s the in-between. The paused moments. The scattered crumbs of story that don’t scream, they just... sit there. Waiting for someone curious enough to look twice.

News asks you to react. Everything else asks you to notice. And when you start noticing again, the world feels less like it’s closing in and more like it’s opening up. Slowly. Patiently. Like a stubborn jar lid that finally gives.

So yeah. Read the news. Then read the back of a cereal box. Read a stranger’s handwriting on a forgotten envelope. Read an old poem. A train schedule. The inside of a matchbook. Doesn’t matter what. Just let your brain touch something that isn’t trying to sell you fear.

The world is still full of quiet sentences. No breaking news. Just little truths, tucked into unexpected places. Waiting for someone to read them like they matter.