Over the last 12 months, if you’re like me, you’ve slowly seen your Facebook feed transforms itself into a river of feel-good garbage posts and trashy news report about drunken mayors and Hollywood stars mug shots. The Facebook dream of “if the news is important, it will find me” has slowly dissolved into the equivalent of the high-calorie, low nutrition meal. Growing frustrated, I have to admit thinking about shutting down my Facebook account many times but have not done it. I still find value with the real-time connections I have with my friends and acquaintances but I keep wondering why people feel the need to share worthless (in my opinion) content. Last week, the Philosopher’s Mail quietly launched and I finally started getting some answers to those questions.

Described as “a new media outlet rooted in popular interests, sensibilities and inclinations of the day – but that tries to read and caption the news with an eye to traditional central philosophical concerns – for compassion, truth, justice, complexity, calm, empathy and wisdom.”, the Philosopher’s Mail is a mash-up of typical tabloid-style newspaper articles with deep philosophical insights you can find… well, that you usually don’t find anywhere!

Led by Alain de Botton (one of my favorite young philosophers) on the editorial team, each article starts with a very mundane or typical daily news but ends up with deep insights into why we tend to focus on that news. Some examples:

In “Emma Watson on Caribbean holiday helps us to find love“, we start with paparazzi photos of starlet Emma Watson with her rugby-man boyfriend and we end up with a lesson in “tenderness and appreciation”.

In “Simon Cowell, on holiday in Barbados, proves that suffering is part of the human condition“, starting with pictures of Simon Cowell on vacation in Barbados,  we now understand he “is one of the earth’s perfect examples of a philosophical experiment about the role of money in a fulfilled life”.

Beautifully written, the Philosopher’s Mail
i) helps us understand why we’re attracted to trashy news
ii) creates meaning where we thought there wasn’t any
iii) helps us forgive ourselves and our friends for sharing these kinds of trashy articles.

Even though I still see as many trashy articles in my Facebook feed, I’m now much less frustrated by the situation. If only because of that, the Philosopher’s Mail is probably one of the best things that happened to the Internet in a long long time.