The only ethical path is to be more selective. Storytelling in the public sphere, in its best form, is like an ongoing conversation that has no end in sight. Ask yourself: what conversations matter to you? Which are relevant to your life, and which are relevant to your interests? After figuring that out, be stricter about excluding stories that fall outside of those conversations. Be selective about the publications you read regularly, and seek to go deeper rather than broader in the conversations you follow. There’s only so much you can do while still remaining online—being on social media means getting a lot of stuff outside the bounds of what you want to pay attention to. But improvement in this area is possible. Clay Johnson has a lot of great thoughts on this in his book The Information Diet.

Most importantly, let go of any pretense of telescopic morality. It will only hold you back from the things that really matter, the things on which you can make a difference and for which you have the most context on which to deliberate.