The siren went off one afternoon and I picked up my phone.

I did not go looking for news. I have never gone looking for news. But my phone was already full of it before I unlocked it.

The siren lasted one minute. It stayed in my head for weeks.

Stage one. I never sought it. It arrived anyway.

I had been switching back and forth between a dumb phone and a smart one for months. The dumb phone for focus, the smart one when I actually needed it. And every single time I switched back, the whole thing was waiting for me.

My mother has a WhatsApp forwarding operation that would embarrass every fake news account on Instagram. Voice notes. Screenshots. Videos with someone shouting over them. A photo of a text message that somebody else screenshotted from a group nobody can identify. All of it arriving faster than the official announcements.

Then the family groups and the friend groups. I am in almost none of them, which did not help, because the few I am in were loud enough for all of them. Then Instagram and YouTube, which decided that what I needed between a recipe and a car review was thirty seconds of a man explaining regional strategy with a map behind him.

And when I was on the dumb phone and none of that could reach me, there was still my mother’s house.

She sits me down next to her, turns the screen towards me, and starts playing. To educate me, as she says. There is no version of that visit where I leave uneducated.

Then Thursday. The zwara. Where every single person had a theory, a source, and a friend who works somewhere sensitive.

I did not subscribe to any of this. I did not open a news site once. It came through the door on its own and sat down.

And I took all of it in. Every forward. Every screenshot. Every voice note that started with “الله يستر” and ran four minutes.

I had more facts in my head than I have ever had about anything. And I could not do a single thing with any of it. My work stopped. My focus was gone.

Stage two. The state got quieter. Everyone else did not.

Then the official approach changed. Fewer details. Sirens only when there was a real reason.

The information coming from the government became disciplined. Nothing else did.

You would think that made things better. It made them worse. The moment the official updates thinned out, the gap filled with speculation. Fewer facts, more theories. My mother’s forwards doubled. The education sessions at her house got longer. Thursday became a full editorial meeting.

And here is what I noticed. Nobody was forcing me to open a forwarded voice note.

But I opened every one. Because it was there. Because someone had sent it to me personally. Because a new possibility had been raised and I felt I should at least consider it.

Nothing was compelling me except the fear that somewhere, someone knew something I did not.

And that someone was usually my mother.

Stage three. I turned everything off.

I stopped switching. The dumb phone stayed.

But that only closes one door, and by then I knew it. So I made the laptop dumb too. No email. No websites. No YouTube. No news. No television. If it could deliver information from outside this house, I closed it.

For the first time, the siren only sounded when there was a siren.

And then I worked. I finished things. I could sit with one task long enough to complete it. I slept properly.

There was one gap in the system.

My mother is not a website. You cannot block her. She has no settings menu. She noticed within a day and a half that I had gone quiet and simply escalated to calling.

So the news still reached me. It just arrived once a day, with commentary, from a woman who has never said “sources suggest” when she could say “I am telling you what happened.”

Honestly, more efficient than everything I switched off. Same information, one phone call. And unlike the analysts, she never predicts anything, because she already knows exactly how it will turn out.

But that was when I understood the whole thing.

Stage three is the correct one. Not because I prefer it. Because it is the right arrangement. The state publishes what people need in order to act, and stops. The person takes what concerns him, and stops. When both sides do that, you get someone who is safe, calm, and able to work.

Any other combination costs you at least one of those three.

Plato said this two thousand years ago.

In The Republic he imagines a just city divided into three groups: the people who produce, the people who protect, and the people who govern.

Then he says the city is like a person. Inside each of us there is appetite, which wants things. Emotion, which reacts. And reason, which decides. The city works when reason governs. The person works the same way.

But the part that matters here is what he says about stories.

Plato did not think stories were harmless entertainment. He believed they enter the mind, stir the emotions, form habits, and shape character. So he argued that the stories given to children should be supervised. Stories that produce fear, panic, or admiration for the wrong things kept out. Stories that build courage and discipline allowed in.

He was not talking about WhatsApp. But the question is the same one.

What happens to a person when every warning, rumour, and theory is allowed in without limit?

I know the answer, because I lived it for a few months. And so people around me that consumed it religiously.

Information does not sit outside you as neutral knowledge. It enters. It creates fear. It changes what you do with your day. Whatever you consume repeatedly ends up helping to govern you.

In stage one, everything was let out and I let everything in. In stage two, the state became careful and I did not. In stage three, I finally decided what was allowed through the door.

That is the useful part of Plato. Not the ideal city. Just this: every one of us is already governing a small republic, and it is our attention.

Inside it, appetite wants one more update. Fear wants one more warning. Curiosity wants one more explanation. Reason is supposed to decide what gets in.

The question is not only whether something is true. It is whether knowing it does anything.

Will it change something I have to do? Will it protect someone? Or will it just occupy the hours where work, family, and ordinary life were supposed to happen?

And the truth is I already knew this.

I did not discover it during those weeks. This is how I have always operated when I was at my best. The most productive versions of me were the versions with the fewest inputs. Every good stretch of work I have ever had came from a period where I was not consuming much of anything.

I knew the rule. I just let go of it.

One forward led to another. One warning became a whole day of attention it did not deserve.

I did not need a new philosophy. I needed to go back to something I already believed and had stopped practising.

Stay informed when the information asks you to do something. And do not hand your mind over to events you have neither responsibility for nor control over.

Enough.

Except my mother’s briefing. There is no schedule. There is no warning. There is only the briefing.