My mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community.
But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
It'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) to get back up to speed when elections come around, so I can do my civic duty and vote. Beyond that I don't let it consume my life. I've got stuff to do, and not very much time left to do it.
I have so much trouble deciding on primary elections. There are often 5 primary candidates, and 10 seats to decide upon. And I've found no good tool to help evaluate their policy and record.
I want some sort of score board website that tracks their political and public behaviors towards various policies.
Then I generally go to the candidates individual websites or see what their main talking points are. You don’t always get a sense for everything, but you kind of figure out who they are in general.
From an actual example of a candidate’s official Facebook page in my state, if you see them post something like “how come the MAINSTREAM media isn’t covering the BLACK on WHITE crime?!” you generally don’t need to do much research on them after that.