More and more people are tuning the news out: 'Now I don't have that anxiety

My social circle has shrank to almost nothing, and I go to work and pursue my hobbies. It's not clear to me that knowing about world or political events has much impact. To the extent that I'm well informed, it mostly just allows me to have political conversations in my head, with no one, sometimes my wife, and very occasionally a fried or two. And there's no reason to think that those political conversations are doing anything positive for the relationships. (I don't lean into politics with people since it can be so divisive, but if people are so inclined, it can be fun intellectually.

I don't generally feel like there's much in the news that either discusses anything I care about. Or, to the extent that issues I care about are discussed, they come at it from such a strange angle that the discourse is mostly frustrating, or disappointing. (quick example, I heard a piece on NPR about how people are turning to LLMs for therapy. The commentator's solution? We NEED robust LLMs that are trained in psychology datasets and have the right guardrails for psychology.) For the rest of the HN crowd, imagine any news story from a mainstream outlet about issues of privacy or security. The commentary is completely worthless, except perhaps for informing you about where some of the general public may be on the issue.

In other words, for me personally, it's not sure that following politics has very much real utility value. I can just research a candidate when I go to vote. The only direct referendums I can vote on are town-level and have nothing to do with national matters. I donate to a few causes I like, and otherwise I have effectively zero say in how these things turn out. This means I'd be far better off reading a book, doing chores, or thinking about how I can improve the quality of my life than paying attention to the news whatsoever.

I agree that there's this intense reality of powerlessness that makes wasting time on anything that isn't personally interesting pointless. And that journalists are atrocious and pushing narratives and their own careers nowadays (not that I should have expected it to ever have been different) but it's a difficult thing to unsee--that the "news" is being driven by power and agendas and is entirely unreliable. And you're right voting is all the control we ultimately have but what even is that. I live in a state that is gerrymandered to hell to ensure supermajority, where even the partisan State Supreme court has repeatedly declared the maps the Legislature and Governor approves to be un(state)constitutional and... there's nothing that anyone can do about it.

But even if that wasn't the case how can you research candidate positions without knowing the political context you want them to represent you within? And even then frankly they've all proved themselves to be spineless liars who say anything to get elected and onto the graft money train so who gives a shit. So then you're left just electing people based on character ethics optics. I really don't know what the answer is, but the nationalization of everything seems extremely disenfranchising. Every little thing becomes a referendum about some national topic and hyperpolarized purity test. Just Ugh. Throw everyone out.

>And you're right voting is all the control we ultimately have

I don't fully agree; there other paths, but they involve becoming _more_ politically active; calling & writing your congressman, joining political movements, volunteering, canvasing, etc. I think my argument is that if you're just sitting at home and getting outraged -- but not willing to spend the real time and effort to do the actual work of supporting a political cause, then your outage has no value in your life.

In other words, it's much more about tying your stress and outage to real, practical action. Most of us are just scrolling and fretting, but not doing anything. We either need to do real, practical things, or stop getting strung out for no reason.

>But even if that wasn't the case how can you research candidate positions without knowing the political context you want them to represent you within?

This is true, but you can just do a couple of days of research when it's time to vote. Given how representative democracy works, a candidate's stated view is sort of only going to directionally affect things, and I don't need expert-level knowledge to pick between two candidates. My decision for who to vote for just never requires much real precision.

I don't want to make this too political, but suppose that Gavin Newsom and J.D. Vance were the next candidates for president. Would I really need to pay close attention to politics for the next few years to figure out which one of them I considered to be the 'least bad' option? To my point above, that decision just does not have a lot of precision with regard to my views, and does not require any real expertise on my end. I could 100% check out between now and then, review the political platforms for each candidate (and maybe a few opinion pieces) over an afternoon, and be informed _enough_ to make a decision.

Again, voting is sort of the "bare minimum" when it comes to political participation. So I'm definitely not arguing that people should not become more involved; only that we should carefully consider whether our involvement is tied to any real positive outcomes. (and that's both personally, but also politically. A great deal of personal stress could potentially be a great tradeoff for a really important political outcome.)

I don't know. Personally I'm just extremely disillusioned about both parties so even picking between Vance and Newsom doesn't even registe as picking the best of two evils. They both seem useless and out of touch with reality.

To be fair, I know the least about Newsom, having never lived anywhere near California and well California doesn't exactly have any better a reputation than Florida or Texas do in my book. So I'll have to tune in late 2027 if he gets the nod. Assuming Democrats survive 2026 because frankly the party is at death's door and I don't know how Newsom is new growth. We already rejected one Californian.