I think I’m having a bit of an autistic burnout moment over politics. I’m moving a lot more left over the years but just don’t feel like I can do anything. I have 2 years left on a work contract and it would be killer to lose that job, but also I want to help people in ways where quitting might be the best option. I want to learn about politics and history more, but I also don’t want to stress about it because I don’t feel like it changes things that much. Id like a community that talks about these feelings and I feel like this should be that community for me. Let’s just chat about it.
This is very helpful! Sometimes I get stressed out about not keeping up “enough” with all the local, regional, national, international news…and it’s good to remember that we have access to way more news than our brains can handle sometimes.
oh yeah. this is a defining feature of the world which goes unremarked: there is a general asymmetry in how often people vocalize good things versus bad things, and in how much attention the former gets over the latter. this is true of the news, of social media, of interpersonal relations, and more. in some ways it just sort of follows from how most of us orient things—if something is good, in how many circumstances would you really need to remark on it? but if something’s bad obviously you would! we should confront bad things!
Makes me think this phenomenon has something to do with how humans have evolved. We are tribal in nature so we tend to perk up in response to negative stimuli, while we tend to relax and become irresponsive in comparison to the opposite.
It seems like a lot of the bad we’re seeing in the world is a result of the human condition butting heads with the conditions we have created as a result of this human condition.