I haven't talked seriously about politics on a consistent basis in years. I find it depressing and repetitive, and it isn't good for my mood, therefore not good for my day to day ethic. I have found what a happier person I've become the less I occupy my mind with what is external and the more I engage with what is immediately relevant.
I'll tell a little story. I normally wouldn't powerlevel this hard, but it's all well behind me and I am almost reminded of myself by someone here. The insight might not be wasted.
For a time in my early days, I lived a very sad life, dying by night and rising by day in a spectral existence where I shut myself off from reality and only left my home to do necessary things that kept my 'life' going. One way I would - so to say - exit my reality, was to enter my mind into politics. I would spend hours reading articles, forums, watching obscure documentaries by crackpot career students, and getting deeper and deeper into the unrealistic, fantastical ideologies shared by many an edgy weeb on the internet. I was never decisive or social enough to adopt much of an ideology, and I jumped around a lot, but I was really into it. One day, I decided that I'd had enough. I had gotten to the point where my very soul was telling me to move it or lose it, so I got on. I cleared my mind and reconsidered how I'd been doing things. I'll spare the details, but I essentially started living in reality and focused on fixing my problems. In time, better days came, and now I hardly resemble the person I was then.
Something I retired altogether was my interest in politics beyond keeping generally informed. It served to embitter and disappoint me in a life that was defined by bitterness and disappointment. I would constantly project my own self-loathing into my misanthropically pessimistic views on society. And I would project, just as well, my longing for a better existence onto some political fantasy where all which made me feel insecure was eradicated, and all of my misled, grossly surfeited whims and visions for a perfect world were fulfilled. I dreamt a part of my life away in this political wonderland, pretending to 'care' about 'greater things' and neglecting my loathsome existence. I ignored the fact that while my life was like clay (if only I would sculpt), the world I would dream of would always be but a pipe fantasy which only served as degenerative mental pornography, and that focusing on the latter would only draw me deeper into the hole. And anyways, I would need to do something with my life to have any impact on the world.
I learned, overall, that I as well as most who shared such similarities had not come to our political opinions via logic and reason, we would make our conclusions on emotions and rationalize later to protect our emotional security. What seems right is the rule of the order for such people, not necessarily what is right. And the problem with relying on 'what seems' in the order of politics is that we inevitably bring our own insecurities and inequitable sympathies into our opinions, and because we have more of an emotional stake in how we want things to be, the failure to step away from our emotions and consult logic to begin with will inevitably result in rationalizing emotional whim rather than the cultivation of a rational process of thought which propagates its own whims and tames emotion; that, with alone, you can begin to have philosophy. And only with sound philosophy can you begin to truly have sound politics.
To put it short: you will only be worth listening to when you grow the fuck up.
