How Politics Hijacks Sanity and Mental Clarity
- Feb 13
- 4 min read
It seems to be very difficult to avoid politics lately, even without talking about social media and news, every big event seems to become politicized and makes it's way into everyday conversation. We wanted to discuss how we approach this problem post the Super Bowl Halftime Show with Bad Bunny. 125 million Americans watched the Super Bowl live, and of course being a spectacle of American culture pretty much everyone, including non-sports people like us, know about it.
Without getting into the halftime fiasco, the main point is that politics is something that will hijack your attention if you're not extremely intentional about how you want to direct your attention. And from our perspective, keeping your sanity in a world with so much information comes down to being extremely intentional about directing your attention to the right things.
What are the "right things" to direct your attention to? Well, first you have to think about your goals.
What's Important?
What's important is determined by what you care about, and what you can do.
What matters to us? We want to be happy, safe, and live meaningful lives. We want to increase the "good" things in our lives, and minimize the "bad". That makes sense!
What can we do about it? That depends on our circumstances. We can all control our individual actions, have varying degrees of influence over others, and resources to exert influence on the world.
So what's important? The things that are directly relevant to what you can do about the things you care about.
Okay, that makes sense. So the main question that remains is...what is good?
What's Good?
This is the big question that seems to be at the heart of our political problem in the developed world. Now that humans aren't so much worried about survival, we need to develop a framework of meaning, identity and how we define good. These are all the same question in many ways. Our identity ultimately stems from our personal identification of what is good. How you value yourself is a reflection of what you value in the world. And what you value for the world is ultimately a reflection of what you believe is valuable for everyone or in other words, "good" for everyone.
This is the big question, because we now have so much freedom with what to do with our lives, and even more freedom in how we identify with our lives.
A cashier at a local grocery store has so many options for what information to expose themselves to online, can build relationships with anyone around the world, purchase products that can be shipped from all around the world, etc. But they can also choose from an immense number of ways to frame how they see the purpose of their life. They could view their purpose as simply to provide for their family, or that they are fighting for the worlds most pressing injustices.
The scary part is that there is a huge pull towards framing our lives through a more heroic, exciting narrative. There are so many enticing narratives that allow us to feel powerful, special, essential, valuable, and/or morally superior. This is the danger of our predicament.
Politics today seems to not be about legislation. Real conversations about real policy are rare in our modern political landscape. Real conversation about truly understanding the complexities of human behavior, the role of government, how details around policy and legal process shape incentives, understanding the potential negative externalities of technical implementations, etc. These practical conversations are not happening in a practical manner. Because politics today isn't practical, it's morally charged because the biggest problem we are facing is a search for identity, a search for meaning, and ultimately a search for good.
The Search for Good
In order to make decisions in our lives we have implicit understandings of what we believe to be good. However, now social media, news, random things we hear from the people around us, the authority figures in our lives, etc. all have so much information and opinions to give you about what is "really" good and what you should really be doing with your life. To allow all this into your head without a way of critically evaluating it is a way to drive yourself insane.
To allow the whims and selfish motivations of news stations, political figures, and influencers determine the information guiding your beliefs is another way to, again, drive yourself insane. If you think about it, the vast majority of the information on news stations and social media is not important. Why? Because the vast majority of it is not directly relevant to what you can control.
It seems that many today are so overwhelmed by the current of new information that is not important and sensationalized with no helpful framing to connect back to your real responsibilities and relationships that we lose any grounding to a helpful framework of what is actually good, and what we should actually strive for.
Now, I won't pretend I have a perfect answer for what that framework should be. I think that is a group project for humanity to continuously strive for a better understanding of the answer to this question. However, I have not found the whole mess and cultural conversation or however you want to characterize politics to be helping us at all in this regard. It think it has been a big distraction and has muddied the water so much around what it is that we're even trying to do here.
Which is why I think that at the end of the day I would like to identify with the camp of "aren't there more important things to think about?" The camp that would rather pay attention to the important people in our lives that we can actually impact with our actions. A camp that would like to focus our free time and extra efforts towards building a better understanding of what is really good for us in the long run, and how that we can channel that understanding into our decisions every day with the people we care about. Because I've found the more I question what the world is shoving in my face as important, it becomes a lot more clear and obvious to me what actually is.
We covered a lot more than just this in the podcast including:
How to stay informed
Finding meaning
How to frame individual events
Building a broader frame of good
& more!
Thank you for reading :) I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
