5 ms·

It’s OK to Not Care About Politics

35 points by freediver 6y ago

sieabahlpark 6y ago
Oh really? "White silence is white violence"? Start showing that people can avoid politics in the rhetoric that fills SV first.
ada1981 6y ago
It’s Political to Not Care About Politics.
Arainach 6y ago
This article is a long-winded philosophical musing that misses the core point: You can only not care about politics if you are incredibly priviliged. Period. If one of the main parties running wants to prevent you from marrying the person you love, you can't just be apolitical. If one of the parties running wants to allow police to disproportionally harass, arrest, and kill people who look like you, you can't just be apolitical. If you're poor, struggling to pay your bills, and one of the parties wants to add new hoops to jump through to claim any welfare or healthcare, you can't just be apolitical. If you have any empathy and care about any people in those positions, you can't just be apolitical. The only way to truly "not care" about politics is both to be very privileged and very selfish.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- curiousgeorgio 6y ago
  And yet, the point you’re making is itself entirely political (just pointing that out). Many would disagree on the premise that it’s not the government’s job to be involved in any of those things. And that’s just as valid as your viewpoint. Also: downvoting something only because you disagree with it doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it’s one step on a path towards more oppression, not less.
  - didibus 6y ago
    The person you're replying is arguing that in practice it isn't "OK", because if "OK" means that you can peacefully live your life as you please, but others are actively engaged in preventing you from doing so, you're forced to care about politics, because others make it not OK for you. Thus only if you are "privileged", meaning that people are letting you be free and giving you your fair share of the resources, can you in practice choose to "not care", since the politics don't affect you negatively. Also note that politics means: "the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status" and implies nothing about having or not a "Government". That depends very much on the political system itself.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Vinnl 6y ago
  Or just not (yet) aware of how privileged you are.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Furthermore, if you live on earth, and one of the main parties wants to let the planet warm uncontrollably... you might think you can not care, but you'll probably dislike the consequences in 30 years.
- watwut 6y ago
  Privileged people always cared about politics. That is how you stay privileged. Regardless of context and type of society - whether it is mini society of a company or state or some group. You gain and keep privileges by engaging in politics.
- rubyn00bie 6y ago
  It wreaks of privilege and decadence; the narrative too is shallow if not completely unoriginal. Born into a great hall, yet you have autonomy and aren't a slave? You leave at will? You're not Nietzsche. This is someone masturbating to their own ideas expecting everyone else to "love them" for it. It's vile.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  I am interested to discover from my karma change whether the following opinion is an unpopular one; it certainly is becoming increasingly unspeakable in the sense of http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html. --- I think you're drawing a false dichotomy here, especially with "If you have any empathy and care about any people in those positions, you can't just be apolitical.". One could be consumed with agony about all the things you mention, and still believe that it is better to focus on other things. The mere fact that a problem exists doesn't mean you must drop everything else to go and fix it, especially such a large and intractable problem as "a third of the population unfathomably has a worldview totally incompatible with my own". You may instead choose to solve a different problem where you think you have an actual chance of making progress. For example, I am of the LessWrong school, and I consider one of the greatest sources of suffering to be the fact that people die; but I am not reskilling into the field of human longevity, and I don't think (?) society would excoriate me for that. And since I have chosen not to work on that particular infinite well of suffering, I have to not care about it so much, for the sake of my own sanity and my ability to work on other things. If mere knowledge of the existence of an infinite well of suffering obliges you to expend huge amounts of effort on fixing it, woe betide you when you discover another one! If you want to put everything you have into solving one of the problems, then you simply have to weep, put aside the others, and try not to let the constant agony affect your efforts in the place where you think you can actually help. It certainly sucks hard that many people have their country's political decisions thrust in their faces every hour of every day. Come to that, 58mm people die every year, which is an overwhelming tragedy that most people manage to ignore most of the time so that they can actually get anything done. But I have the choice of investing effort into fixing only a very limited number of problems, and I do not judge someone who runs the numbers and thinks they can do more good by not pouring all their effort into the impossible ones. I stress again that politics really is extremely hard (just look at the US election results to see how much popular support there is for both of the two highly incompatible sides of the USA election).
  - watwut 6y ago
    You are building false dichotomy between being apolitical and "drop everything else to go and fix it".
- robocat 6y ago
  Only the most privileged people have any reason to really care about politics, because only the most privileged have political power. The less privileged you are, the less point caring about politics. The least privileged have no political power at all. The less privileged are affected by political decisions but they don’t care about the politics per se, instead they care about how the effects of politics touch their lives (through laws, policy or practice.) Edit: In a democracy it is our responsibility to care about politics. However, it is a tragedy of the commons in that as an individual, time spent on politics is probably mostly wasted, given the amount of political power we control as an individual (assuming that political knowledge doesn’t give you much other benefit). A large percentage of the world’s population has even less power than the right to vote or otherwise be politically involved.
- darkengine 6y ago
  This seems backwards -- anecdotally, it feels like the most politically active people I know are doing quite well for themselves. In contrast, those who are working harder to make ends meet seem more likely to be apolitical. There is some data to back this up: https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf
- michaelt 6y ago
  Eh, just because you'd benefit from something that can only be achieved politically, doesn't mean you have to do the work. This is a classic free-rider situation. I mean, I'd like house prices to be lower by increasing the supply in high demand areas. But I haven't actually done anything towards that.
- username90 6y ago
  I live in Sweden where those things aren't issues, is me being apolitical selfish? Or do I have to care about Americans shooting and abusing each other to not be selfish?
fearface 6y ago
It’s not ok, to not care about politics. Everything that happens in the public space is political. As citizen of most countries, you have political rights and options. It’s ok to not care whichever label match to you, but you should care about actual policies, about changing values and who best represents you.
- porknubbins 6y ago
  I think someone who says they are into politics or a “politics nerd” means to say they enjoy following the human drama of scandal, who is winning, who is unpopular etc in the same way some people follow sports teams, which is fine but does not interest me. Its interesting that we have a completely different term- a “policy wonk” for someone who is knowledgable about policy. I feel like I can care about policy without caring who represents me.
- disposekinetics 6y ago
  The society I live in has values so alien and antithetical to my own that my choices are dread, or a kind of inward retreat control what you can and accept the rest apathy. Anything I invested would just result in me being more frustrated.
umvi 6y ago
Sort of reminds me of the fictional "Extreme Center" movement in "The Social Dilemma" (great documentary, btw, regardless of your political party).
dkural 6y ago
Some of us cannot afford to not care about "politics" when some politicians want to deport you, have a problem with your skin color, or look down upon gender to the point of not shaking hands.
systemvoltage 6y ago
Well, this is how you install a fascist to run a country if we're not vigilant.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Website is down - anyone have a mirror? My hot take just based on the title: politics has a return on investment like anything else. And engaging in politics, especially to the degree the general public has in the last several years, can be unhealthy in many ways. It can hurt your mental health, damage relationships, create emotionally charged echo chambers, etc. And being a political junkie can be problematic for society in other ways, like driving partisanship and viewing everything through extremist lenses (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-politics-americans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-poli...). So the positives of being politically engaged have to be weighed against the negatives and also against the time input it requires. For those whose lives aren’t drastically affected by election churn (which is a lot more people than you might think), I understand why they may choose to be disengaged or not vote.
shaggyfrog 6y ago
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." -- Desmond Tutu
- snth 6y ago
  This is a classic false dilemma, and usually, in my opinion, an attempt at manipulation.
marcinzm 6y ago
I feel one should take a moment to think about why we've been so political for the last 200 years and why it started during democratic revolutions. Before then the vast majority of people had little power and thus no need for politics. Those with power (lords, kings, court members, etc.) were very political all the time. The rest did what the king and lord said or died. Ones opinions and thoughts and desires didn't directly matter. Then democracy came about and your opinions and thoughts matter. You can influence policy without risk of death, you can change the forces that drive a decent chunk of your existence. Political decisions impact your life and the lives of those around you so it is logical to try to shift them to your benefit if possible. It's simply that in the past that wasn't possible or risked your death. I'll take being political over being a slave any day of the week. edit: Also, in the past I'm sure people were political but locally within the scope they were allowed to influence. They couldn't tell the king what to do but maybe they could get their local parish priest to help them instead of the neighbor they hate. It's just like how HOAs are political nowadays.
- _eht 6y ago
  So if you’re not living in an HOA, are you a slave?
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    That's not my point. If you live in a HOA and don't care about the governance of that HOA then you are a slave to the HOA. The HOA may be a benevolent dictator or a malevolent one but you are their slave. edit: The same applies to government except you don't generally get the choice to not live under a government (or the cost of moving is massive). As I see it, over longer periods of time being a slave is unpleasant even if it can be cushy in the short term.
    - _eht 6y ago
      I see your point. Thanks.
- Balgair 6y ago
  Athens invented their democracy ~2600 years ago. Themistocles is a good example of a person that shows the breadth of politics at the time and how remarkably similar they are to today. Even in the 6th century BC people were political, from a slave to an archon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles
bigcorp-slave 6y ago
Hot take: it’s ok to not want to be an activist and to engage in politics primarily by voting. People should vote. The counter-meme is something I’ve seen a lot lately in both left and right wing circles. This idea being that if you’re not an activist, you’re the enemy. It is bullshit, and depressing to see on HN. Does the person dying of cancer have time to care about politics? What about the person with crippling chronic disease? What about the person who is just trying to make ends meet and comes home every day exhausted? What about the person taking care of a relative, or recovering from an opioid addiction? Being an activist is a luxury for people with a surfeit of money and free time. Edit: the rapid downvoting of this post is actually a great example of how badly this idea has infested the meme-space. HN consists primarily of unbelievably privileged people, to whom the idea that someone might not want or be able to tie huge aspects of their identity to their politics seems to be unacceptable or at least controversial.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  Not being an activist and not caring about politics are not even remotely the same thing, and I suspect you were downvoted for implicitly equivocating them.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whoisjuan 6y ago
This is why politics are so prone to corruption. Because democracies depend on people caring about the local and macro implications of policies driven by their representatives. I understand people who don’t care about politics because they don’t trust the system. I also understand those that don’t care about politics because they don’t have the education to form political opinions. But those who think not caring about politics is some sort of intelectual position that can be defended through the same means of political advocacy are not only the most cynical members of a society, but also the most dangerous since they often become opportunistically political when is their time to be affected by public policies. Is definitely OK to not voice your political opinions and only cast your positions through vote. That’s is definitely OK. But saying that is OK to not care about politics, is why politicians are capable of governing for some and not for everyone, without consequences.
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
I think there's a difference between "not caring about politics", and actively avoiding political discussion and influence in the news and social media. I care about politics and about the policies of the society in which I live. But I have removed every bit of political media and news from my life and my daily mood and outlook on life has increased dramatically. People will say yeah, because "ignorance is bliss". I'm not ignorant. I know what's going on in the world. I just choose not to be inundated in it all the time. The news, even (maybe especially) local news, can never make you feel good. It will only ever make you feel bad, or scared, or worried, or confused, or disheartened.
miguelmota 6y ago
"Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- disposekinetics 6y ago
  I've never really understood that quote. Do you happen to know which of his works it is from?
didibus 6y ago
The definition of "OK" seems political to me. Are you implying it should be a legal or protected right to not care about politics? That the society you live in shouldn't condone or oppress those who don't want to care about politics? If so, it seems you DO care about politics.
insickness 6y ago
To answer whether it's okay to not care about politics, we can ask whether it is okay to care about politics less or more than someone else. Of course it is. Not everyone needs to spend 80 hours a week doing political activism. Maybe 10 hours is right for you, maybe 1 hour, maybe zero hours.

35 points by freediver 6y ago

Oh really? "White silence is white violence"? Start showing that people can avoid politics in the rhetoric that fills SV first.

ada1981 6y ago

It’s Political to Not Care About Politics.

Arainach 6y ago

This article is a long-winded philosophical musing that misses the core point: You can only not care about politics if you are incredibly priviliged. Period. If one of the main parties running wants to prevent you from marrying the person you love, you can't just be apolitical. If one of the parties running wants to allow police to disproportionally harass, arrest, and kill people who look like you, you can't just be apolitical. If you're poor, struggling to pay your bills, and one of the parties wants to add new hoops to jump through to claim any welfare or healthcare, you can't just be apolitical. If you have any empathy and care about any people in those positions, you can't just be apolitical. The only way to truly "not care" about politics is both to be very privileged and very selfish.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
curiousgeorgio 6y ago
And yet, the point you’re making is itself entirely political (just pointing that out). Many would disagree on the premise that it’s not the government’s job to be involved in any of those things. And that’s just as valid as your viewpoint. Also: downvoting something only because you disagree with it doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it’s one step on a path towards more oppression, not less.
- didibus 6y ago
  The person you're replying is arguing that in practice it isn't "OK", because if "OK" means that you can peacefully live your life as you please, but others are actively engaged in preventing you from doing so, you're forced to care about politics, because others make it not OK for you. Thus only if you are "privileged", meaning that people are letting you be free and giving you your fair share of the resources, can you in practice choose to "not care", since the politics don't affect you negatively. Also note that politics means: "the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status" and implies nothing about having or not a "Government". That depends very much on the political system itself.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Vinnl 6y ago
Or just not (yet) aware of how privileged you are.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Furthermore, if you live on earth, and one of the main parties wants to let the planet warm uncontrollably... you might think you can not care, but you'll probably dislike the consequences in 30 years.
watwut 6y ago
Privileged people always cared about politics. That is how you stay privileged. Regardless of context and type of society - whether it is mini society of a company or state or some group. You gain and keep privileges by engaging in politics.
rubyn00bie 6y ago
It wreaks of privilege and decadence; the narrative too is shallow if not completely unoriginal. Born into a great hall, yet you have autonomy and aren't a slave? You leave at will? You're not Nietzsche. This is someone masturbating to their own ideas expecting everyone else to "love them" for it. It's vile.
Smaug123 6y ago
I am interested to discover from my karma change whether the following opinion is an unpopular one; it certainly is becoming increasingly unspeakable in the sense of http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html. --- I think you're drawing a false dichotomy here, especially with "If you have any empathy and care about any people in those positions, you can't just be apolitical.". One could be consumed with agony about all the things you mention, and still believe that it is better to focus on other things. The mere fact that a problem exists doesn't mean you must drop everything else to go and fix it, especially such a large and intractable problem as "a third of the population unfathomably has a worldview totally incompatible with my own". You may instead choose to solve a different problem where you think you have an actual chance of making progress. For example, I am of the LessWrong school, and I consider one of the greatest sources of suffering to be the fact that people die; but I am not reskilling into the field of human longevity, and I don't think (?) society would excoriate me for that. And since I have chosen not to work on that particular infinite well of suffering, I have to not care about it so much, for the sake of my own sanity and my ability to work on other things. If mere knowledge of the existence of an infinite well of suffering obliges you to expend huge amounts of effort on fixing it, woe betide you when you discover another one! If you want to put everything you have into solving one of the problems, then you simply have to weep, put aside the others, and try not to let the constant agony affect your efforts in the place where you think you can actually help. It certainly sucks hard that many people have their country's political decisions thrust in their faces every hour of every day. Come to that, 58mm people die every year, which is an overwhelming tragedy that most people manage to ignore most of the time so that they can actually get anything done. But I have the choice of investing effort into fixing only a very limited number of problems, and I do not judge someone who runs the numbers and thinks they can do more good by not pouring all their effort into the impossible ones. I stress again that politics really is extremely hard (just look at the US election results to see how much popular support there is for both of the two highly incompatible sides of the USA election).
- watwut 6y ago
  You are building false dichotomy between being apolitical and "drop everything else to go and fix it".
robocat 6y ago
Only the most privileged people have any reason to really care about politics, because only the most privileged have political power. The less privileged you are, the less point caring about politics. The least privileged have no political power at all. The less privileged are affected by political decisions but they don’t care about the politics per se, instead they care about how the effects of politics touch their lives (through laws, policy or practice.) Edit: In a democracy it is our responsibility to care about politics. However, it is a tragedy of the commons in that as an individual, time spent on politics is probably mostly wasted, given the amount of political power we control as an individual (assuming that political knowledge doesn’t give you much other benefit). A large percentage of the world’s population has even less power than the right to vote or otherwise be politically involved.
darkengine 6y ago
This seems backwards -- anecdotally, it feels like the most politically active people I know are doing quite well for themselves. In contrast, those who are working harder to make ends meet seem more likely to be apolitical. There is some data to back this up: https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf
michaelt 6y ago
Eh, just because you'd benefit from something that can only be achieved politically, doesn't mean you have to do the work. This is a classic free-rider situation. I mean, I'd like house prices to be lower by increasing the supply in high demand areas. But I haven't actually done anything towards that.
username90 6y ago
I live in Sweden where those things aren't issues, is me being apolitical selfish? Or do I have to care about Americans shooting and abusing each other to not be selfish?

fearface 6y ago

It’s not ok, to not care about politics. Everything that happens in the public space is political. As citizen of most countries, you have political rights and options. It’s ok to not care whichever label match to you, but you should care about actual policies, about changing values and who best represents you.

porknubbins 6y ago
I think someone who says they are into politics or a “politics nerd” means to say they enjoy following the human drama of scandal, who is winning, who is unpopular etc in the same way some people follow sports teams, which is fine but does not interest me. Its interesting that we have a completely different term- a “policy wonk” for someone who is knowledgable about policy. I feel like I can care about policy without caring who represents me.
disposekinetics 6y ago
The society I live in has values so alien and antithetical to my own that my choices are dread, or a kind of inward retreat control what you can and accept the rest apathy. Anything I invested would just result in me being more frustrated.

umvi 6y ago

Sort of reminds me of the fictional "Extreme Center" movement in "The Social Dilemma" (great documentary, btw, regardless of your political party).

dkural 6y ago

Some of us cannot afford to not care about "politics" when some politicians want to deport you, have a problem with your skin color, or look down upon gender to the point of not shaking hands.

systemvoltage 6y ago

Well, this is how you install a fascist to run a country if we're not vigilant.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Website is down - anyone have a mirror? My hot take just based on the title: politics has a return on investment like anything else. And engaging in politics, especially to the degree the general public has in the last several years, can be unhealthy in many ways. It can hurt your mental health, damage relationships, create emotionally charged echo chambers, etc. And being a political junkie can be problematic for society in other ways, like driving partisanship and viewing everything through extremist lenses (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-politics-americans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-poli...). So the positives of being politically engaged have to be weighed against the negatives and also against the time input it requires. For those whose lives aren’t drastically affected by election churn (which is a lot more people than you might think), I understand why they may choose to be disengaged or not vote.

shaggyfrog 6y ago

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." -- Desmond Tutu

snth 6y ago
This is a classic false dilemma, and usually, in my opinion, an attempt at manipulation.

marcinzm 6y ago

I feel one should take a moment to think about why we've been so political for the last 200 years and why it started during democratic revolutions. Before then the vast majority of people had little power and thus no need for politics. Those with power (lords, kings, court members, etc.) were very political all the time. The rest did what the king and lord said or died. Ones opinions and thoughts and desires didn't directly matter. Then democracy came about and your opinions and thoughts matter. You can influence policy without risk of death, you can change the forces that drive a decent chunk of your existence. Political decisions impact your life and the lives of those around you so it is logical to try to shift them to your benefit if possible. It's simply that in the past that wasn't possible or risked your death. I'll take being political over being a slave any day of the week. edit: Also, in the past I'm sure people were political but locally within the scope they were allowed to influence. They couldn't tell the king what to do but maybe they could get their local parish priest to help them instead of the neighbor they hate. It's just like how HOAs are political nowadays.

_eht 6y ago
So if you’re not living in an HOA, are you a slave?
- marcinzm 6y ago
  That's not my point. If you live in a HOA and don't care about the governance of that HOA then you are a slave to the HOA. The HOA may be a benevolent dictator or a malevolent one but you are their slave. edit: The same applies to government except you don't generally get the choice to not live under a government (or the cost of moving is massive). As I see it, over longer periods of time being a slave is unpleasant even if it can be cushy in the short term.
  - _eht 6y ago
    I see your point. Thanks.
Balgair 6y ago
Athens invented their democracy ~2600 years ago. Themistocles is a good example of a person that shows the breadth of politics at the time and how remarkably similar they are to today. Even in the 6th century BC people were political, from a slave to an archon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles

bigcorp-slave 6y ago

Hot take: it’s ok to not want to be an activist and to engage in politics primarily by voting. People should vote. The counter-meme is something I’ve seen a lot lately in both left and right wing circles. This idea being that if you’re not an activist, you’re the enemy. It is bullshit, and depressing to see on HN. Does the person dying of cancer have time to care about politics? What about the person with crippling chronic disease? What about the person who is just trying to make ends meet and comes home every day exhausted? What about the person taking care of a relative, or recovering from an opioid addiction? Being an activist is a luxury for people with a surfeit of money and free time. Edit: the rapid downvoting of this post is actually a great example of how badly this idea has infested the meme-space. HN consists primarily of unbelievably privileged people, to whom the idea that someone might not want or be able to tie huge aspects of their identity to their politics seems to be unacceptable or at least controversial.

plorkyeran 6y ago
Not being an activist and not caring about politics are not even remotely the same thing, and I suspect you were downvoted for implicitly equivocating them.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

whoisjuan 6y ago

This is why politics are so prone to corruption. Because democracies depend on people caring about the local and macro implications of policies driven by their representatives. I understand people who don’t care about politics because they don’t trust the system. I also understand those that don’t care about politics because they don’t have the education to form political opinions. But those who think not caring about politics is some sort of intelectual position that can be defended through the same means of political advocacy are not only the most cynical members of a society, but also the most dangerous since they often become opportunistically political when is their time to be affected by public policies. Is definitely OK to not voice your political opinions and only cast your positions through vote. That’s is definitely OK. But saying that is OK to not care about politics, is why politicians are capable of governing for some and not for everyone, without consequences.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

I think there's a difference between "not caring about politics", and actively avoiding political discussion and influence in the news and social media. I care about politics and about the policies of the society in which I live. But I have removed every bit of political media and news from my life and my daily mood and outlook on life has increased dramatically. People will say yeah, because "ignorance is bliss". I'm not ignorant. I know what's going on in the world. I just choose not to be inundated in it all the time. The news, even (maybe especially) local news, can never make you feel good. It will only ever make you feel bad, or scared, or worried, or confused, or disheartened.

miguelmota 6y ago

"Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

disposekinetics 6y ago
I've never really understood that quote. Do you happen to know which of his works it is from?

didibus 6y ago

The definition of "OK" seems political to me. Are you implying it should be a legal or protected right to not care about politics? That the society you live in shouldn't condone or oppress those who don't want to care about politics? If so, it seems you DO care about politics.

insickness 6y ago

To answer whether it's okay to not care about politics, we can ask whether it is okay to care about politics less or more than someone else. Of course it is. Not everyone needs to spend 80 hours a week doing political activism. Maybe 10 hours is right for you, maybe 1 hour, maybe zero hours.