An interesting antidote for that is to read biographies --- even those of leaders often have a section where the subject is an ordinary person, subjected to the

An interesting antidote for that is to read biographies --- even those of leaders often have a section where the subject is an ordinary person, subjected to the forces of those in power --- reading a series of them in chronological order (I read those of U.S. Presidents to my children as a dry-run for an unfortunately abandoned project to do this for the entirety of world history) yields interesting insights into history and its ebb-and-flow.