>And you're right voting is all the control we ultimately have I don't fully agree; there other paths, but they involve becoming _more_ politically active; cal

>And you're right voting is all the control we ultimately have I don't fully agree; there other paths, but they involve becoming _more_ politically active; calling & writing your congressman, joining political movements, volunteering, canvasing, etc. I think my argument is that if you're just sitting at home and getting outraged -- but not willing to spend the real time and effort to do the actual work of supporting a political cause, then your outage has no value in your life. In other words, it's much more about tying your stress and outage to real, practical action. Most of us are just scrolling and fretting, but not doing anything. We either need to do real, practical things, or stop getting strung out for no reason. >But even if that wasn't the case how can you research candidate positions without knowing the political context you want them to represent you within? This is true, but you can just do a couple of days of research when it's time to vote. Given how representative democracy works, a candidate's stated view is sort of only going to directionally affect things, and I don't need expert-level knowledge to pick between two candidates. My decision for who to vote for just never requires much real precision. I don't want to make this too political, but suppose that Gavin Newsom and J.D. Vance were the next candidates for president. Would I really need to pay close attention to politics for the next few years to figure out which one of them I considered to be the 'least bad' option? To my point above, that decision just does not have a lot of precision with regard to my views, and does not require any real expertise on my end. I could 100% check out between now and then, review the political platforms for each candidate (and maybe a few opinion pieces) over an afternoon, and be informed _enough_ to make a decision. Again, voting is sort of the "bare minimum" when it comes to political participation. So I'm definitely not arguing that people should not become more involved; only that we should carefully consider whether our involvement is tied to any real positive outcomes. (and that's both personally, but also politically. A great deal of personal stress could potentially be a great tradeoff for a really important political outcome.)