There's a great mental model called the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. Happiness, according to this model, is about making the former circle onl

There's a great mental model called the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. Happiness, according to this model, is about making the former circle only slightly smaller than the latter. For some people, "focusing their thinking" means acknowledging their powerlessness and becoming unbothered by it, narrowing their scope to the things they can actually do something about. For them, politics was never useful, because they never believed they had any influence. For others, such focus means pushing out their influence to encompass more things, so that their concerns are something they can do something about. For these people, politics is inevitable and necessary, because influence will naturally touch more and more lives and consequently, more and more politics.