A lot of news is extremely hard to avoid and I’ll inevitably be exposed to it. If it seems important like the types of topics you’re describing, I’ll carve out some time to find out if it’s actually important.
Most of it is a spectacle and my actions and point of view are entirely irrelevant to it. Frankly, I don’t believe a lot of the news is even rooted in reality. To have a point of view on it, or to have feelings about it, would be to lend legitimacy to something I sincerely believe is part of a bizarre, performative, ephemeral blob of social invention. I don’t mean to sound absurd or like a conspiracy theorist at all; I really can’t see how much of what’s in the media is remotely objective or connected to any kind of shared reality that is practical and sane.
As far as being embarrassed, I find I can get by with simply listening to people and letting them get their ideas across. They like to express themselves and I’m content to listen. I typically won’t be embarrassed because no one really cares what I think or what I think I know, too. No one asks unless I say something in the first place.
I think we’re encouraged to believe it’s some other way, but if you keep to yourself you’ll find very quickly that indeed, almost no one cares. Even here on hacker news, the vast majority of readers don’t care about what I wrote. It’s irrelevant to them, and that’s okay. It’s probably a good thing.
The only people in my tiny corner of all of this who have any remote concerns about me are right here, near me, in my life. The rest is mostly a spectacle. If it can effect me, the chances that I can effect it in any meaningful way are infinitely tiny.
I do vote, too, but again… I’m not convinced it means what people think it means, or that it leads to things I hope it will. On the other hand, by working on local concerns I can actually make a difference. The changes we can make like restoring a watershed to improve wildlife diversity, reduce erosion, improve runoff capacity, and so on can be a real model for improving these features of other municipalities. That can matter many times more than a vote for the leader of my country; it can lead to real data that people turn to improve the places they live in. It seems totally uninteresting and pointless compared to the notion of democracy and national governance, but from my point of view, it’s far more pragmatic and connected to reality.
I agree with you overall. I want to be aware of contentious issues on which I might have a side or a stake too. I think the difference between us is only that I think the scope of these issues is extremely small; there’s very little I come across in my day where it truly matters at all what I believe, and any stake I may have is almost exclusively relevant to me alone.