I'm in Western Europe and it's getting crazier here than ever before. While it used to be easy to ignore the more extreme political views, I am now seeing more and more political content that advocate things starting from prohibiting political parties up to "joking" insinuations of killing a certain very well known president.
While I'm used to ignore mainstream media (my thinking has always been that they are mostly financed by af very few wealthy entitites) and it's easy to block content like that on platforms like Facebook, it's now gone so far that I'm getting political memes even from close and distant relatives. It's getting harder and harder to ignore. Just today I got two separate messages from relatives, independently from each other. I don't want to block these people since they are my family, and just ignoring those messages doesn't seem like an ideal option either.
This shit is affecting me since I end up thinking about this stuff and how to respond to it while I go about my daily life, and also makes it harder to concentrate on things like game.
Anyone else here have a similar experience? If so how do you deal with it?
When things slide into chaos, whether it's a general chaos or one that's specific to you, you have two possible responses:
1. Panic/get emotionally involved
2. Surf it
The instinctive human response is to get emotionally involved - to panic, to complain, to seek security in comfortable illusion, to bury the head under the sand, etc. That's what everyone is doing now, taking sides and preparing themselves to be subservient to something that they believe will save them.
The other possibility is to surf the chaos. Think of it like a huge, powerful wave. If you confront it, it will wipe you out. If you try to run from it, it'll catch up. But if you roll with it, navigate it, use it to give yourself kinetic energy, find the pockets of control that are available to you and maximize their utility, and always enjoy the ride, then life becomes an exciting puzzle with all sorts of dynamic opportunities.
That's my modus operandi for any situation that either seems completely intractable, or that hits me out of nowhere, where it could have immediate or long term negative consequences for me. That way, I get to keep my awareness, my drive, and my intent, which are the only things that completely belong to me that have a chance of getting me where I need to go. Whenever you try to go to that place, emotions try to pull you back into the bucket, and that's where self control comes in, to give you the realization that your emotions are not who you are, and the humility to face defeat at your own hands as a possible outcome.
As far as relatives getting political, my habit is to either avoid it completely, or make a point at an extremely basic level that's hard to disagree with and tangential to their argument, and move on. A lot of people adopt strong mainstream opinions about hot political issues, but are very open to non-mainstream ideas about less controversial things that are more related to their immediate experience. For example, a woman might be completely feminist about some political talking point, but when you're just conversing about day to day stuff she's implicitly accepting all sorts of frames about how men and women are different. So it's always best (if you want to influence someone at a personal level) to avoid their ideologies and speak to their experiences - it's my habit whenever I talk to anyone face to face to immediately peel away as much stereotypical context from the conversation as possible.
At the end of the day, politics is the struggle for power and influence between groups of people, and whether it veers in one direction or the other, it's fundamentally the same animal, one that will be with us until the end of time. There's no way to avoid it. The trick is to enter the game at the level and at the scope where you have maximum capability - and for most guys, that's at the level of their personal relationships with friends and family, not at the level of mainstream politics.
