Re:Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
by ryandrake on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:25AM
(#50104144)
It’s a nice luxury to be able to ignore politics. There are people in some places who would be imprisoned or killed if the wrong political party came into power. A major political party in my country would love to find a way to deport half of my family if they could and split us up forever. I wish I could ignore politics and just stay neutral.
"Chi tace acconsente" (he who is silent says yes)
Re:Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
by TGower on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:07AM
(#50104796)
People often say this "I wish I could ignore politics, but if the other team wins it would be disastrous", but they rarely put their money where their mouth is. If someone truly believes that, you'd expect them to take actions that actually make an impact, working extra shifts to donate more, or volunteering with a party to help. Instead, everyone I've seen that says this just casts their own statistically insignificant vote and discusses politics with family and friends, resulting in no swayed votes but straining otherwise healthy relationships. Maybe you are the exception.
Once the political climate is polarized enough, choosing to not engage in the discussion about how evil the other team is will get you lumped right in, because if the other team really is evil and you don't care, then you must be pretty bad yourself.
The "Oh, but it's your civic duty to improve your community/state/nation (which obviously means voting the way I want you to, not the way the other half the country wants you to)" tries to frame political engagement as some moral good, but if they redirected the time and energy from political engagement to working at McDonalds and funding charity with the paycheck they would have 1000x the impact, even if you assume there is a Good and Evil team and they are on the Good team.