That's easy to say in California, but not New England. Mental models give one the ability to plan ahead, and are necessarily based on heuristics. Winter is coming.

Some specific heuristics, and the ways they are interpreted, are a bit outdated. But it sounds like you're advocating for letting go of independent moralistic thought, and going along with the flow of what feels good.

> It's also a bit grating because I sense some condescending overtones. "Look at all those people who don't care about the world but just distract themselves with popular entertainment. How shallow!" Obviously you, the reader, do not belong to this group ... I mean, I follow the news, I care about recent events and where does it get me? Nowhere

I take the opposite analysis - World events are a stratum of popular entertainment, and politicians are just a different set of celebrities. Each focused topic makes you feel a way, but it's ultimately tourism because your opinion on something that will not affect you and that you have no input to does not matter. Any discussion of topics where an intelligent decision could actually be reached ultimately get lost in the noise and clamped to one of two choices. Voting itself has devolved into a team sport where you channel all your built up outrage at the "other people" who are messing up the world, but it ultimately just signals assent to the entire system.

My two main points do seem a bit at odds, and I think the second is what causes people to depart from the first. They don't want to be like the people who cling to the first yet deny the second and thus spend their time shouting at the TV, especially as we all now carry self-activating TVs in our pockets. But I think the resolution is embodied in phrases such as "be the change you want to see in the world", "cypherpunks write code", etc. (Not that any mantra is free of problems, but I digress..)