>2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is “normal” for human political history, even the political history that many people alive today were around for.
>Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.
To me, this is an utterly nihilistic framing that renders one's entire life meaningless because the logic doesn't just apply to bad things. Like why did you even leave this comment? Maybe you or I remember for a little while. Maybe a handful of other people who read it will too. But no one is going to remember it, let alone genuinely care about what either of us said 100 years from now.
How are you making the jump from calibrating your emotional response to distant political changes that have no immediate significance on your own life, are par for humanity, and don’t matter in the long run, to nihilism in your immediate experience of meaning?
I don’t connect distant political to my own personal experience of meaning in the world, so i can’t follow this line of reasoning.
>How are you making the jump from calibrating your emotional response to distant political changes that have no immediate significance on your own life, are par for humanity, and don’t matter in the long run, to nihilism in your immediate experience of meaning?
The primary difference I see between these two is how you define "your immediate experience". At what distance does something become "distant political changes" that can be ignored? Because almost all of us lead "par for humanity" lives that "don’t matter in the long run" so why care about any of it if that is the extent of what matters?
I’m not advocating for ignoring the world. I’m advocating for contextualizing it so that your emotional response is sane. I think I put it in another post, but someone I know closely has become catatonically depressed this year because of what political news he reads on Reddit. He makes statements like “there has literally never been a worse time to be alive”. His personal life was great, there was nothing in it to suggest the US president’s decisions affect him, but his emotional response to Reddit news is about as extreme as if his wife died. He stopped going to work and won’t get out of bed most days, which will actually impact his life and give him things to be depressed about.
Caring should not be binary. If in your life, caring about things is all or nothing, and a political event that is extremely common and minor in the context of political history feels as acute as the death of a loved one, then I’m really sorry for you. The world will always be a miserable place for you.
>there was nothing in it to suggest the US president’s decisions affect him, but his emotional response to Reddit news is about as extreme as if his wife died.
Do you not realize that you are judging what "decisions affect him" exclusively from your own perspective? You clearly have some established distance in your mind in which you think someone's suffering is immaterial to you. You seem to imply that this reaction might be appropriate for a partner dying, but what about for other people? Would it be appropriate to be depressed because of a friend's suffering? What about a distant cousin? A neighbor? A coworker? An acquaintance? What about the parent of one of your kid's friends who you haven't even met before?
You don't seem to actually be objecting to the reaction your friend is having, you seem to be reacting that your friend just has a larger circle of people he empathizes with than you and therefore more people have the potential to "affect him".
>Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.
To me, this is an utterly nihilistic framing that renders one's entire life meaningless because the logic doesn't just apply to bad things. Like why did you even leave this comment? Maybe you or I remember for a little while. Maybe a handful of other people who read it will too. But no one is going to remember it, let alone genuinely care about what either of us said 100 years from now.