I've stopped reading news 3 years ago. One of the best decisions of my life. Before I was super anxious and had a big FOMO syndrome. Now I'm more relaxed and I sleep better.
If something is really important, I can be sure other will let me know.
If something is really important, I can be sure other will let me know.
Some demographic groups already polarize their votes over 90%, the goal of the people in charge is to get ALL demographic groups polarized over 90% then we can get rid of pesky elections and nobody will care or notice.
To some extent, for a surprisingly large fraction of the population, its already true that they only get to vote when they decide to have a child.
The way to overthrow a democracy is not upfront violence but to make it irrelevant. Right now if we did away with uncontested municipal elections nobody would care, for example.
You do. As the OP said:
> If something is really important, I can be sure other will let me know.
So is it worth suffering declining mental health from consuming news for 2 years, just to give a meaningless vote in a sham election every other year? Probably not.
Second, for party elections the vote total still matters. It's a message that says how strongly the electorate feels about particular candidate or issue. There's a big difference between a 49.9/50.1 result and a 70/30 result.
When you don't cast a vote, you are still sending a message.
There's a huge difference between expressing a minority opinion and saying, "I don't care just do whatever you want. It's all a sham anyway."
This is a very American thing fwiw. A lot if not most of these positions are not elected in other countries.
I like uniqueuid's recommendation more generally though