During the last ‘election summer’ things went haywire but ultimately nothing meaningful really happened, and not a whole lot really changed as a result of that unrest. This time things are going haywire again, and it seems like something big will happen but people thought that the last time… Would it just be better to ignore everything and go work on yourself, your skills, etc. or consume whatever thing is going on? The constant fear that’s being pushed is so emotionally exhausting… I’m finding it harder to care about these things without anything major happening, as shitty as that sounds
Just my opinion:
“Politics” impacts a huge amount of what happens in our lives. It used to be possible to have a single-income family living in a nice house from working a 40-hour job, take vacations, have a nice retirement. The process that got us that was definitely a stressful and unpleasant time (TL;DR unions). The reason it all stopped being that way was “politics” (TL;DR Reagan).
IDK if any particular outwards manifestation is or isn’t productive but I definitely wouldn’t look at the whole endeavor as unmeaningful. I think a lot of what comes through TV and social media is partisan and engineered to produce an emotional response, which is draining. I get that. If that’s what you’re talking about then maybe just ignoring it is honestly a better response because a lot of it is just noise and nonsense. But disengaging from the whole thing doesn’t seem like the right way either.
BLM produced a lot of positive changes to policing, neoliberal economic policies produced a lot of unnecessary not-having-enough-money after decades of people getting jaded about “getting political” in the union-drive sense and just showing up to vote every few years and thinking that’ll be enough. To me what’s happening now actually feels hopeful - like people are starting to care again, because things are getting so bad that it’s unavoidable that things need to change. IDK if any particular stressful thinking is going to produce change (probably not, if it’s coming from consuming media) but I definitely would say that people caring about politics and government and what public policy looks like seems like a good thing (instead of just leaving it on rich-person-in-Washington autopilot and hoping that the result from that is gonna be good.)