Political Hobbyism is Not A Magic Spell that Changes the World

Outrage only changes you and not for the good

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“It’s really difficult to be a therapist these days” is the message in social media posts of self-declared socially-minded mental health workers. This pervasive message has, of course, a reciprocal effect on the nature of what therapy ends up being in practice, where the assumptions brought in by mental health workers and the questions posed, iteratively teach clients and patients the “proper” lens through which they should assess their lives. As behavioral research has repeatedly shown, what you attend to is what you reinforce in your life. This is not incidental: I find it frustrating when therapists and parents declare that a client or child is “spontaneously” and by their own will expressing interest in a particular thing or focusing on a particular behavior. Each will forget the questions they asked about and the attention they gave to those specific interests and behaviors.

This focus on attention is not some reiteration of the magical thinking of “The Secret,” that early 2000’s book which elevated thought to a realm of causal power upon the universe. Rather, this is an appreciation for how attention, likely one of the most powerful, if not central, of the cognitive mechanisms in our lives, directs the use of our limited resources, namely time, but also by extension finances and social capital.

What you pay attention to, what you spend your limited cognitive space contemplating, has an innate opportunity cost. This is true of all behavior, but where it’s at least nominally easy to identify how engaging in a particular bodily activity means you can’t then do another one at the same time, people tend not to view mental activity in the same way. Thing is, mental activity is still, well, activity. You can’t have more than one conscious thought at the same time. And insofar as consciousness has a role in our lives, consider it as a second step, establishing the direction of your immediate life. The first step is not anything you have much direct control over, that of your unconscious or pre-conscious processes. There isn’t much to it in providing a definitive answer to what you’re going to do next with your behavior; it’s simply too fluid to establish a concrete direction. Once the internal activity manifests in consciousness, there are still a lot of directions you can go, but they’ve become a lot fewer.

Unfortunately, because consciousness is so central to our lives, and frankly, the case could be made that it really is the only thing we ever actually do experience, we take it for granted even as we also give it entirely too much power. We take it for granted by not appreciating the opportunity cost that each thought has, and, especially, what the level of cost is when we preoccupy ourselves with particular thoughts. There were several ways to express that last sentence, but I like the word “preoccupy” because that is what we are often blindly doing with our attention, front-loading the occupation of our mind, pre-selecting how we are going to spend our time, and therefore cutting ourselves off from the myriad of other possibilities that exist.

This is where we give our thoughts entirely too much power. Just because our thoughts are occupied by something and qualify as a behavior, it does not mean doing so is an action possessed of automatic or inevitable moral inertia. In other words, your thoughts are not nearly as important or powerful as their presence may trick you into believing. Consider that each and every day, there are thousands, if not millions, of thoughts that you have zero recollection of. Further, a sizeable majority of those thoughts contribute almost nothing to the physical expression of your life. There are thoughts you can have right now, just like many others you have every day, that not only do not connect to an expressive behavior, but are even the opposite. One of the favorite personal experiments in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to do is to have the thought, and even express it out loud, that “I am not raising my arm” even as you do in fact raise your arm.

Yet, despite this lived experience highlighting the limitation and powerlessness of our thinking, we still seem determined to believe that some thoughts are somehow special or unique from any others. Spoiler: they are not. Thoughts are always just thoughts, and nothing makes one or another more intrinsically meaningful than any other. In fact, and here’s the icing on the cake of recognizing that thoughts aren’t important merely by their existence, is how the significance of any of them is determined far more by the environmental context within which they arise.

Experiment with me. How often do you think about food and not reach for a sample? Given the biological need we all have for calories, and how often advertisements are centered on food, it’s a fair guess that the percentage of times you have a thought about food and do not engage in eating is extraordinarily small. You can do this with several things, from seemingly random thoughts of violence, cursing, and imaginings of violating social norms, of which you do not express outwardly, to the sadder example of the many times you think about how much you love the people in your life and consider acting on it, but don’t. The threshold for when a thought leads to an action is not based on the thought itself, but the context, including the immediacy of access where it concerns food, and the perceived reception of our actions by those we care about. Here again, your thoughts are not the linchpin to release an action, but the ride-along for environmental opportunity.

However, because we often ignore context and place the locus of control upon our thoughts, this leads to a situation ripe for manipulation. Advertisers, department store organizers, theme park developers, and entertainment streamers all love the fact that we hubristically believe our thoughts to be under our immediate and total control, and by extension, our actions, to be a matter of deliberate choice. It frees them up to manipulate us, often utilizing the same technique, albeit expressed in different ways: the intense fluctuation of high-intensity emotional experiences, particularly from aversive to affirmative, or anger to joy.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in news coverage of politics and related social issues, with the result being the exact opposite of good for you. As Arthur Brooks notes in a recent article, “Face It, You’re Addicted to Politics:”

This manipulation is effective but horrible for your mental health—especially if it becomes a semi-permanent feature of your life, because emotional instability (not negative emotion per se) drives neuroticism. Psychologists have shown in multiple studies that variability in mood predicts clinical depression even better than consistent emotional negativity. One hypothesis to explain this finding is that frequent ups and downs, especially for people prone to depression, dysregulate the amygdala, a crucial part of your brain’s limbic system that regulates emotional processing, in a way that biases a person to overreact to negative stimuli and underreact to positive ones. (Arthur Brooks)

This brings us back to the beginning of this article, where the therapist laments having to do their job, forgetting that what they bring to their job is at least as important, if not more so, given the power dynamics at play in the “professional” relationship, than what the client does. Therapists are not passive recipients of their clients’ lives, but cocreators of the therapeutic space. What they attend to contributes to, in part, what the client will believe is important to focus on. Encouraging themselves in the constant inculcation of political news and framing every individual life as somehow being directly affected by broader national issues supports a mentality of thought-centric living. When therapists should encourage a healthier practice of holding thoughts lightly, they instead reinforce the erroneous notion that thinking is the most crucial activity we engage in daily, and thoughts are somehow sacred, particularly when they pertain to socially significant concerns.

This thought-centric living is enlarged through the emotional heroin that is social media, where not only is every thought encouraged to be expressed, no matter how ill-informed or ridiculous, but ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and comments, often equally if not more ill-informed and ridiculous, are seen as engagement. While I do not subscribe to the notion that “Twitter (or insert other social media platform) is not real life,” the equivocation of engagement, where throwing thoughts into a digital landscape is often seen as similar in effect to volunteering, community involvement, and actual voting, is not only destructive to democracy, it reinforces the false notion that thoughts themselves are somehow affecting the world.

Such magical thinking fuels the rapid pace at which people doomscroll and consume increasingly substantial amounts of political news and commentary. Again from Brooks’s article:

In a 2023 survey of American adults, about a third said they follow national politics “very closely.” Meanwhile, 62 percent of Americans consume news about politics and government “often” or “extremely often,” which is 30 percentage points above the next highest area of news interest.

Read that last part again: “30 percentage points above the next highest are of news interest.” Let’s come back to opportunity cost and the limitation of our resources, and consider now how people are ignoring sizeable sections of their lives. If such consumption was leading to more behavioral engagement, like voting, and being more informed about local and state government, there could be a case made for such an outsized percentage. However, as polling done by Johns Hopkins indicates:

“Almost half of those surveyed couldn't say what their state spent the most on; even fewer knew which state issues were most controversial. Fewer than 20 percent could name their state legislators. A third couldn't name their governor.”

And where it concerns voting, the only direct influence people have in a representative democracy, according to Pew Research:

The 66% turnout rate in 2020 was the highest since 1908, and 2024’s rate of 64% was the second highest, tied with 1960.

Little wonder people can’t name their governor or who represents them in Congress, as so few people are actually having to fill in the bubbles next to those names.

If news consumption isn’t leading to greater behavioral involvement or in being informed about the actual government, then what is it doing?

Feeding the magical thinking assumption that thoughts matter, through encouraging an increase in neuroticism by emotional manipulation.

Reading that tenth article on the war in Iran isn’t going to change anything in the world. Watching video after video of ICE agents being belligerent is not going to make them stop. And no, “being informed” is not what’s actually going on, since if that were the case, such would have been addressed at the first, if not at least by the second video or article, given how so many of them are just repeating the same talking points and behavior. “Being informed” is the modern equivalent of clapping to give a fairy its wings.

A reminder that opportunity costs are an inevitable calculation we make through our behavior. How much are you missing in your life because of constantly feeding the outrage machine?

Put down the phone. Disengage from social media (and yes, I recognize the irony of writing this on Substack). Bring your attention to your loved ones and express how much they mean to you. Volunteer with your charitable organizations. Organize community activities. Contribute to your local stores and artisans.

The problems of the world are not going to go away because of your rage and digital posts. By being more engaged in actual living, rather than mental incantations, you’ll not only find yourself living a better life, but you’ll also find yourself more capable when the chips are down to do what is necessary to support the change you want to see.

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