Transcript
Hello everyone. Welcome to another daily Jimm. It is Thursday, January 18th, 2024. Today I want to talk about, apathy and voter turnout. So there are many elections happening in the world this year. Uh notably one in the United States. Um main election, obviously every, every two years or so, there are different senate seats that are up for election at the US level and then the House of Representatives every two years as well. But uh this year is a presidential election. So the president and vice president will be up for election and, I'm worried that people are starting to engage or will start to uh sorry, starting to disengage or uh have already disengaged from politics.
And I worry about this because.
If people don't vote, then sometimes, hm people we don't want to get in. Um How do I put it? So I remember doing some research after Trump got elected and came across a company called Cambridge Analytica and SCL and some of these and they said that it was too hard to convince people to switch their votes. And so what they did was they tried to convince people to not vote. And one of the tactics sometimes to get one's candidate to win is to convince the other people to not vote. And I just see this message of apathy spreading more and more. And I don't know if it's so much telling people directly that they should be apathetic. It's often that I think we feel too overwhelmed by emotion that we just give up. We, we just feel too overwhelmed. It's like we reach our limit and our capacity. And I've seen this happen, not just in politics, but I've seen it happen in relationships, um, romantic ones and family ones and in work relationships and such that a situation can get so emotional for us that we reach our limits. And we say, ok, I'm done, I'm exhausted, I'm tired. I don't want to ever talk about this again. Well, if we don't ever talk about these things again, how do we coordinate and collaborate and try to make joint decisions together? We can't, it's pretty hard if people aren't engaging in conversation, um, doesn't even have to be spoken conversation but exchanging information back and forth. It's pretty hard to work together and make decisions together.
And I think sometimes politics can be the catch all for our emotions almost like, we have all these things happening at the top of in our lives, at the top of a funnel and politics is at the bottom of the funnel. So everything that happens in our lives kind of gets funneled down into political discussions. And that can be a lot of emotions, especially if we haven't communicated or talked about the emotions that have happened in different parts of our lives.
And so then it can really bottle up or filter down and kind of get really compacted, this place of a lot of different emotion and we can get to the point where say, OK, I've had enough, you know, maybe I've heard enough stories about the economy or about COVID or about Trump or about Ukraine and Russia, or about Israel and Palestine. Like I'm just, or immigration. I'm, I'm just done, I'm just done. I can't deal with it anymore because I have so much going on in my own emotional life. Man, I've heard people say this before. I don't want to hear about what's going on in your life because I got so much going on in my life or I don't want to hear about politics because I already have so much going on in my life. And that's, I understand that. But how do we start working on the things that are going on in our lives or at least working on the reactions that we have to them and our beliefs about them so that maybe we can process some of these things so that we can contribute or we can pay attention without burning out. How do we increase our own emotional capacity? So that if we get a little bit angry, we don't tip over the edge. Uh, like, and go into deep anger or frankly, um, burn, like, just fry, quote unquote, fry the circuit and retreat.
So I hope that we have the courage, the strength and the endurance to have some of the conversations this year. About so many issues, but especially about political issues because I think again, politics intertwines so much of our lives and is the catch all for so much of our lives that even if we start on a political conversation, maybe we can dig deeper and figure out what's, what's really driving some of these beliefs in somebody and, and myself as well. And, uh, I think I worry that, again, as I've talked about in the last couple of episodes that going towards, like, trying to get peace means trying to have almost an apathetic way of just, ah, it's too much, it's overwhelming. I just want to kind of disconnect and have only, I just want to be calm and happy and good vibes and just be really at peace. Well, how are we supposed to coordinate and deal with conflicts of opinions and beliefs and perspectives if we don't, feel a little bit here and there anyways, I think I'm rambling at this point. Um, it's Thursday. It's late. I didn't sleep very long last night and I look forward to talking to you on Monday. Have a great weekend y'all. Bye.
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