I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to blog over the last several weeks, partly because I was working on the book-in-progress, but largely because of politics. It’s not just that the US election and its ongoing aftermath is sucking up tons of attention in a way that makes it seem futile to write about anything else, it’s that writing about politics itself seems futile and depressing.

This is not to say that I don’t have thoughts about the election and the various associated issues, or even about the innumerable Takes out there on what happened and why and what needs to happen next. I do, in fact, have opinions about all those things, but they’re all pretty much overridden by one more general thought, which is that in the current partisan environment, attempting to write about it would be an exercise in futility. It’s not just that nobody wants to hear my squishy moderate views, it’s that I don’t think anybody is capable of hearing them right now.

And that’s deeply frustrating, because I think a lot of what’s out there is just blisteringly stupid and counter-productive. But much of the very dumbest stuff being written and shared around is in the form of extreme responses to tendentious misreadings of what seem to me to be far more sensible positions. Many of these I see because they’re shared into my social-media feeds by people who ought to be able to recognize them for the gross caricatures that they are. And, you know, that doesn’t suggest to me that there’s any upside to trying my hand at expressing similar positions.

In a weird way, this echoes something that happened to me with physics writing a while back, specifically around the topic of quantum foundations and interpretations. While on the one hand, this is an endlessly renewable source of clicks writing anything at all positive– or even generally agnostic– about, say, the Many-Worlds Interpretation just brings down an endless and wearying argument in which people on one side or the other insist on pegging my position to one extreme or the other. It’s exhausting in a way that makes it feel utterly pointless to broach the subject at all.

The political conversation, of course, is orders of magnitude worse, because the stakes are so much higher. What position one takes on interpretations of quantum mechanics is completely and utterly inconsequential, but winning or losing elections can literally save or cost lives. Which makes it just crushingly depressing to watch a lot of what passes for political discourse at the moment. And the disconnect is at such an incredibly basic level– a matter of incompatible theories of political change– that it’s difficult to see any plausible path toward anything better. To mathematicize it a little, there just isn’t even an agreement on what axioms should apply to the situation, which makes it impossible to converge on a proof.

So, as it says at the top, depressing. At this point, I’m pretty much hanging on to my current social media feeds just for the illusion of feeling informed about evolving events. I think once the Electoral College vote is done, I’m going to do some really aggressive muting and unfollowing to try to get back to a better place. And also see if I can’t find some healthier topics to write about; what that is, I can’t say, but I know damn well it’s not going to be quantum interpretations…