A Pause

It’s been a few weeks since the U.S. election, and I’ve been gradually stepping back from being a high-information voter. I still subscribe to four newspapers, my podcast feed is filled with a mix of political and pop culture content, and I follow a couple of Substacks. But my social media presence has been pared down mostly to Facebook. I left X (formerly Twitter) months ago, briefly set up a Bluesky account, and then deactivated it when I realized I was falling back into old political habits—habits that brought little joy. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels don’t interest me either; they just bore me.

Short videos don’t appeal to me at this stage of life. I’m heading into my sixth decade on this planet, and it feels like I’m on a glide path toward fading into the background. That’s just the nature of aging. I don’t wish to be young again, nor do I want to cling to relevance like a Baby Boomer who can’t accept they’re no longer the center of the universe. I’ve come to terms with the fact that as the world changes, my place in it feels increasingly irrelevant—and that realization brings with it a sense of loss.

Maybe that’s why I feel the need to pause. The attention economy is exhausting. The catastrophic tone of liberal writers irritates me. And the lack of meaningful discussion about solutions to complex problems is disheartening. I’m tired of being lectured by a so-called liberal media that expects me to extend unending empathy to people who knowingly voted for the incoming president. I’m supposed to understand their struggles—the economic and cultural dislocations they’ve faced because of NAFTA, 9/11, two wars, a financial crisis, and the rise of tech. It’s as if they’re the only ones who’ve endured hardship or felt the invisible hand of neoliberalism smacking them around.

Meanwhile, liberals are constantly told to understand the other side, yet the other side is rarely asked to understand us. Instead, their resentment, retaliation, and even violence are often framed as justified—a rejection of the post-1965 liberal-pluralist order that some media outlets seem almost eager to celebrate because it fuels outrage and profit.

All of this—my exhaustion, my sense of irrelevance, my frustration—is making me more cynical about the world. Too many people in power are opportunists who, as Machiavelli put it, are “ungrateful and unreliable; they lie, they fake, they’re greedy for cash, and they melt away in the face of danger.” Yet these are precisely the people who are elevated in the attention economy. Whether it’s Elon Musk or extremists patrolling the southern border, the more extreme, ungrateful, and greedy they are, the more they’re celebrated.

So where does that leave those of us who try not to view humanity through such a Machiavellian lens?

Maybe that’s why I feel the need to pause.