In this experiment, my goal is to empty my mental bandwidth of political content as completely as possible, for the months of February and March 2025.

I’m doing this by cutting out the inputs as much as I can. Practically that means:

• No news
• No social media
• No politics-related books
• No participating in politics-related discussions

Instead of political philosophy audiobooks and podcasts, which have been my main listening material for a few years, I can listen to anything else, but I’m going to be focusing on business and marketing themed material, as it is particularly relevant to my life right now. My hypothesis is that if you’re going to fill your head with content, it might as well preoccupy you with thoughts and behaviors that have some use to you.

This experiment began February 1 and ends April 1.

The Log

February 3, 2025

Noticed something about social media

I am noticing a few impulses that social media used to satisfy. Sometimes I’ll have a little opinion about something, or a quippy insight, and I have the impulse to tweet or post it. But then I realize there’s no reason at all to do that, other than I might get some approval in the form of likes or engagement. Certainly nobody else would benefit all that much from it – at most it’s another pithy comment in their endless feed of pithy comments.

This made me realize that one role social media has for me, and presumably others, is a place to broadcast semi-interesting thoughts that would normally just come and go from the mind. They’re not interesting enough to say aloud — in the real world — to a room full of friends, for example, but social media provides a receptacle for them, and sometimes you get a little reward of fake internet points in the form of likes or upvotes, for dumping them there. Social media is a receptacle, a landfill, for our marginally-interesting thoughts, but you get a few pennies for the materials.

February 5, 2025

The old internet is still there

I’m listening to business and marketing books again, which is getting me excited about the possibilities for the future of Raptitude and my soon-to-be How To Do Things site. The internet used to be really exciting to me, like a huge viewing room with windows out to a million corners of the world out there. There were so many people out there to connect with and to bring your work to. This is how “the world out there” felt to me in the early 2010s — optimistic, full of possibility, full of friends I haven’t met yet.

I haven’t felt that in a long time. Surely the internet has actually changed — when you go online, instead of finding yourself on random people’s interesting creative projects, connected through hyperlinks, you’ll find yourself slipping into greased channels made to funnel you to major social platforms, and you’ll encounter the content that thrives in those systems. But all of those possibilities and unmet friends are still out there. What has changed is how easily our minds are captured by certain content channels and funneled to ends designed by major players.

We can still decide where to put our attention though, and it doesn’t have to be caught by the low-friction funnels set up by social media companies.

Feburary 10, 2025

Optimism and agency returning

This is perhaps particular to my own situation but I feel much more optimistic that I have for a few years. Part of that is surely due to spending less time ruminating over the ramifications of political events. It’s not that political events themselves have any more or less effect in the world, but they occupy much less of my attention. The other reason for this surge in optimism is that I’ve switched my main topic of interest to something where I have a lot more agency, which is business and marketing. I’m finally taking action on projects I’ve delayed for years. The future feels bright and I’m pretty happy right now.

Why I’m doing this (in some detail)

I feel a need to explain why I did this experiment in the first place, and that requires describing the cultural change I’ve witnessed in the last 5 to 10 years. Reading so much about political ideology has at least given me a framework and vocabulary for understanding this shift. In this entry I’ll try to unpack, for those interested, what I think has happened in the culture, and how it brought me to the point where I felt I had to begin this experiment. This gets into the ideological weeds — don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I come from a liberal background and I believe deeply in liberalism. However, something very disturbing has happened in the last five years: the mainstream left, which has always been the half of the spectrum I identified with, has become less liberal than the mainstream right-half population.

You might have noticed this shift. For example, it’s become taboo among liberals to defend freedom of speech as a vital principle for a healthy society. It used to be common for liberals to say, or at least believe, maxims like, “I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll defend with my life your right to say it.” Today, if you defend free speech among group of progressives, someone will assert that free speech opens the door to “hate” or “misinformation,” or will maybe they’ll just roll their eyes, but it will be made clear to you that freedom of speech is to some degree problematic. As a result, a proud intolerance towards difference of opinion has become normalized among many progressives and self-identifying liberals, and there’s nothing liberal about that. Instead, there’s a there’s a “right way” to say everything, a right opinion to have on each issue, and you will be reminded of this when you say it any other way.

Meanwhile, center-rights and conservatives, for the most part, still take for granted that free speech and other classically liberal norms are essential for a healthy society, and are willing to say so, in part because their political opponents have turned against them. Even the US Democratic Party has clearly been positioning to restrict speech and monitor communications channels, in the name of “battling dangerous disinformation.” (I can’t believe anyone who considers themselves liberal would go along with that. Twenty years ago, could you have imagined conservatives defending free speech from censorious liberals?)

This shift is not an organic trend of people all learning to be sensitive and thoughtful in exactly the same way at the same time. It’s the result of a deliberate strategy among a certain activist culture to normalize self-censoring among the population. They want to make you afraid to vocally defend Western society and its essential values — free markets, equal treatment before the law, and liberal speech rights.

That claim might sound out of left field for those unaware of the 20th century’s ideological battle surrounding the subject of capitalism. (Read the footnote* for a quick primer.) Basically the strategy works like this: online activists make a point of expressing loud and vehement intolerance for any praise or defense of the Western liberal status quo, no matter how pedestrian or sensible. Free speech? Problematic. Western countries trying to grow their economies? Exploitative. Equal treatment before the law? Racist, actually. In social media posts, explainers, comments, and replies, activists imply or explain that your classical liberal values are actually oppressive, and lead to “dangerous extremism.” Even middle-of-the-road opinions on free speech, free markets, enforcement of existing immigration laws, etc, are contested vehemently and described as oppressive views held only by far-right crazies, or by people unwittingly becoming far-right crazies.

It’s not only activists that employ this kind of rhetoric, but also an overwhelming proportion of the journalistic and academic classes, who learned the same anti-Western worldview and its rhetorical moves in university liberal arts programs. The prominence of these views in mass media creates a false sense that most people think this way, and that if you have any classically liberal, middle-of-the-road opinions, you’re probably best keeping them to yourself, because you might be lumped in with the bad people.

This tactic comes straight from a philosopher named Herbert Marcuse, who was advocating its use in a much more conservative society in the 1960s. Its purpose is specifically to undermine support for Western capitalism, by inflicting a small but significant social cost — a feeling of shame, self-consciousness, or fear of reprisal — whenever anyone defends any of capitalism’s cultural underpinnings (commerce, the rule of law, liberalism, etc). This is called problematizing and it’s undoubtedly been done to you many times by now. You’re supposed to feel like a jerk, or at least an old fuddy-duddy, for defending or even mentioning those norms. Ideally, you will stop talking about them, allowing activists and people who speak “correctly” to dominate the discourse on the subject.

This is why you hear people so flippantly throwing around words like “nazi,” “white supremacist,” and “fascist” these days, even when the target is clearly none of those things. It’s not because society is suddenly inundated with actual neo-nazis, who are a small minority with little political power (and who also don’t mind being called nazis). The point is to scare normal people into either shutting up, or speaking only using the correct (read: anti-capitalist) terminology. You don’t want to be called a nazi, even if you aren’t one — especially if you aren’t one — and you don’t want to be the one defending someone accused of being a nazi, no matter how absurd the accusation is. Activists and hardline progressives engage in this strategy actively on social media; ordinary liberals notice the way the wind is blowing, keep dissenting opinions to themselves, and often parrot, or at least tolerate, accusations of right-wing extremism deployed against normal people with mainstream opinions.

In this way, a rather extreme view (that Western society is bad, actually) can gain outsized presence in the culture. Social media has made this tactic extremely effective, especially during the pandemic lockdown era when everyone started consuming more content. The effect has been to shift cultural speech norms against even middle-of-the-road beliefs that most people hold, and allow the advance of more extreme left policies (e.g. speech controls, price controls, unlimited immigration, sanctioned discrimination against “oppressive” groups, the seizure and redistribution of private wealth) even when the majority does not support them. This kind of strategy is obviously undemocratic, which is why its advocates claim incessantly that it’s their critics — advocates of free speech, Western values, and equal treatment before the law — who are the ones threatening democracy.

Obviously I think all of this is really terrible. Meanwhile, the shift to these new norms has put me in the weird position of currently being in closer agreement with the near side of the right half than the near side of the left half. I don’t have a conservative temperament, but it’s clear to me that mainstream conservatives and libertarians are far more aware of this problem than liberals, because they’re directly targeted by it and see its absurdity. Everyday liberals can disengage from it without much friction, or they can be cowed into going along with it, believing they’re fighting a powerful far-right movement, when in fact they’re helping to consolidate an authoritarian movement from the other side.

Not having gone along with this cultural shift has made for a very uncomfortable social experience for me, because much of my peer group consists of orthodox progressives. My opinions are, I think, quite middle of the road — free speech is good; capitalism makes better societies than socialism; we need to enforce our existing criminal laws; Western society is not uniquely or intrinsically racist — but such beliefs are now regarded by many progressives as “right wing” or even “far right.” This gambit is starting not to work anymore, as activists really overdid it in the pandemic years, but as a cultural meme it still persists among progressives.

So among friends I keep my opinions to myself, not wanting to be a pariah that gets whispered about in my absence. Meanwhile, some peers frequently pronounce strident political opinions to the whole room, even when that room is in my own home, and I just sit there and eat it, while it is implied that my 1990s-liberal worldview is shared by nazis and bigots and far-right lunatics.

This doesn’t feel good. I’ve felt like a non-believer in a highly religious community, one that is now so fundamentalist that its adherents have no idea they even associate with non-believers. Reading about political philosophy has helped me understand why this is happening, but being preoccupied with the subject is not good for my wellbeing.

Since this experiment began, I’ve been (at least temporarily) giving up on even the thought of arguing, when someone goes on a tirade. Because I’m not going to represent my own position (aloud or in my head), I don’t let my mind explore the subject matter at all. Instead I just think about how lucky I am to know so many people, despite our different life paths and worldviews. This much, at least, feels healthier.

*Why would anyone want to attack Western values? Well, doing so is now considered the only way to end capitalism, by those determined to do that. After the Russian Revolution, members of the anti-capitalist movement (aka communist movement) were disappointed that the rest of Europe didn’t fall into revolution. Evidently the proletariat didn’t want to overthrow capitalism; they just wanted better pay and benefits. A group of influential leftist philosophers then determined that Western culture itself was to blame for inculcating its workers with the false belief that they could serve their own interests under capitalism. The strategy then became to undermine Western culture on many fronts, one of which is the speech problematization tactic described above, along with applying ideological influence in the education system and in Hollywood movies, stoking cynicism towards religion and nuclear family structures, and asserting that Western society is uniquely guilty of humanity’s great crimes (namely slavery and colonialism), or even claiming that mammalian traits like greed and self-interest are capitalist constructs. Ideally, the population will become demoralized and hateful of their society and demand revolution. The Soviet Union directly participated in this cultural subversion campaign, which ramped up in the 1960s — here’s a former KGB agent explaining how he was instructed to undermine American culture.

(Edited for clarity Feb 12, 2025.)

February 13, 2025

Politics pokes through

I’ve found so far that while it’s easy enough to opt out of active engagement in political discourse, I can’t keep from hearing about it. Some (certainly not most) people want to bring it up, which is fine, as it is a consequential topic, and it’s on people’s minds.

This means I’m always seeing shapes behind the curtain. I know things are happening and people are reacting to them, and I can only speculate about what they’re reacting to.

Standing back from it all does highlight the ephemeral nature of political news. People are concerned about one thing for a week or two, then it’s something else, yet each time it’s supposed to be the most important thing ever. It’s the same pattern that’s been happening since newspapers were invented. It’s not that today’s developments don’t matter, but not every crisis can be some historical do-or-die moment. When I’m involved and my emotions are wrapped up in my own position on current events, it’s harder to see that.

Another phenomenon that’s become clearer is how people tend to believe their own view of things is simply “what’s happening” rather than the position taken by the media they consume. One friend will tell me of appalling examples of government waste being uncovered, while another is lamenting the gutting of vital aid programs. They are describing the same event, but the entire description of “what’s happening” is based on one talking point surrounding a complex phenomenon with many things to say about it. This is how “current events” are sold to us by media sources — they are 10% telling you what’s happening, and 90% what you should think about it.

I’m also realizing that being interested in politics is kind of a curse. I used to not find it interesting, but now that I do, even the little bits that poke through the curtain get my mind going.

February 17, 2025

Difficulty “checking in” with tariff situation

At the beginning I had planned to check in periodically on the situation with US tariffs affecting my home country of Canada. I’ve been doing this but I feel conflicted about it. I don’t feel meaningfully informed just checking the paper about it, because I regard newspapers as mostly spin, but I don’t want to add any more sources because then I’m back in the habit.

Normally I get my sense of a developing situation from a mix of independent journalists and pundits, through articles, videos, and Substacks. The strategy is to get multiple views and form a sense of what might be happening from people who disagree with each other. I read writers I like (and am biased towards) and also writers that usually annoy me, so that I get a more 3-D view of a topic. I check in to legacy media institutions (newspapers, etc) when I want to understand what is being emphasized about a given story and how it’s being spun. I still have subscriptions to the New York Times in the US and the National Post in Canada for this purpose.

I had planned to check into them, periodically, reading anything related to tariffs, in order to track that situation by looking for the actual facts (what rules are changing) and ignoring the editorializing around it (i.e. what “people are saying” about it / what I’m supposed to think about it). I’ve found this extremely frustrating, because the reporting us mostly what they’re telling me to think about it rather than simply what happened. I then get mad about being told what I’m supposed to think, and wish I never opened the damn thing. I don’t feel like I can get a good sense of this issue from this one source, even when I’m just scanning for facts. But at the same time I don’t want to start reading a slew of Substacks and editorials about it, because then I’m undermining the whole experiment by loading myself with talking points and all the rest of it.

At least this experiment has made it clear how it is basically impossible to gather information about a topic without mostly gathering other people’s thoughts about it. It’s like panning for gold — you need to process large amounts of sand from multiple sites in order to find where the gold (i.e. the truth) is. You simply cannot learn about what has occurred without mostly hearing what you’re supposed to think about it. It seems like you’re either in or out of the panning-for-gold game. You either involve yourself deeply enough that you can responsibly come to an opinion — by consulting multiple sources and perspectives — or you just opt out and let everyone else fight about it. Putting a toe in to track one issue is almost too much exposure to the anger and hatred and I’m not getting much out of it.

What’s more depressing is that I don’t think most people see much of a distinction between the facts journalists report and how they’re told to think about them. Nobody can write about something involving Donald Trump without telling me how he is either Satan or the savior of the Western world. You just can’t get bare bones information on your topic if it relates to such a polarizing figure. This makes me feel like the whole idea of knowing “what’s going on,” even with a single issue, is dubious, because if you open yourself to these information channels you are letting in mostly sophistry. The human mind was not designed to sift the truth out of massively biased information like this, but to succumb to one or another bias and fight for it, right or wrong.

I’m not sure how I’m going to proceed. I want to just step away entirely but I don’t like not knowing how these particular laws are changing. I’ll check back in in a week, but I’m going to add an independent source or two to my legacy source, which means more time, and more emotional investment, just in learning what’s going on with this one story. If I feel like I’m getting dragged back in, I’ll just drop the checking in altogether.

February 26, 2025

Bandwidth replacement works

Last update I lamented the difficulty in actually excluding political content from my life. People keep bringing up political topics and expect me to respond to what they say. I’m torn about whether to mention my politics fast or whether to just refuse to add any energy to the topic and let it move on to something else. I have been unable to achieve this politics-free mind I want to temporarily live in.

I inadvertently lapsed for a bit. I didn’t give up my rules, but I ended up scrolling and engaging with political topics on Reddit, in a subreddit that is not primarily about politics. Since I blocked a bunch of news apps and other politically-related phone activities, my reptile brain is struggling to find something to do in my phone in those moments when I unlock it through muscle memory. So I’ve ended up on Reddit, which I didn’t block and which offers a lot of non-political content, but politics always sneaks its way in. I now block Reddit most of the day, and have unsubscribed from the subreddit in question.

However, I have to say that for the most part, the bandwidth-switching idea has worked. My dive into business and marketing has reawakened the excitement for community-building I had when I began Raptitude, and this has translated into a burst of personal productivity on that front. I haven’t been this excited about my work in a long time. I’m so into my work that I want there to be more hours in the day so I can work more. I am almost entirely unaccustomed to this feeling. I did feel it in the beginning years of my blog, but that was a decade ago.

So the future feels bright and I feel in greater control of where things are going. Being more focused on entrepreneurial activities could explain this increased sense of agency, but I think part of that feeling also comes from being less invested in politics. Politics, for the everyday citizen, is largely about yearning to control what you can’t, and fretting over how it’s all going to hell because you (or your proxies in office) don’t have enough control. I’m focused on a smaller sphere — my business and my audience — and it feels I have tons of agency there.

March 11, 2025

Supply of political opinions far outstrips demand

Basically things have continued in a holding pattern. I avoid political content, and I’m happier when I am successful at this, but some amount always leaks in. I’m not tempted to go and binge-read a bunch of political essays or anything, although I am curious about what ephemeral outrage people are fixating on this month.

There is a very mushy line between news and politics — it’s hard to allow news in without politics. (The inverse isn’t true — you can read political books written years ago, which is mostly what I’d been doing, although it triggers a lot of thoughts about current events.) However I wouldn’t mind checking out some local news if it wasn’t infused with political ideology. Mostly this is not a healthy impulse. It’s just the curiosity of someone standing outside the theatre.

I keep encountering people who want to tell me their political beliefs, and I don’t want to hear them. When this happens, I try to be polite. I don’t mention my experiment (or remind people who know). I just don’t fuel the subject and move on to something else as soon as possible without being rude. Everybody wants to tell others what they believe, but nobody wants to hear what others believe. It’s an interesting human quirk.

When I accidentally encounter news media, I hate it. Not being immersed in media narratives has made the manipulative nature of the news that much more obvious. It’s all very simplistic and divisive, very us-and-them, no real discussion, no learning, no seeking of common ground, no moral complexity. For the most part this experiment has been very positive, as I’m investing my emotional energy in more constructive things, but there are times when I feel really feel despair about what a grip simplistic narratives about the world have on our species.

I’m thinking a lot about what to do when the month is up. I’m nearly 3/4 of the way though the experiment. The thought of jumping back in to the world of hot takes and simple narratives makes me nauseous. I certainly don’t want to invest much time in it. However, the thought of staying out completely is also alienating. Everyone around me is boiling over with opinions and they are determined to tell me what they are. I need to meet some people for whom political narratives are not a big part of day-to-day conversation, because I really can’t stand to hear it anymore. It’s so rare to see any interest in what one’s political opponents are actually saying — not what they’re said to be saying — and that is genuinely depressing.

This has been a fairly negative report so far, sorry. This experiment itself has been mostly excellent overall — bandwidth-switching really works if you absorb yourself in a different topic. The resulting reflection on the state of public discourse has been really hard to process. For someone who values calm and measured discussion, charitable interpretation, and entertaining multiple viewpoints, our culture has reached a kind of nadir. Let’s hope this is as low as it goes.

March 20, 2025

Adding a month

I’ve got a little more than a week left, and I feel like I want to keep this fast going.

It seems like whatever I’m trying to do, it’s a longer process. It’s been so riled up for so long that it can fall right back into it, even without consuming political content. Last week I ended up having an unintended political discussion/debate with a family member. I bristled at a comment that I felt was unfair, and I chose not to bite my tongue, because I resent having to bite my tongue while everyone else is constantly pronouncing their opinions to me. I shouldn’t have. The right thing to do is ignore, change the subject, don’t take the bait. I think I need to practice this for much longer, and be much more disciplined about it.

The conversation was halting and all over the place and mostly counterproductive, although it did help me understand what is so frustrating about the culture war’s effect on society. Clearly, the two of us had totally different frames of reference, totally different working assumptions. I was jumping from topic to topic because my brain sees all political issues as connected through the ideologies that underpin them. That’s why you can tell what someone basically thinks about issue X from what they think about issue Z, even though they’re different issues. After that discussion it occurred to me that most people probably think of politics as being about specific events, not ideologies.

I should have avoided it. Keeping away from the topic is very difficult, because I see political tribalism making things worse every day, and I cannot stop people from constantly telling me their opinions. I have a lot to say about the subject of tribalism and hyper-partisanship, and I think I have a responsibility to say something about it. But I need to say it in an organized way that is relatable to others, otherwise it just creates more misunderstanding.

I guess I didn’t realize how upset I still am at the harms of the culture war, even after six weeks of cutting off political content the best I can. I see liberalism getting eroded away by the side that is supposed to defend it, and I feel like I need to say something, which violates my fast. I am really struggling with the conflict between wanting to highlight this problem to my fellow liberals, and wanting to keep the whole burning mess out of my head for the sake of my own sanity. I want to do both of those things, but I need to do the fast first, then come back to it with a clear head.

The final output of this experiment

Since the start I’ve been wondering what’s going to happen when I stop the fast, and what will I have gained, if I just jump back into it. Well, now I think I know.

However long my fast ends up being, when it’s over I think the healthy thing is to finally write about how I feel. This will help me to at least understand my own thoughts, and be able to talk about politics judiciously and responsibly. The main reason I write in the first place is to clarify my thoughts and feelings. When I express my thoughts aloud without having written about them, they come out muddled and fragmented. I need to do that with politics. I’m not going to publish any of this writing on Raptitude, or probably anywhere else. But I need to write about it so that I can distill my feelings into distinct points that are easy to follow. During my recent accidental political conversation, I’m sure I came off as being all over the place, because to me all the issues connect quite obviously through their ideological roots. I realize now that normal people, who do not binge-listen 50 straight audiobooks on political ideology, probably don’t see recognizable ideologies behind the messaging that makes up news content. They take it as a face-value recounting of world events.

So this fast will conclude with a writing project. I’ll sit down, and for the first time since I’ve been thinking about all this stuff, I’m going to represent my perspective in the written word. That way I’ll be prepared to talk about it in a way that is relatable to more people, when I do emerge from my fast. The purpose is not to try to unleash a manifesto on the world, but to teach myself to be able to talk about what I’ve noticed in a way that people are more likely to understand and relate to.

I’m not ready to do that yet. I think I’ll probably continue the fast through April at least. I won’t stop the fast until I’m ready to write. I’ll be focusing on two things — my business, and chess — until then.

***