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How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?
I consider myself psychologically even-keeled and don't doomscroll, but unless you actively try to avoid information, nasty stuff inevitably seeps through. For instance, I saw in the last 24 hours a surveillance video of someone carjacking a poor helpless woman at the gas station, and another who wrote that they know of a backyard puppy breeder who has four bitches constantly getting pregnant and living in filth just to cheaply breed and sell puppies for some absurd sum. I think the normal reaction is to feel a combination of anger and sadness. But rationally, that emotional response seems pointless. It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.
I realized that it would be much simpler to frame everything as nature and natural. Crying over a mouse being gobbled up by an owl seems as pointless as doing the same for a fly being caught by a Venus flytrap or a blueberry being decomposed by fungi. These things just happen. I'm not super familiar with zen or its equivalent. Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
At any rate, I plan to remind myself of this whenever I feel any emotion the next time I see a headline that some DA dropped charges against repeat criminals or some author pulled her novel because some nobody complained that she was culturally appropriating an oppressed minority group. Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.
I think the stoic framework is the healthy one in most cases. There are things you can control: what you do, how you react, and what you say. The rest is simply outside of your control. You cannot make the DA press charges, so you don’t need to worry about the outcome here. The universe doesn’t owe you anything and what it does give you is best held lightly as it can be just as easily taken. Enjoy it, but don’t get attached to it.
That seems like abdicating responsibility. DAs are often elected. A US citizen is capable of doing many things that would damage their re-election chances. You arguably have a duty to draw attention to their transgressions if you're upset.
You still can’t force him to do anything the best you can do is apply pressure or perhaps remove him. Doing something is better than doing nothing, but you still can’t force things to go your way.
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