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I am married now and don't really do the whole dating thing. But I am still on the lookout for new friends, and although friendship is lower stake, politics does seem to matter a little more with friends than it used to.
The underlying problem is that people seem to inhabit entirely different worlds nowadays depending on their politics. Your social media bubble and news diet can make your perception of the world completely different from that of your neighbors. The news stories you know about, the 'must watch' shows, the latest international incidents, etc. Its just hard to culturally connect with someone that has nothing in common with me. I am politically libertarian, and I was never gonna agree with their politics in the first place, but I have at least learned how to handle political disagreements in a friendly way. I don't know how to handle disagreements about reality itself.
The pandemic seemed to have made this far worse, with fewer people inhabiting a shared local reality, and instead inhabiting a shared political reality in the online space. But the pandemic also created a filter for shared local reality that I have been enjoying. All the people who aren't very worried about the pandemic tend to be the people out in the world interacting with each other. As long as I am someplace that is fully optional to be in (like a restaurant, and not like a school or grocery store) then I can safely assume I share at least some of my perception of reality with the people around me.
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