A Fantastic World of Passions

From ¹ Om Malik, quoting A Beginner's Guide to Japan :

Nowhere else I’ve been, in fact, are individuals so disengaged from the political domain; my Japanese friends assume they can no more address their leaders than they can a group of look-alike men in suits in a corporate boardroom with the doors locked and the curtains drawn. So they turn their backs on the public sphere, and make fantastic worlds out of their passions, counter-societies out of their hobbies.

This resonates. I think there’s a degree to which I have been turning away from the public sphere and towards my hobbies more and more over time. Some of this is changing where I am in my career. Some of this was moving away from Providence and consciously deciding to be uninvolved in local politics and news. Some of this was the despair of the first, and now second Trump presidency. But overtime, I’ve tried to put more time into things like playing with my band (just over a year now!), playing volleyball (just over 3 years now, with a 7 month break for injuries), my website, etc.

At times, I’ve worried this is unhealthy or immoral. Correction, no past tense– I worry this is unhealthy or immoral.

Other times I wonder if our greatest failures are from people who have turned entirely to the public sphere at the cost of their hobbies. How many bedroom warriors on Twitter, or living room screechers watching Fox News or OAN, or gym rat ragers listening to Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan are unnaturally focused on the public sphere? How many of these people are so preoccupied with politics, and specifically what the government is or isn’t doing, that they’re failing to live their lives?

This form of bizarre populist politics as a hobby is toxic. As the kids these day say, go touch grass. They are so focused on oppressing people whose lives are not actually impacting them at all. I can’t believe that if they turned toward a different set of passions or hobbies and not the “public sphere”, all the manufactured outrage would disappear and the world would be better.