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What can you do when politics has sucked all the life out of you?

By “you,” I mean not the activists or the pundits, but rather ordinary run-of-the mill Democratic voters who had never paid as much attention or become so afraid until Donald Trump came along. 

You felt inundated by the endless presidential campaign but couldn’t tear yourself away. Another day, another outrage, another fear. Then, for God’s sake, he wins.

You can’t imagine how that happened, and you don’t know what to do.

Now, many people — pundits, experts, call them “mobilized people” — are predicting what’s going to happen, and talking about things like authoritarianism, guardrails, international anti-incumbency, realignment and, of course, threats to democracy.

That’s not your world. Big Politics is so distant from your everyday life. “Mobilized people” live in one world. You live in another.

So, let’s ignore the big shots and focus on you and the things that you can do to recover and get on with your life. 

These aren’t escapes. They are personal strategies for ordinary people that turn out to be far more than personal in their own quiet but crucial way. Because getting on with your life is important not just for your sanity. It’s also crucial for democracy itself.

The strategies include both disengagement and engagement. The key is to get the right mix of the two.

Be A Thinker, Not A User

You need to disengage from cable news and social media, wily menaces that led you astray. Every day you turned to them. Every day they made you angry and sad. Every day you talked to the same people about them. The platforms were poison pens that unintentionally but powerfully led you astray.

Every damn thing became about politics. But that’s a narrow view of politics, as if the country, the world, and your life solely depended on the 2024 election.

As it turned out, the anti-Trump insights about Trump’s appeal weren’t insightful at all. 

If they gave an Emmy for preaching to the choir, MSNBC would win it hands down.

Schools, sewers, good and bad neighbors, favorite gathering places, family — all of those are more pressing as well as more rewarding.

Technically, MSNBC and other cable news networks are not social media. Nevertheless, they so much resemble the harm social media does generally.

Social media followers become users rather than thinkers — victims of what Christine Rosin calls  These platforms, she says, “have become our new character-forming institutions. They have invaded the private world of existing institutions such as the family and become indispensable in the public world of work and leisure.”

Social media diminishes our social skills. It narrows our ability to interact with others. Face to face, what’s that? It disembodies us and makes us less human. It harms our ability to step back and think.

It also inhibits our ability to do the kinds of personal, grassroots reengagement necessary to thrive in the post-2024 world. Engagement requires disengagement too.

Take Back That Well-Ordered Life

National politics is a false idol that blurs and eliminates so many important things between up there in D.C. and down here where you live. It’s as if our entire lives depended on the 2024 presidential race.

Face it. No matter how much you worry about what Donald Trump will do, you have many more pressing and invigorating things in your life right here and right now. Like your kids, your neighborhood and your community.

One of the ways to counter post-election despair is to get back to work and to reengage and reinvigorate all the pleasures and struggles of daily life. Schools, sewers, good and bad neighbors, favorite gathering places, family — all of those are more pressing as well as more rewarding.

As they often say about Lahaina, community-driven solutions are crucial.

Who knows what Trump is going to do? The more certain you are about him, the more paralyzed you are going to be.

The key is to understand that, Trump or not, your life, as , is “a portfolio of struggles that is found in the stuff of a well-ordered life.”

There is a lots of high-level talk out there about democracy post-2024 — peaceful transfer of power, guardrails, stuff like that. But democracy also requires citizens who learn, by doing, the skills and attitudes that democracy needs.

That is what the reengagement tries to do.

If you want an example of a good balance between disengagement and engagement, take a look at the work of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, who were . You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate it, and you don’t have to be religious to learn from it.

Their lesson is this: We live in a flawed world. Sometimes it’s essential to retreat from it and to contemplate, free your mind, maybe think about some things of a vaguer, more transcendent order. At other times, it’s necessary to engage. The process of contemplation and action go hand in hand.

I make no predictions about what the Trump era is going to be like. Pay attention to the pundits at your own risk.

And it is a risk. My point here is not to predict but to energize, to keep you from being crippled by your fears. To not be users, but rather doers.

I’m not trying to be an optimist. Who knows what Trump is going to do? The more certain you are about him, the more paralyzed you are going to be.

I am a realist. Whatever happens, whichever members of the cottage industry of Trump predictors (if any) turn out to be right, you’ve got a life to live right now. Hopefully a well-ordered life filled with private spaces and contemplation opportunities that allow you to escape the insanity that has eaten away at your humanity, as well as the chance to engage in activities that enrich the people and places close to you.