Sad Citizens: Democratic Engagement in Turbulent Times

Lindsay: Hi, it’s Lindsay Shingler, host of Talking Policy. We are well into Spring 2025, and I have a question for you:

How are you feeling? How are you feeling about the state of the world, the state of the country? How are you feeling about your life, and about the future? If you’ve been worried or depressed, you’re not alone.

[Anonymous: “I feel very disheartened and, like, dispirited each day that something new happens because it’s just one after the other. There’s a new executive order; there’s a new bill they’re trying to pass… Something comes every day and it’s a lot of negative each day with seeing each headline.”]

[Darren Cunningham: “Politics today make me feel kind of just bummed out, just overwhelmed by so much happening at once. You feel like you can’t keep up with it, and when you do keep up with it, it just kind of makes you sad and you feel powerless to change it in some ways.”]

[Anonymous: “When I read the news, it makes me feel anxious. We have breaking news every day, multiple times a day, and it’s always negative.”]

[Ty McGlynn: “When I read the news, I feel scared, a little timid, a little nervous about what’s going on in the world.”]

What are these feelings trying to tell us? And what are we supposed to do about them?

[Anonymous: “I’m trying to tell myself that although things seem really bad, the sky hasn’t fallen yet and maybe it won’t… I think that we have to lean into our negative feelings and still be engaged and not bury our heads because it could just come crashing down on you later if you don’t engage now.”]

[Ty McGlynn: “I think you definitely should stay engaged in politics, even if it makes you depressed, or makes you scared.”]

[Anonymous: “I’m not a citizen of the United States, so I feel more that I’m a victim of the politics around me, and I don’t have the ability to engage and change anything about it. So I’m really just on the recipient end of politics, which I think motivates you more to turn a blind eye to it because you feel so powerless about it.”]

[Darren Cunningham: “The news cycle’s moving very quickly, and at a certain point you just kind of are like, ‘Do I want to keep up with this? You know, every time I’m looking at my phone to check the headlines, it’s making me sad.’ It does make you want to disengage a little more.”]

Today, I’m going to talk with a friend and colleague to unpack why politics makes people depressed, and what we can do about it. Christopher Ojeda is a political scientist at UC Merced who has studied the links between politics and depression. Together, we’re going to think about how to balance our own personal well-being with the demands of being a citizen of a democracy.

Christopher, welcome to Talking Policy. Actually, welcome back to Talking Policy.

Christopher: Thank you for having me. It’s nice to be back.

Lindsay: So you have a new book coming out in June called The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters. Why did you write this book?

Christopher: It really begins with my childhood. I grew up in a single parent home with several siblings, and my mother didn’t have a college education, so she had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. And when I went to graduate school and began writing my dissertation, I was writing about something called the income participation gap, which is the fact that the people who are richer participate more in politics than people who are poor in the United States. And a lot of people had written about this, but I felt like the literature didn’t really reflect my experiences growing up. And one thing I thought could help us understand this gap was depression, right?

We know that poverty is a huge risk factor for depression, and I thought maybe people who are depressed are less participative in politics. And so one chapter of my dissertation looked at depression as this demobilizing force in politics, and people became very interested in this particular chapter. I published it as a paper. It started to get cited a lot. People wanted to talk to me about it. And so I kept writing about depression.

And then in 2016, after Trump was elected, I had a good friend who became very, very depressed. And I think some of that had to do with her preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, not getting elected. I think she was very excited about the prospect of witnessing the United States’ first female president. She also cared a lot about the climate. I think she was worried about what would happen to the climate. And I saw her fall into a deep depression following Trump’s election.

And it was then that I began to think, can politics make us depressed? For years, I had been writing about how feelings of depression could make us less participative, but I hadn’t really considered the possibility that politics itself can be a source of depression. And so it was in large part because of her experiences that I began to think about the possibility of this book.

And then I waited because I wasn’t sure I could write about depression as a political scientist. Typically, that’s a topic that’s reserved for psychologists or psychiatrists, or even maybe sociologists. So I waited several years, and it was during the pandemic that we saw a really steep decline in the mental health of people around the world, and I thought, “Okay, I have to write this book. Someone’s got to write a book about how politics is depressing, because we’re all seeing it, we’re all feeling it.” And that’s when The Sad Citizen was born.

Lindsay: Yeah, I cannot think of a book more relevant to exactly where we are, so I’m really glad that you wrote this book.

So, okay, let’s talk about feelings. Lots of things are constantly affecting the way that we feel every day, from, you know, our jobs, traffic, relationships, whether we have a bad diagnosis. All of these things are affecting us all the time and they are things that impact how we feel about ourselves, how we look out at the world around us.

Politics is this kind of other thing that is kind of outside of our lives. It’s outside of all these other things that are actually very much directly in my life. It’s this other thing that’s kind of like happening in the atmosphere all the time, like operating in the background all the time. So it’s interesting to think about that, like you said, as a cause of impacting feelings in the way that all these other things impact my feelings, which is much more intuitive. So talk us through, how do politics affect the way that we feel?

Christopher: Yeah, it’s a great question, and to answer that I actually want to step back and answer an even simpler question, which is just like, how does anything make us feel emotional? And really, it starts with some kind of stressor. Like, there’s some change in the world, and we interpret that change as relevant to some goal we have, right?

I mean, you mentioned traffic, so let’s just talk about traffic for a second. We all sit in traffic all the time. And you could imagine, you’re on your way to a meeting and you hit traffic. And if that meeting’s important to you—maybe it’s an interview and you’re like, “If I’m late to this meeting, I’m not going to get that job”—you become anxious, like, you’re nervous. “Am I going to make it on time?” And that affects your behavior. Maybe you start to speed, maybe you get really aggressive, you want to get to the meeting on time. But maybe it’s a meeting you don’t want to go to and you’re like, “Oh, this meeting’s going to be so boring. I don’t want to go to it.” And the traffic makes you feel relief! You’re like, “Oh, now I have an excuse for skipping the meeting.” So we feel emotions when something happens in the world that is relevant to a goal we have, and how it affects our goal will determine what kind of emotion we feel.

So emotions start with some kind of change in the world, and politics is full of change. Politics is about who gets what, when, and how. And I’m studying politics mostly in advanced western democracies, especially the United States. So I’m really thinking about how do these kinds of systems bring about changes that are relevant to our goals. And so one question we might have is like, what kinds of goals do we have in politics?

One goal is having our political preferences fulfilled. Maybe we want certain policies passed, we want certain candidates elected because we have some vision of the world and what makes the world a good place. Another goal is about things of their own personal value. I think about this as health, wealth, home, and family, right? We care about our health, we care about our money, we care about our property, and we care about our relationships with others, our family, or it could be friends, and policies can have direct material effects on those things that we value.

And so politics has the potential to really make us anxious, if it’s threatening those things, or make us proud—if we think the United States is doing a good job on the national stage, maybe we feel some pride. And so politics can be an immense source of emotions, and political scientists have written about a lot of different emotions. They write about anger, they write about fear and enthusiasm, they write about anxiety. They just had never written about sadness and depression.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s interesting. I like how you put it, say it again. Politics is…

Christopher: Politics is about who gets what, when, and how.

Lindsay: Exactly. I mean, how many times have you heard somebody say, like, “I don’t like politics. I stay out of politics.” But actually, politics is just the business of, like, everything that impacts our life, right?

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely.

Lindsay: It’s the taxes that we pay, it’s whether our water is clean, it’s how we organize our society. So politics is sort of embedded in so many things that impact our lives.

Christopher: It really is embedded, and because of scarcity, not everyone can get what they want. You know, only one person can be president, and maybe you want a different person to be president than I want, but the election’s going to decide which of us gets what we want. And so someone’s going to be left with less than what they want, and other people might get more of what they want. And so there’s always this tension and this competition between different groups in society, over who gets what, when, and how.

There’s constant stressors, there’s constant change. And sometimes that change is aligned with our goals, and sometimes it’s not aligned with our goals, and that’s where emotions come in.

Lindsay: Yeah, yeah. We’re thinking a lot today about kind of the harder emotions: sadness, depression. But like, I can remember, speaking of whether your candidate wins or loses in an election, I was living in Washington, D.C. when Barack Obama was elected for the first time. And I can remember, you know, being in a café with friends when we got the news and there was tears and embraces, and people were flooding out into the streets, and there was spontaneous marches to the Washington Monument.

But what that was jubilation, you know, it was a sense of joy and gladness and relief. So yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, politics can make us feel just all kinds of things.

Christopher: For sure, I remember I was in graduate school when the Supreme Court passed the case that allowed for gay marriage. And I’m a gay man, and I felt such jubilation. I remember crying, reading that story. It was such a relief to know like, oh, the United States Supreme Court is like bestowing this right upon me that I previously didn’t have. And it was really an emotional day for me and so many people I know.

Lindsay: Oh my gosh, yeah. So your book is focused really on one kind of set of emotions, which is this kind of sadness to depression spectrum. What do we know about the extent to which politics produces this kind of an emotional response, and like, what causes it?

Christopher: Yeah, that’s a great question, and before I answer it, I want to touch on something you had just mentioned, which is, in the book, I’m looking at the spectrum of emotions that we’ve sort of just been calling “depression,” and I want to clarify what I mean by that, because I think oftentimes when people hear the term depression, they think of major depressive disorder. This, like, clinical mental illness. And that is the most extreme instance of what I’m studying. I’m really studying anything that falls in what I think of [as] this family of emotions that includes depression, includes sadness, includes disappointment, it could be melancholia, or grief. And so, you know, the most severe cases are people who are experiencing major depressive disorder, but most people do not experience clinical depression in their lives. But lots of people do experience disappointment, and disappointment may not be a clinical disorder, but it can still feel painful and it can still have ramifications for how we go about our lives and how we participate in politics. So it was important to me that I capture not just the most intense versions of this emotion, but even the least intense versions of these emotions. So I do study the whole range, but just as a shorthand, I sort of refer to this family of emotions as “depression.”

In terms of your question, how is politics making us feel depressed? Well, depression is a response to irrevocable loss. So something’s taken away from us, and we believe that it is impossible to get back. And I think the sort of quintessential example of this is the death of a loved one and feeling grief, right? We lose a loved one, we know that they’re not coming back, and that makes us grieve. We cry, we don’t want to get out of bed, we withdraw from social life. And so when I was writing the book, I was starting with this idea that depression is a response to irrevocable loss. And where does politics produce irrevocable losses? Where do we see that occurring? And I think one of the most obvious places is elections, right?

Elections, by definition, produce winners and losers. And so there is a loss, and if you’re a candidate and you lose that seat, you can’t get it back at least until the next election. So it’s irrevocable, at least until there’s another election. But also, the policymaking process produces winners and losers. The judicial process produces winners or losers. And so that’s sort of like a theoretical explanation for how politics is depressing.

[Anonymous: “Politics used to make me feel like I could be engaged in a positive way with something, and now it feels like I don’t have any control over anything that’s going on…and helpless.”]

Lindsay: So you mentioned, like, loss in terms of an election, but loss could be defined even more broadly or, like, squidgier. Like, loss of an idea that we believed, right?

Christopher: For sure.

Lindsay: About ourselves, about who we are.

To what extent is depression—again, defining it broadly, as you said, as a kind of a family of emotions—to what extent is it also related to a lack, or I guess maybe a loss of control?

Because when I think about, in my own life, what might push me over to a place of despair, it’s if I think there’s literally nothing I can do about this.

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. So when we experience loss, we feel like we have no control in this situation, we might think that that loss is just not something we can get back. And that sense of a lack of control can be really what makes the loss depressing, as opposed to feeling angry about it. Like if you think back to the early years of the Obama administration, do you remember the Tea Party? The rise of the Tea Party?

Lindsay: Oh yeah, it feels like a million years ago, but yeah, I remember it.

Christopher: Right. So the Tea Party, they had a long list of grievances. And grievances—that’s just another word for losses. They’re saying, “We’ve experienced all these losses,” but they were not depressed. They were angry, and they were angry because they felt like they still had some control over the situation. “If we get out to the streets and we march, if we get Tea Party members elected to Congress, we can recover these losses.” And so when we think the losses are recoverable, that’s when we feel anger, and when we think the losses are unrecoverable, that’s when we feel depressed.

And this is actually really important, because it means that not everyone is equally susceptible to feeling depressed. People who are more marginalized, who are traditionally underrepresented, who are poor or have fewer resources, they’re more likely to see political losses as depressing because they don’t have the means or the ability to get them back. People who have more privilege, more money, they’re more likely to respond to loss with anger. And so in a way, I think of this as, like, the political cycle of depression, which is: People who are already on the margins of society feel like there’s nothing they can do. Depression then keeps them from becoming engaged. And so it really allows the process to sort of perpetuate itself.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s interesting, because when I think about causes of depression, the politics piece is really different from all these other things that we think of as more personal.

A lot of these things, if it’s happening at kind of a very personal level, there is some measure of control, like individual control you have over that. Whereas political stuff, if you want to change something, that’s going to take some time, and that’s going to take some coordination and collective action. And so it’s like, what you are able to do is you can vote, you can donate, you can protest, you can volunteer, but the steps connecting the dots between your actions and the outcome that you want seem further removed than it is kind of at the personal level, where you can say, “Here’s what I’m going to do in my life to contend with this personal thing that I’m facing.”

Christopher: No, you’re absolutely right. I think democracy by definition means that no one person is in control of what happens in politics, right? Whereas in our personal lives, we do have a lot more control over what happens. And so it’s surprising to me that political scientists hadn’t studied depression sooner, given the fact that, like, what happens in politics is just so often out of our control. I mean, we can vote, but our vote is never the decisive tie-breaking vote in an election, right? So this is why we see freeriding, this is why people sit out. I have a friend who just says, “I don’t vote because it’s never going to decide the election. It’s going to be the same outcome whether I go to the polls or sit at home.” So there is this sense that politics is beyond our control.

So, you know, so far when we’ve talked about politics being depressing, we’ve really focused on sort of being contained within the political world. Like we’re voters, we go to the polls, and our candidate loses. But politics also enters our personal lives a lot. And this is what I was saying earlier about health, wealth, family and home.

I did a lot of interviews of mental health professionals, and one of the things I heard from almost every single one of them is the way politics disrupts our personal relationships. So I remember talking to this one therapist who was telling me about this adolescent girl that she was seeing. And this girl was very, very depressed because she would go to school, and she had different political views than her classmates, and her classmates would bully her for it. And it was this sense that political polarization has made it hard for her to feel included in the social relationships at her school. So she had this sort of loss of friendship, this loss of feeling comfortable at school, and it was depressing to her.

And so I think, you know we can talk about sort of politics being depressing, in terms of elections, or the policymaking process, or what sorts of cases get decided by the Supreme Court. But I think the way that politics is most depressing is when it enters our personal lives and it disrupts our relationships with others.

Yes, it can be depressing when our political preferences don’t get fulfilled, but it’s extremely depressing when it affects our health, wealth, family and home.

Lindsay: Oh my gosh, yeah. Wow. That’s something that I resonate so strongly with. Especially, you know, I think back to—I don’t know when, when did things get so polarized? Where do we go back? But even in like the George W. Bush years, where we were marginally less polarized as a country than we are now, my family, like everyone’s family, has political divisions that are always kind of uncomfortable, but maybe you can kind of laugh about them or you make fun of each other or whatever.

Now that things are so polarized, and so kind of, you know, ratcheted up, orders of magnitude beyond what they’ve ever been, at least in my lifetime, it does have an impact on your relationships with family.

It casts like this really deeply felt shadow. And you’re right, these are our support systems. This is our fabric, you know? And so when walls start to go up, when there start to be chills in the room, things that we can’t talk about that are really important to us with the people who are our network…

Yeah, I just resonate with that really strongly. I think I’m probably one of a lot of people who are contending with that, you know, there’s all this stuff happening and it’s literally changing relationships that I care about.

Christopher: For sure. And, you know, it goes both ways.

I mean, I remember talking to one mental health professional who was telling me about one of her colleagues at her practice, who had to terminate a relationship with the client because she felt like she couldn’t do a good job helping them because of these political divisions.

And, you know, I’ll just give you a little peek into the book writing process, actually. In my original proposal for this book, I did not think I was going to be looking at personal relationships, and I didn’t even have a chapter on personal relationships in the original proposal. And then I’m doing all these interviews and I just keep hearing from one mental health professional after another.

It’s the personal relationships. It’s this polarization, this animosity that we’ve developed towards people of the other party that is getting in the way of families, of friendships, and that’s what is causing people to feel depressed. And so I ended up adding a chapter to the book that focused solely on polarization and the politicization of personal relationships. It’s just so important.

Lindsay: Yeah. A couple data points from your book. You found that depression is consistently and negatively associated with political participation in the U.S., European countries, and Israel.

And one thing that I kind of said, “Oh, wow” when I read it was that, whether or not you say that you’re depressed is the number three determinant of electoral turnout, after age and education level. Is that right?

Christopher: Yeah, so in a lot of my earlier research, I find that depression is one of the most consistent and strongest predictors of who votes and who doesn’t vote in advanced Western democracies.

So this is from some earlier work with a co-author of mine, Claudia Landwehr. We published a paper in the American Political Science Review, and we looked at feelings of depression and turnout across countries in Europe, and it was just consistently and strongly predictive of turnout.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s incredible.

In your book, you go into kind of what depression means, what it feels like, what it looks like, depressio being Latin for “sinking.” And I can kind of see this sort of sinking in water, and this grayness and, you know, having not been clinically depressed, I don’t know what that feels like, but all of us can relate to deep sadness, to deep melancholy, and kind of what that even feels like in our bodies. So talk to us a little bit about what it does to us, to our bodies, but then what it does to us in terms of how or whether we engage in our country’s political life.

Christopher: So you touched on the psychosomatic components of depression, this like sinking feeling we have, it’s like a weight on our shoulders or our limbs feel really heavy. Like it’s just hard to move. And in the most extreme cases, it’s just hard to get out of bed. But depression’s also characterized by the presence of these negative feelings—feeling sad, feeling lonely—and the absence of positive feelings, so like the absence of happiness, the absence of hopefulness. And it’s also sort of characterized by a loss of that interpersonal connection. So, like, I’d mentioned feeling lonely, feeling like, you know, no one’s there to support you. And what these feelings do to us, and that sort of weight on our shoulders does, is it leads us to withdraw from political life [and] from social life.

And so it has a really demobilizing effect. And what I mean by demobilizing, it’s like people who are depressed, they don’t vote, they don’t take to the streets, they don’t contact their elected officials, they don’t donate money, so on and so forth.

There is also this negativity bias that’s associated with depression. Depression can lead to this, like, negative thought spiral, right? I mean, I feel like so many of us can relate. Like one small bad thing happens, and then suddenly we’re thinking everything in our life is going wrong, and it’s all you can see, it’s all you can think about. And that can lead us to also sort of feel less satisfied with how things are going in politics, less trusting of institutions, less efficacious. So we feel less confident in our ability to participate, we feel less confident in the responsiveness of politicians to what we want. And so it really makes us less engaged, on the whole, as citizens.

Lindsay: Can stoking depression be a political strategy? If depression immobilizes voters, is this a tactic to overwhelm us? Could it be, have you ever seen that?

Christopher: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I mean, we’re all familiar with politicians who engage in fear mongering, or we’re all familiar with, you know, the rise of angertainment, is what some people call it.

In the book, I sort of wonder about the possibility of what my friend calls “suppression through depression,” which is the idea that maybe politicians can sort of demobilize the opposition by making them feel depressed. And I actually start the book with this example from the 2022 midterm election. So Joe Biden was president, but you remember he was very unpopular going into the midterm elections. There was, like, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, he had all this trouble getting his spending bill through Congress. And in general, Democrats were feeling very disappointed in his performance and in the performance of the Democratic Party.

And this really threatened the Democrats’ majority in Congress, and they really couldn’t afford to lose very many seats. And there was the concern that if Democrats are disappointed, they’re not going to turn out to vote in the midterm election. And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, people would be asking him, “What are the Republicans going to do if they retake the Senate? What sort of policies are you going to pass?” And he would just say, “Well, you know, you’ll find out when that happens.” And what he was trying to do was avoid taking a stand, saying anything that was going to turn Democrats’ disappointment into anxiety about a Republican Congress, because that anxiety could be mobilizing.

He wanted the focus to stay on Biden’s poor performance, and to make sure that Democrats remained disappointed, or maybe their disappointment would even deepen. So, this is where this idea of suppression through depression comes from. And so I do think it is potentially a tactic politicians can use to demobilize the opposition.

[Darren Cunningham: “I think we should engage in politics when it makes us feel bad, because that’s usually the time when politics is the most important. If everything in politics seems like it’s going well, you might not feel as compelled to get engaged and you might think, ‘Okay, everything’s working, why do I need to get engaged? Why do I even need to pay attention to this?’ Whereas if things are happening routinely that are kind of making you sad or angry, upset in any way, I think that’s when you really need to start engaging more, as difficult as it is.”]

Lindsay: So your book highlights a really fundamental tension, which is, you know, what are we supposed to do when what is good for democracy, which we value very much, is bad for our mental health, for our wellbeing?

We need to be informed, we need to participate. But doing that is making me feel things that are having an impact on my life. And so there’s this really deep kind of tension woven throughout your book. I mean, what do you think the answer is to that? What are we supposed to do?

Christopher: This is a great question and throughout the book, I try to raise this question, like, “What do we do when what’s good for democracy is bad for our mental wellbeing, or vice versa?” And just to sharpen that point, I’ll give you an example. I mean, we’ve been talking about elections a lot, but I’ll go back to elections because we’re all familiar with them.

Democracy requires elections, and we all want democracy, we want elections. But elections necessarily produce winners and losers, and that losing can be painful. And so this is a place where we see that tension between something that’s good for democracy and potentially something that is bad for our mental wellbeing.

I’ll give you just another example. So we want an electorate that’s informed, right? We think people should be aware of what’s going on. They should have some idea of what promises politicians are making, what promises politicians are keeping, what they’re doing, whether they should be held accountable at the next election. But the process of staying informed about politics can be depressing when we learn about, you know, policies that get passed that we think about as a loss, or maybe we want a policy to get passed and it fails in Congress or it fails at the state legislature, and that can feel depressing. And so there’s this tension between a responsible public that’s informed, but also a public that is sort of maintaining its wellbeing.

And we can think about resolving that tension in two ways. One, as a political scientist, I might think about like, well, how can we redesign democratic institutions so that they don’t leave the public feeling depressed? But another way we can think about resolving that tension is at the personal level, like what should I do personally to protect my own wellbeing, but also to continue to be an engaged democratic citizen?

There’s a few answers out there, and in order to find out what those answers were, I actually went to a bunch of popular psychology websites, because people are increasingly turning to the internet for advice about how to cope. And so I want to know, well, what kind of advice is out there? What are psychologists and psychiatrists and mental health professionals saying?

And the number one thing I saw is: it’s okay to turn off the news. It’s okay to step away, and you don’t have to be following the news all the time. And that was so powerful to me because I am a news junkie. I love following politics. I mean, this is partly why I became a political scientist, but sometimes it is just too much.

And then I want to step away, and I will step away, but then I feel guilty about it. And then that guilt eats into me. I lose this sense of who I am. Like, “Oh, I thought I was someone who is politically informed and now I’m not, and I feel bad about it.” And so it doesn’t really help solve the problem.

So what I want to say is, like, give yourself permission to step away when politics feels like it’s too much. You know, if we go back to what we were saying earlier about control, right? By definition in a democracy, no one person is supposed to have control over what happens. And so, you know, maybe for the next week, I need time off and you’re engaged, Lindsay, and then maybe the following week, I’m ready to become engaged again and you take a week off.

I think it’s okay for people to step away, if they need to sort of just re-energize before they step back into the public sphere.

Lindsay: I have talked to so many friends who have said the same thing. Like, I’m having to reduce my level of reading the news. I have to just turn it off. You know, I get one day a week where I read the news, or my husband and I talk about it only at these allotted times, because we can’t take this on 24/7. Which makes total sense.

But on the other hand, there is this worry, right, that does this mean I’m disengaging from something at a moment of great peril. And are people disengaging? I mean, I don’t have any evidence on this. I’m sure you do, and I want to hear what the evidence is, but, you know, there’s sort of a general sense that maybe the younger generation is less engaged and feeling a little more kind of nihilistic about the state of the world.

And certainly young people are way more attuned to kind of mental health and their own wellbeing and boundaries than I was when I was 20, so kudos to them. But then I worry sometimes like, are people just going to disengage? Like, if politics makes me feel this way, I won’t engage in politics. And we all know what happens when that happens.

Christopher: Yeah, it’s a thorny problem. I mean, because on the one hand, I’m saying like, it’s okay to step away. It’s okay to disengage. Not permanently, you know, that’s not what I’m suggesting, but I’m saying, like, if you need a break, take a little break. And then when you’re ready to re-engage, you can do that.

But I do think it is concerning if a whole group of people is just sort of saying, “You know what, I’m just not going to do politics at all because it’s just so toxic and it’s so vitriolic that it’s just not for me.” And that’s, like, a larger sense of disengagement than what I’m recommending. And I think if that’s happening, then that really is cause for concern.

I’m always uncertain about these generational arguments because I think it’s like a tale as old as time that like, you know, there’s sort of “these kids these days”, and we know that it often takes younger people well into their young adulthood before they become fully engaged citizens, right? I mean, turnout increases substantially over their twenties before it sort of reaches a level that’s typical of older adults. And so, you know, I think we have to wait and see to know for sure whether this generation is largely disengaged, or if they’re just taking a little bit longer to sort of matriculate.

Lindsay: Yeah. One of the things that comes out in your book that I really liked is that, you know, these emotions, these feelings are important kind of signals that we need to pay attention to, that something is wrong. And so our goal shouldn’t necessarily be that we don’t want to have those feelings at all, because they’re telling us something.

I like what you’re saying about kind of finding balance, that maybe there’s some kind of a level that we all have to determine for ourselves is the place that we feel it’s important to be in terms of engagement as responsible citizens, as part of our communities. And so we want to stay informed, we want to participate in certain ways.

And then there’s kind of all of the rest of our energy that we have. Because all of that takes energy, it’s sapping us of energy, we’re using our energy. And so then whatever is left after we’ve kind of reached that acceptable point of, I’m informed. My head is not in the sand. I do care. I’m participating in these ways. But I’m going to use the rest of my energy kind of building my strength back, you know, with things like relationships, friendship, music, all the rest of life that kind of strengthens [and] buoys us.

I guess the relationships piece is just a giant part of kind of the antidote to this, and to keeping that strength that we need to engage. Because again, I mean, we have an assumption on the podcast that political engagement is the right thing to do. We should do it, especially when it feels bad. It’s probably a signal that it’s really important.

Christopher: Yeah, absolutely, and I’m very pro-political engagement. And one thing that I did see mental health professionals recommend online is engagement as a way of dealing with these feelings of depression.

And I think there’s something to it. I mean, I think everyone has to decide for themselves, but engaging can give you a sense of control. It can also give you some hope. You know, I just mentioned, like, I had to stop consuming news and I sort of went to this push notification news diet, which is not great, but that’s what I was doing for a while because that’s what capacity I had. But I slowly got back into my regular news consumption, and at some point I said, I want to go to a rally. Like, that’s what I can do. I can just show up and be counted.

So I went to a rally for science. It was held at city hall in San Francisco. And I showed up and I found that just going there—I went alone, but going there and just seeing all the people who were there saying like, we think science is important and we want to continue to see the federal government support science in all of its different agencies. It gave me a sense of hope. It was like, oh, other people care about this. Other people are trying to do something. And that was empowering.

And so I do think you have to decide what’s right for yourself. Maybe a sort of short respite from participation is what you need. But maybe a little bit more participation is what you need. Maybe less news consumption, and more engagement, where you’re connected to other people, you’re physically doing something with other people. You’re volunteering, you’re making calls, you’re at the rally, and you’re not just sitting scrolling on your phone or watching TV on your couch by yourself, and that can be the way you feel like you are making a difference. You’re having a little bit of control over what’s going on.

Lindsay: I love that. That’s a great place to end. Christopher Ojeda, author of The Sad Citizen, out June 11th. Thanks for being with us on Talking Policy.

Christopher: Thank you so much for having me, Lindsay. This was great.