Please, God, Make Politics Boring Again

Smart Ass Take:

McKibben wants a president you can forget about for weeks at a time, and I have never related harder to a policy platform. I’m one of his 3 a.m. people (statistically, so are you), lying in the dark doing threat triage: is tonight’s worry the river, the robot, or the health secretary who thinks airplanes are crop-dusting us? The CDC says 71.5 percent of us are tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix, which explains why my naps now feel like reloading a save file in a game I’m losing. This is a LIVE problem wearing a politics costume. Your nervous system was built to outrun one leopard, then lie in the grass for a week feeling smug. It was not built for a leopard with a podcast, a Senate confirmation, and an IPO scheduled for Q3. McKibben’s prescription is unglamorous: vote, volunteer, then go fill a pothole and ignore everyone for the weekend. I’d add the part he’s too polite to say out loud. A lot of very rich people profit when you’re too wrung out to pay attention. Your exhaustion isn’t a side effect. For somebody, it’s the quarterly target.

Article Excerpt:

We have to sit and listen as men worth unfathomable sums speculate about whether our species will survive their companies’ initial public offerings.

Article Summary:

Bill McKibben, who has spent forty years watching the thermometer climb and has the gray hairs to prove it, argues that humans evolved for slow problems and are now drowning in fast ones: flash floods wiping out Nepali towns, California neighborhoods burning in hours, and an AI industry whose own founders put decent odds on it killing us all.

He brings receipts. A CDC survey found 71.5 percent of adults reported fatigue that rest doesn’t fix, and the APA’s Stress in America report found most people feeling isolated and anxious, with nearly two-thirds blaming “societal divisions.” McKibben insists this isn’t fragility. It’s a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable newsfeed. Even his own coping kit (movements, community, daily hours outdoors) is starting to come up short.

The old shock absorbers aren’t helping. Where FDR offered calm plus actual programs, Trump rebrands AI as “superintelligence,” RFK Jr. goes after chemtrails, and the tech chieftains wring their hands before returning to their fortunes. Roughly seven in ten young adults distrust the AI bosses, which seems generous.

His fix: don’t tune out, but elect leaders whose goal includes being ignorable. He points to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s cheerful pothole videos and wishes for a president who talks for half an hour every Thursday and then lets you have your weekend. Cage AI if it’s an existential threat, stand up to Big Oil, and build a world fit for human nervous systems rather than something artificial.