Thinking is really hard. After a long day of work and then expending energy maintaining relationships, my body, and my home - I don't always have much left to do the research necessary to form sensible, well-informed opinions about topics that I feel are important.

Health-care, police violence, taxation, welfare, immigration, and the list goes on - I have intuitions about the effects of various policies based on what I have read in the moments of distraction between things I should be doing - but I know that those are informed by my filter bubble.

Maybe I was fooling myself when I was younger, but I had more faith that the content I was reading was at the very least provided in earnest. That any oversights or falsehoods were due to laziness or honest errors - not through a willful attempt to upset me or point me like a tiny internet missile towards an enemy.

A friend recently told me that she judged her exes based on the perceived malice during their rocky times. I don't think that, outside of comic-book villains, anyone actually acts out of malice - just a different prioritization of principles. E.g., what factors combine and in what proportions to calculate a person's well-being? how much do I value other's well-being compared to mine? my family's? what other principles outside of the golden rule drive my behavior? religion? animal-welfare?

So:

• I don't think people are evil and I tend to take anyone who describes their political enemies in those terms less seriously;
• I have a sense, though not a precise definition, of what outcomes I value and what I find important;
• I don't have the time or energy to properly research all of the topics that interest me and the state of reporting on it leaves me feeling like I don't have the information I need to understand how to evaluate policies - especially now that I feel like many journalists aren't demanding redundant sources and much of the easily available content is just factless marketing supporting various positions;
• I feel like politicians and advocacy groups have made it clear that they don't represent me or my beliefs;

Not sure how to deal with all of these feelings, this isn't a post about solutions - just a vent