Are you worried about a Donald Trump-Kamala Harris election? Here's what to do

When election season rolls around, I always meet a lot of people who are going through a pretty tough time. It's the rhythm of bad news, twists and turns and last-minute scandals. These are the absurdly closed elections. It's the feeling that we, especially people like me in California, are pretty much helpless while a decision of enormous importance is being made. There's nothing to do but wait and see what happens, but that doesn't stop me from frequently refreshing all the models and squinting at the internals of all the surveys.

So I wanted to talk about how to keep perspective on presidential elections without pretending they don't matter or letting them become the sole verdict on whether our world is heading in the right direction.

It is obviously very important who wins on Tuesday. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have very different views on Ukraine, Gaza, tariffs, legal immigration, coup attempts in Latin America, abortion, whether commissions should reject the results of legitimate elections, and much more. I'm not here to say you should be zen about the election, because it doesn't matter, it matters a lot.

But I think when you step back and take a step back, it's clear that many of the things that matter most to our lives, the lives of our loved ones and the lives of everyone on Earth, are not decided during elections. And how these things play out is much easier to influence than elections.

Back to what really mattered

Often, the most important mechanisms that have affected people's lives, for better or worse, have done so without a single mention being made on the stage of a debate or campaign platform. Antibiotics. Vaccination. Mass electrification. Contraception. Internet. The nuclear bomb. Factory farming. Most of the ways we are lucky to live in the 2020s instead of the 1920s and most of the ways the 2020s are far more horrible than the 1920s happened despite bad presidents and without much help from the good ones.

Even when an issue is hotly contested, the key element that ultimately leads to change is often only indirectly related to the part that everyone is arguing about. We're in a much better position in the fight against climate change because solar power is so cheap that most debates about everything else end up being a rounding error relative to it.

One of my colleague Dylan Matthews' most famous Future Perfect-flavored contrarian stances was that George W. Bush was actually, if you do the math, a great president thanks to PEPFAR, his program. fight against AIDS which has saved at least 1 million lives in Africa at one point. a time when no one gave AIDS the priority it deserved. Of course, it also started a few unnecessary wars in the Middle East and the unnecessary expansion of the surveillance state in the name of freedom; Of course, his domestic policy agenda was largely a failure or forgotten in the aftermath of 9/11. But he still saved a lot of children.

To what extent to consider this a defense of Bush is primarily a philosophical question, and frankly, I don't care, I'm not the judge of his soul. But I think it's an important point if you're thinking about how to do good in the world. The things that no one pays attention to, the neglected programs that a dedicated visionary can achieve, are often where the enormous effects on the world occur.

Elections matter. But they are far from the only ones who matter. And it's hard, amid the noise, chaos and fury of any given moment, to guess which of the many contested issues in an election is the one that will really matter. (Pandemic prevention, to take just one example, wasn't much of an issue in 2016, just a few years before Covid hit.)

So if you feel paralyzed and helpless in the face of elections, refreshing the news sites instead of doing real substantive work for a better world, my advice, which I have had mixed success with, is to stay geared toward all the other things that are just as important and are much easier to change.

Instead of letting every twist and turn in the Wisconsin polls control your mood, work on something that really matters and that none of our politicians are bothering to fix. This is a big decision over which you don't have much control. But the direction of our country and our world is an important decision over which you have enormous control.

Many great people are alive today thanks to the individual efforts of dedicated people who decided to solve a problem they could no longer stand. Many important science projects require volunteers. There are horrible evils to be eliminated, and horrible dilemmas that will become less problematic as advances in technology and human creativity provide us all with better options.

So the next time you want to refresh the polls, ask yourself if it will give you more power and if the world will find it more useful if you chose something else that also really matters, and do that instead.

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