Part 1: Make Politics Unsexy Again- What's the deal with the centrists?

Nothing kills my libido in the way politics kills my libido. My mental libido, to clarify. In my eyes, the political arena and the gross perversion of sensationalism in the news media is the equivalent of picturing your grandmother naked: it kills your metaphorical intellectual (lady) boner, and hopefully, any other boners...

When discussing politics in this blog, I do want to clarify that politics are important. You can argue that it doesn’t play a large part in your life, but in the smallest most myriad ways, it definitely does. You’ve heard this all before, “politics is the sidewalk you walk on, the price of your coffee, the gas price bla bla bla..”, I’ll spare you the blabbing.

So here is the main observation I see among my peers today. My generation seems to be very much divided in so many ways. Like Mark Manson pointed out in his book “Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck”, it seems as though we live in a time where every demographic, religious, or value group are being simultaneously victimized. This is especially true when it comes to political parties or convictions in specific social problems.

Since I’m only 20 maybe I don’t understand the full scope of political climates through previous decades, but it seems as though the political climate is more divided than ever. People are either in an "us vs. them" mentality, or they’re trying to convince others to join the "us vs. them" mentality. Because frankly, in this day in age, radical centrists seem to be the most slept on political ideology we see. It’s not particularly the sexiest- it's not profitable, it's not easy, and the most interesting thing about the centrists is that they don’t default to identity politics. To them, the subscription to a political party is too easy and, in my opinion, subjects itself to both groupthink and self-affirmation bias. But I’ll save that for another blog.

Back to my peers. The majority seem to have become more centrist. Being in an academic environment, you see a really good mix of political perspectives. Most, however; falls right in the center. And what’s most interesting is that many people are becoming disinterested in politics altogether. I understand this completely.

You take a whole generation and they witness the growth of technology, the devolution of the media sector become something so sensational and unstructured that you don’t truly get a good picture of what’s actually going on. On top of that, we are constantly bombarded with information.

In this whole process, many of my peers say they have to address media with a healthy dose of skepticism. They found that they were less immune to bias in the media and were able to come to conclusions themselves.