In our explanations, we (and by “we” I mean anyone, but specifically anti-“woke” liberals and centrists) should avoid th

In recent years, those of us who have criticized leftist excesses — be it “cancel mobs” on campus or online, Antifa violence, morally troubling iconography, or assorted episodes of identity politics gone mad — have often been chided for a misplaced sense of priorities in the age of Donald Trump and the Trumpist threat to democracy.

Go to bed a bit stronger — mentally and physically. Help your partner, kids, parents, siblings, friends, and expand the circle like that. I see it as a sequential thing. Start with yourself, and then expand your reach, one person at a time. We probably won’t get old enough to expand the circle to the world. But hey, it’s pretty good if you can make your own life and the lives of the people you care about better. That’s already hard enough. Just don’t make things harder by wasting time on things you don’t control. Know what you can and cannot control! That’s the Stoic’s path to a happy life. If you set a high value on happiness, everything else must be valued less. All the best.

Today, as the Trump era limps to a close, variations on this theme continue: liberal and centrist attacks on the left and on “wokeness,” we are told, not only serve as a distraction from malfeasance on the right but also play into the hands of the “right-wing propaganda machine,” as Laura K. Field puts it in a well-received recent piece in The Bulwark.

Go to bed a bit stronger — mentally and physically. Help your partner, kids, parents, siblings, friends, and expand the circle like that. I see it as a sequential thing. Start with yourself, and then expand your reach, one person at a time. We probably won’t get old enough to expand the circle to the world. But hey, it’s pretty good if you can make your own life and the lives of the people you care about better. That’s already hard enough. Just don’t make things harder by wasting time on things you don’t control. Know what you can and cannot control! That’s the Stoic’s path to a happy life. If you set a high value on happiness, everything else must be valued less. All the best.

It’s so important to only focus on what you control. Everyone seems to talk about that these days, which is great because we all need those types of reminders. But I also feel like I’m constantly bombarded with useless information, which neutralizes those good reminders. This morning I saw something about Bitcoin, and then I spent the next thirty minutes following one link after the other. I started reading about the history of money, but by the end, I was getting lost on Wikipedia. How often does this happen to you? You start with watching a video, then you look something up, and soon you’re down a rabbit hole of useless information.

There is no question that Trumpism is a preeminent danger; Trump’s post-election assault on democracy proves it in abundance. But there are also real dangers in ignoring or downplaying illiberalism and extremism on the left.

For instance, Field rightly challenges Andrew Sullivan’s claim, based on early exit-poll data, that college-educated white voters skewed toward Trump much more than was expected: in fact, it appears Trump’s biggest net loss in support across any demographic from 2016 to 2020 was college-educated whites, especially men. But the critique Field cites also mentions a different demographic with which Trump did have an unexpectedly good showing, though not enough to save his bacon: Hispanic voters. This apparent fact is a pretty huge slap in the face to “woke” ideological premises. It even supports a claim made by critics of “wokeness” such as Georgia State University Ph.D. candidate Zach Goldberg: that white progressives are the main driver of the recent years’ leftward shift on social issues and are now substantially to the left of minorities.

Without accepting that we don’t control most things in life, we can never have lasting happiness. Getting concerned with things outside of our control is a habit. For example, today you might be celebrating the outcome of the US election. In a few months, you might get worked up because the issues you care about didn’t immediately improve. You wish things would change faster. And so the cycle goes. It’s good to practice indifference to things that don’t matter to your happiness.

Field has a valid point when she argues that some analysis of the left’s negative impact on the Democrats’ performance at the ballot box (evident not only in their relatively poor results in the congressional and Senate elections but in Biden’s closer-than-expected win) has relied on iffy data — specifically, exit polls that may be unreliable. I agree that, especially in an election that relied heavily on voting by mail, extrapolations from exit polls (supplemented with surveys targeting mail-in voters) require caution — particularly with regard to specific demographics such as college-educated whites. But does this necessarily undercut critiques of the left?

What I learned from Stoicism is that time is your most valuable resource. Maybe it’s nice to know about everything in the world, but there’s no way we can actually use all the information we consume. So these pursuits are largely a waste of time. I will never get back the time I spent hopping from one Wikipedia page to the next one. We all need to be more conscious of how we spend our time. Most of us know this — we just don’t live it. We squander our time like it’s nothing. We read articles about how bad the world is, we browse the social media profiles of our ex-partners, we watch TV shows we’re not even interested in just to “kill time.” Why kill something so precious? That’s what should really upset you. Not some insignificant message you read on Twitter from some person you don’t even know. We’re all so quick to get triggered by others. Why do we feel the need to respond to every single thing that we run into? We don’t control what other people say or do.

Things are the way they are; and we need to deal with it. That’s how it’s been for the past 10,000 years, and probably will be for the next 10,000. What happens after that? No one knows, not even the world’s beloved futurist, Elon Musk. Getting just a little bit heated over COVID was a waste of my energy, and didn’t make anything better for anyone. Our best bet is to make our own lives better — NOW. Start the circle small.

It’s a stark contrast with another day I had last week. I was talking to another friend about this COVID thing. I got a bit carried away. “They just got to shut down the whole world for 3 weeks and we’re done!” That didn’t happen earlier this year, and it’s obviously not going to happen now. I kept that negative energy with me during the day and guess what I did? Not much. I just consumed more useless information. I didn’t create anything useful that day.

Sia, like most people, may not have a good grasp on the myriad ways that autism can present. If she is autistic and not diagnosed, then having this information could be helpful — and potentially even life-saving. Many newly diagnosed autistic women describe their adult autism diagnosis as a huge relief. Many talk about their newfound ability to have self-compassion and to look back on their lives with a far deeper understanding of themselves.

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e Good Grief festival in England, a weeklong digital event this fall, where speakers from various disciplines discussed the grieving process, as well as the pandemic. She says this kind of “public acknowledgment of compounded multiple losses and that validation and that acknowledgment can set a foundation for starting to mourn and to grieve and to heal.”

What does actually matter to your happiness? Good friendships, work that you enjoy, reading books that make you think, walking in nature, working out, watching a good movie — you know this. Last Saturday, I woke up, did some reading and writing, had brunch with my family, then went for a walk together, came back, did some more writing and reading, had dinner, and watched a movie in the evening. It was a good day.