The Curse of Politics

A while back, I was having coffee with a mate who runs a successful blog.

He was pulling his hair out.

"I can't write anything any more without someone getting angry about politics," he said.

"Even when I write about my garden, people find a way to make it political."

This got me thinking. We live in a world where everything has become political. Your coffee. Your shoes. The car you drive.

Even the word "political" has become political.

Here's what happened when my friend wrote about planting tomatoes:

One reader attacked him for not mentioning climate change. Another accused him of virtue signalling about organic farming.
A third said he was pushing a globalist agenda by growing non-native species.

He was just writing about tomatoes.

But that's not how humans work.

We're pattern-matching machines. We see politics everywhere because we're looking for it everywhere.

It's like that old saying: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When all you think about is politics, everything looks political.

My friend tried harder and harder to be neutral. He wrote about more and more innocuous things. The complaints got worse and worse.

Then he had an insight.

The problem wasn't the writing.
The problem was trying not to be political.

Because trying not to be political is itself a political act.

It's like trying not to think about pink elephants. The harder you try, the more you think about them.

So what did he do?

He went back to writing about whatever interested him. He accepted that some people would see politics in it. And he carried on anyway.

That's when his blog got interesting again. Because authenticity beats neutrality every time.

The lesson?

Don't try to be non-political.
Just try to be honest.

That's all any writer can do.