When Pumps Trump Politics

What if you stopped reading the news for a while and used that time to check your smoke detectors or get your home humidity into the recommended range?

This thing measures my Substack world politics ranking, right? Photo by Kaffeebart on Unsplash

For a few weeks last month, I sailed off the edge of the news world. For some of that time, I was on vacation. For some of it, I wasn’t. I was just ignoring my job, and the world around me. During those weeks, I read books, watched television, and took care of the house. It was equal parts restorative, glorious, disconcerting, and revealing.

At times, I felt guilty for being off, as we often do when we take breaks, trained as we are to regard any moment not spent generating income — and ‘content’ — as a wasted. As a politics writer, I felt doubly guilty for tuning out and attending to the mundane as the world burned, literally and figuratively. I have a platform. I have a voice. I have a position in the media firmament, and since I’m able to say true things about bad things, don’t I have a duty to do so? I think so. But that wasn’t the problem. I knew I could, and would, always return to work after the summer doldrums passed. I’d resume assiduous attacks on power. It pays the bills and it’s the right and good and true thing to do. A wonderful synergy of righteous utility. But not the problem. The problem was I so thoroughly enjoyed taking care of my house more than I did writing about the world of politics.