because you made it so. Not politicians, not the media, not any other outside force: you. I walked into your home hoping to catch up about our actual lives and instead find myself defensively crouched as you try to score points against faraway people who have so very little effect on your day-to-day.

It’s undoubtedly true that players with certain financial interests want you to see everything as part of a political fight, but it’s just as true that you possess agency to reject this imposition. You can, of course, stop listening, though this is becoming increasingly difficult as the politics is everywhere message flexes from all corners – avoiding the news offers little reprieve. So the more potent defense is to meet the message squarely and reject it for its incompleteness.

Consider that politics is everywhere is another version of Jesus is everywhere. Now, perhaps you do fervently believe that one of those two concepts is true, that your job, your breakup, and your medical issues are all tied to something far larger than the thing itself. Overarching narratives may be at play, sure. But when everything is so quickly funneled into a grand narrative, the evaluation of the thing itself becomes stupidly shallow. Narratives work to broadly and simply explain patterns, not to actually explain what’s truly going on in a given situation since life never has, never will conform to narratives’ simplicities. And the more you capitulate to narrative-based thinking, the more you will think you have it all figured out when quite the opposite is true.