Trump Derangement Syndrome - Mine. Need help. [View all]

[InformedElitist]

I thought I might get some good advice here. I’m letting this Trump shitshow affect my life way too much, and I need the wheels in my head to stop spinning and to stop driving my wife and immediate family nuts.

My background: white, male, almost 40, straight, married, no kids, 1st from working class family to go to college and succeed bigly (at least academically), live in middle/upper-middle class NYC suburbs, contemplating a mid-life career change from the soulless corporate world to something less lucrative but more meaningful.

The immediate problem:
My politics are quite liberal (-5,-5) as are my wife’s, but virtually every member of our extended families is for Trump. I don’t mean just voted for him. I mean: many still forwarding every fake, hateful meme since last summer; have been emboldened since the nightmare of 11/8; have a mean-spirited way of shoving their support in people’s faces and will not back down.
The healthy reaction to this is probably to spend less time on social media and block/unfriend as needed. I just can’t turn the other cheek anymore. While I know that these people can’t be reasoned with, my instinct is now to shove the nastiness right back in their faces. And my way of doing it is at once haughty, with lots of cursing, and made to show them or their followers how stupid and mean-spirited they really are. "If I'm angry, I'm gonna make them angry too so that everyone is miserable." Bad, I know.

I feel rage and I’m blowing up some once-valuable relationships, maybe unnecessarily, but I just can’t get past it. This is not Bush ’04, the last time my “team” “lost” an election; it’s so much worse b/c there is so much hatred that’s going along with the willful ignorance. I truly look at their thought process as disgusting and hateful – a serious character flaw, and I have nothing but contempt for them. To me, and this is where my views have hardened more than my wife's, this WAY goes beyond politics. These assholes don't have any decency or empathy for anyone who they think is unlike themselves. I know this is unhealthy on my part and I need to stop seeing things so much in black&white, but it’s hard to when, for example, at a Superbowl party, I completely kept my cool, but: Fox News was on the TV, I was told that protestors should be shot, that I should leave the country, and the thing that stuck with me the most: “C’mon, you never made fun of someone in a wheelchair before?” As rarely as I see some of these people in-person, I want nothing to do with them anymore, and by lashing back out at them, I’m making it uncomfortable for some people I do care about that are sort of caught in the middle.

The longer-term problems:
1 – I’ve been addicted to the news ever since 9/11, which happened just as I was turning 24. I remember the anxiety of the Bush years circa the beginning of 2004 through the merciful end when Obama was sworn in. I remember the constant stupidity, war, color-coded terror threats, lying and scandals, but there was usually only a few major ones every couple of months. Ever since July, when it dawned on me that people were just stupid and, yes, deplorable enough to elect Trump, my mind is overloaded with multiple serious controversies and worldwide problems at any given moment. My hair’s been on fire since November and here we are in April and it’s SO much worse than even I had imagined. I try to cut down on news and social media, but I could only seem to look away for a few hours to a couple of days. I want off the merry-go-round; I have a life to lead and real responsibilities that I’m not attending to the way I should be.

2 – I literally lost whatever hope I had left for this country on Election Night. And maybe humanity in general. You just can’t fix stupid and this kind of tribalism. I hate the idea of going through the rest of my life clinging to whatever I have and occasionally trying to pitch in for those more vulnerable than I. But past is prologue – the US, in most of the important ways, has been in decline my entire lifetime (since the late 70’s). I seriously am contemplating finding work and living in a more civilized country, once we see how the elections/Russia situations develop in Europe the next couple of years.

So with all that said…any advice for coping in the meantime would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.