Comment by skybrian

There is of course a connection between individual and aggregate effects (consider voting) and certainly the aggregate effects have been very bad lately.

But I think it's bad for your mental health to lose perspective about it. It all adds up, but it's 99.999% other people doing the adding, and unless you're in the right position to use leverage, you are mostly an observer of national and global events.

This means that morally, you don't need to feel responsible for big stuff like that - unless you see a way to end up in a position where you have that kind of leverage.

Using big, negative events as justification to scold random nearby individuals is mostly just making your local community more unpleasant.

Example: I do encourage people to vote, but I'm not going to worry about one voter more or less.