With all the blogging I’ve been doing over the last few months, I’ve started to wonder whether there’s a point at which being too well-informed becomes debilitating. I went a good number of years during the Bush administration being completely tuned out from a lot of what was going on in the world. In a way, I think a good part of it was an act of self-preservation.

During the 2008 election, Obama’s candidacy ripped me out of my complacency and got me engaged again. Now that he’s in office, and the lack of complacency persists, I continue to read news outlets and blogs voraciously and post some of the best (worst?) bits here.

This brings me to my point. A lot of the stuff I come across on a daily basis is horrifying. On a daily basis, I absorb reams of religious extremism (both foreign and American), stupidity, ignorance, intolerance, subtle/not-so-subtle gay-bashing, and more examples of gob-smackingly stupid Republican lunacy (seriously, click the link and try not to involuntarily smack your head on the table) than I ever thought imaginable. Although I think blogging about some of this can be pretty cathartic, at what point does the deluge threaten to drown me?

I often envy people who have a spouse, religion, kids, hobbies and other things that fill up their life to the point where they no longer have any time or inclination to independently inform themselves beyond the occasional talking point fed to them by their friends, preachers, Fox News or other convenient sources of soothing empty-calorie mind nourishment.

Is there a happy medium that can be struck? Am I making too much out of this? Was Mill actually right in saying “it is better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a fool satisfied”? At what point does all the cruelty, dishonesty, ignorance and evil in the world become too much to handle?