Our civic duty is to distribute our free time researching a huge list of social issues, deciphering the propaganda from the truth, weighing the solutions and the candidates… so that we are prepared on voting day. If you do all that give yourself a smug pat on the back because chances are that you, along with most voters, just did another great job leading modern society!

This is a silly excuse to feel self-important. Democracy does not hinge on the average person solving world problems. We can’t. It works because the average person can, with great accuracy, say whether they (not anyone else) are better or worse off than they were two or four years ago, and vote accordingly. That’s the feedback that drives politicians to maximize our well-being. And they do that by finding real experts to solve our problems. Our wacky opinions are just noise in the system.

So personally, I don’t vote because life is peachy.