Lord_Vorloupulous
Too many cooks spoil the coup.
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User ID: 2077
Lord_Vorloupulous
Too many cooks spoil the coup.
1yr ago
What is it about the election season that's impacting your mental health? If you live in an area where things are known to get fiery (but mostly peaceful!) I'd say leave at least six months in advance. The civic powder kegs are being packed tight and there's no telling what might set them off.
If what you're trying to get away from is a feeling of anxiety about the election and its outcomes, then a change of scenery on its own won't help. That's coming from within, and will follow you to the ends of the earth.
Lord_Vorloupulous
Too many cooks spoil the coup.
1yr ago
It's worth keeping in your mental toolbox because it allows you to restructure information into something more human-readable. This makes it easier to work with for overall knowledge management.
As you've noted, this is most critical for memorization tasks. You'll get the biggest band from your spaced-repetition buck if you're integrating mnemonics into good card design. For example, I'll never have to worry about mixing up the layers of the OSI model because I know to ask people Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away.
And if the fate of the world ever depends on reciting trig ratios I can repel the alien hordes by telling them Oscar Had Another Hit Of Acid.
Outside of exams and party-trick scenarios, there's still value to keeping strictly-curated local cache:
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Memorizing your ID numbers and emergency contacts saves you a ton of grief if your hand-brain is ever lost/stolen/broken.
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Memorizing work-related references lets you focus deeper and expands your ability at back-of-the-envelope evaluations.
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Having bigger pool of disparate ideas to-hand expands the capacity of your unconscious to generate creative insights.
A general knowledge of mnemonic techniques is still useful for information that you don't intend to memorize, such as whatever is going into your note-taking system. Useful notes are, after all, not just a copy of raw information but a record of your understanding for later reference.
So we break things into chunks, turn sets into enumerations, drill down to atomized concepts, find and codify arbitrary connections to what we already know. Everything distilled to down to be maximally useful and readable by Future-You. As a bonus, if turns out this information would be worth memorizing, everything has been pre-encoded and we just need to plug it into our spaced-repetition system for retrieval practice.
Travelling will certainly separate you from the stimulus of seeing other people lose their minds on this specific issue. From your other replies it even sounds like you've done one of these trips before and had a good time. If you have the opportunity, you might as well take it.
However, speaking as your certified internet stranger, it still comes across as dodging the main issue: you're letting the behavior of others dictate your mental well being. You can't control the initial flash of annoyance when you see someone with election fever, but you do control your response.
This could even be a great opportunity for you to bring a little sanity to the world by setting a better example. Tune your media intake and personal systems to let you be the steady rock in the political storm. That way when the election is over you'll be better prepared for when life throws you a stressor that you can't travel away from.
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