The turning point for me was my last year of law school when I took a class on Cyber Law and we got into all these really interesting and technical issues about privacy and copyright and whatnot and how corporations and the government basically fuck the average dude six ways from Sunday.
So at the end of the course, the prof comes out and says to this six-person class, "so what do you guys make of all this? Do you support policies like what we've discussed? Oppose them? Sup?" and then he added somewhat facetiously, "do you care?"
I don't know if I was insulted by the question or didn't like the class or was a week from graduation and didn't give a shit, but I just straight up said "You know, I can't really bring myself to care." Prof looked nonplussed, asked me why. I said it was because the sea levels were going to rise twenty feet by the time I die, displacing hundreds of millions of people, drinking water was drying up, people were getting tortured, millions dying every year in Africa from treatable diseases, the US spending billions to support the tobacco industry, 50 million without health insurance, the US and Europe generally approaching insolvency, etc., all seemed like much greater problems to me than college kids getting busted for stealing hollywood movies or the CIA making a record of what kind of shit I buy on ebay.*
In an attempt to, I guess, sympathize or placate me or whatever, the prof said he understood that a lot of people could adopt this stance of rational ignorance, but that kind of ticked me off. I said it wasn't rational ignorance at all; I perfectly understood the implications of IP and privacy and what have you, but I simply didn't care, because these are First World Problems and while yeah, the RIAA is kind of shitty for theoretically suing someone for 150 grand for downloading a song, that does not rise to even the fourth or fifth tier of injustices mankind is perpetrating on his brother at
this exact moment, so no, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Sorry.
I got an A in the class, one of two I got in a substantive class throughout law school. Hilariously, the other was Copyright.
*I expanded on this second point in library school to browbeat other library students who honestly felt protecting the privacy of a patron's borrowing records made them Christ figures or something (real talk)
Now see, this is exactly the sort of fatalism I've been trying to avoid in my own worldview.
And keep in mind my last post ended with "We're all gonna die."
If you really want to be frustrated, try to find one instance of somebody saying "Americans should take more time to educate themselves on the issues before they vote" without actually meaning "anybody who doesn't vote the same way I do must be ignorant".