Last month I had the good fortune to attend a weeklong conference of Buddhism scholars in Leipzig, Germany – a wonderful opportunity in many ways, not least that one gets to be in a world far removed from the current craziness of American politics. So not long afterwards, I set myself the goal of not saying the T-word to anyone during my week there.

I succeeded at that goal, barely. But it was really hard.

Now it wasn’t hard when I was talking to Europeans or Asians! I met many such people at the conference and the conversation turned to a wide variety of matters, especially the conference’s topic of Buddhist studies, but also the beauty of Leipzig or classical music or psychedelics. But there were also plenty of American scholars of Buddhism there, and with them I was struck by the realization: wow do Americans go on and on about Trump – even when they are on another continent two thousand miles away from him. Others turned the conversation to him so many times that I only managed to avoid saying the T-word by talking around it (“this administration”). But I was still glad to stick to the letter of my policy, because it was a good reminder to myself to change the subject as soon as possible.

To keep Trump on one’s mind was already bad for one’s mental health in his first term. And in terms of impact, that first term was to the second term as COVID was to the Black Death. It’s going to feel even worse.

There’s also very little we can do about it, for the moment at least.

“Very little” is not “none at all”. Faced with a government this brutally destructive, if there was ever a time when activism was an obligation (a big if, in my book), then for citizens of the United States it is now. We can give money to Democratic candidates for the midterm elections; in the more immediate term we can contribute to organizations making legal defences against the administration’s usurpation of power. (I recently upped my monhtly contribution to Democracy Forward, which seems like a very helpful such organization working on multiple fronts.) There are probably a few other things we can do – recording and reporting any ICE activity in our neighbourhoods, maybe attending mass protests. But all of those will only get us so far. And while we are waiting for them to have their effect, there still remains the question of the rest of our lives.

When we spend our time with friends talking about Trump, when we read more news articles about his latest atrocity, we need to ask: what are we accomplishing here? I think there’s an often unstated assumption that one is obliged to be “informed about what’s happening”. But even assuming that’s true, anyone in the US reading a philosophy blog is likely already more informed about what’s happening than the average American – and more to the point, far more informed than they need to be. We know this administration is a disaster, we know a few ways to help stanch the bleeding – but it’s rare that our news consumption helps us find new ones. (None of those conversations in Leipzig, and few if any similar ones I’ve had back home, turned to the topics of effective actions one could take to help stop it from happening.) We need to ask: what is it getting us?

I’m not practising what I preach very well, I admit – a hypocrisy of weakness on my part. I slept badly one night of the conference in part because I checked the news in the evening, and found out that Trump had taken federal control of the police force in the capital. And in the following days, that’s what people wanted to talk about. But what good was that doing any of us? If you lived in the District of Columbia, knowing that fact would be relevant to your life on your return. But as I recall, none of us did. So what good was served by our freaking out over this latest in a long series of unlawful aberrations and tyrannical power grabs?

The Serenity Prayer is essential life guidance in a variety of contexts, and right now I’d say politics is foremost among those. We are right to look for opportunities to make a difference – to change the things we can. But also we need to realize that right now that’s not a lot. And we harm ourselves by obsessing over all the bad things we can’t change. Some amount of fear and stress over what’s happening may be helpful, in order to help us take action: actions to mitigate consequences on ourselves and our loved ones, as well as to change the politics themselves. But by continually following the cycle of news and keeping our minds on it, we increase that stress and fear greatly, with no corresponding benefit. We let Trump live rent-free in our heads, every time we think about him in ways not connected to figuring out what actions of ours will actually help.

Trump wants you to fear him. That much is all too painfully obvious in his actions, which are poorly suited to achieving any sort of lasting national state of affairs but extremely well suited to making the whole world suck up to him in their terror, to demanding that everyone kneel before Zod. He’s succeeded in making some amount of fear unavoidable. But we don’t have to give him any more than that. Learn whatever is necessary, even have the amount of fear necessary, to get yourself to make the changes you can. And then get on with the rest of your life. Any fear beyond that is an additional victory for him.