Most things aren't actually political

High functioning teams and people focus on their craft and ignore the political circus

Mission Control during Apollo 13. No one cared who anyone voted for. The only question that mattered was: how do we bring them home?

Step outside your feed or turn off the news for 5 minutes and you’ll see something simple: most things aren’t political, and normal people do not define themselves by their politics. When someone says “everything is political,” what they’re confessing is that politics has become their primary obsession. And when that obsession follows them into every room, it only succeeds in making that person quite insufferable while ruining the chances for great work. Everyone like this also seems to be somewhat anxious and depressed, truly a prison to live this way.

In over 20 years of studio work I’ve never talked politics with anyone I’ve collaborated on music with. We talk about the craft. We fight about whether the synth lead is too bright or the percussion flows nicely. No one stops a take to debate policy or talk about whatever the news is obsessed with that day, we just don’t care, we have more important things to worry about in the moment.

Any functional workplace is like that too. In offices, in code, in product meetings, you see the same thing with highly-competent teams. People obsess over UX flows, social strategy, ad creative. The daily effort of making and marketing something useful doesn’t care what’s happening online. And the people on your team who are political-brained and constantly obsessing over these things are a giant distraction and just slow things down. 9 times out of 10 they’re also people you really just want to get away from.

Friendship runs on the same rules if it’s normal and healthy. It means dinners, jokes, kids, enjoying nerdy movies, the way someone tells a story. Sometimes politics enters the chat, but with friends who aren’t broken it’s quite brief, then the conversation shifts away from the political circus. And anyway, grown‑ups can disagree and still break bread. Civilization thrives on peaceful disagreement and people seeing things differently coming together amicably.

But lately, some people reinterpret everything through this one narrow lens. They think every ad, every song, every corporate logo redesign must have some kind of political statement (or shouldn’t be created unless it has one). Or that athletes and celebs must constantly state their politics. To them, art turns into messaging, business turns into signaling, friendship becomes “alignment.” This is truly a silly way to process the world, it’s something closer to being in a cult.

The new Star Trek is deeply unserious, run by people who hate Star Trek, storytelling and the essence of the show while force-feeding audiences strange ideology. The old Star Treks focused on storytelling. One still of each makes this painfully obvious via simple aesthetics and reflects the sad state of creative industry. It’s a perfect example of why you shouldn’t ask people to “bring their whole selves to work.”

Of course some things are political: law, power, justice. But politics isn’t the center of reality, it’s simply one layer of it. Also note, the people who do force every single choice through some kind of political filter end up badly harming the end product. We see examples of this constantly, a recent one is the new Star Trek, which quite obviously was processed through a Kathleen Kennedy-esque 2015 socialist checkbox media filter, which simply ruins the work and destroys any IP it touches. And it’s not like you couldn’t make something good with a political message (like promoting a healthy conservative or liberal worldview, or simply both sides coming together). But you have to actually be able to write to do that, and it turns out the people who process everything through politics as a priority are quite bad at that. Star Trek: The Next Generation very clearly was promotional of a liberal-utopian future, but it focused on storytelling, morality and aesthetics as prime directives so it actually worked. The latest trek, Starfleet Academy, doesn’t care about any of this, and is instead a slop world demoralization exercise. If you’re a trekkie and you looked at both the new vs the old Star Treks and you’re being intellectually honest, I think you can easily see the difference.

Healthy adulthood means knowing when to shift gears and when personal politics comes into play. It’s really simple actually: you can talk policy with conviction, then walk into the studio and only care about the track, you can vote one way and build something with someone who didn’t, you can sit across a table, disagree, and stay human. You can have different viewpoints during creative brainstorming sessions and meet peers in the middle of ideas to produce something everyone enjoys. I think the people who relentlessly promote their politics and are unreasonable about compromise will ultimately find themselves socially and professionally ostracized, and for good reason. And if you’re a media company actually serious about making anything worth sharing, hire proper creatives as leaders, not bureaucratic ideologs.

Most of life is creative, relational, practical, and human long before it’s political. And honestly, your personal morals and ethics, center of right and wrong, what is true based on observed reality, what is objectively beautiful, all this should supersede any politics of the day. Especially if you hope to make any creative work of consequence, and not throwaway slop-propaganda no one wants to sit through, that will never be seen as timeless.