I don’t know what I was trying to say. Someone told me once “du skal vaere der for dig selv inden du kan vaere der for andre”, maybe I understood it wrong. Probably did.
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“If I ignore the rest of the world outside my own home and pretend like none of it matters, does it matter?”
Let’s all be narcissistic hermits living in our shells and ignoring everything and everyone else unless we happen to bump into them 
wow, what a highly advanced human society!
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Yeah but at the same time trying to focus on the whole world is like trying to manage everything at once, that doesn’t work. The global news cycle trains you to think everything is your problem, when realistically what you can affect is the things around you first and foremost.
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Right, there are things we can do based on caring about far-away places but without overdoing it or stressing ourselves out about things we really have very little or no control over, and which we should understand the media is deliberately trying to make us feel emotional and worried about because that is their MO and how they make their money.
Obviously there is a lot of middle ground between “focusing on the whole world” and “not caring about any place outside of Edmonton”.
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For example, since your particular vote makes no difference in politics, why should you vote? And why would you care about politics? Classic stoicism would be on the side of “Just Edmonton things”
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Interesting you put those two things together.
If I vote because I understand that “voting matters”, and I choose to vote even though I know my one vote won’t change anything but because I want to be part of something that ostensibly does matter, then ok. I see no problem with that. It all hinges on how we understand “it matters”. I guess for most people, voting is something they do because they want to participate in something that matters. Even if you point out to them their one vote changes nothing, they just get mad at you for saying that, they act like it doesn’t matter to them… because it doesn’t. They don’t vote because they believe the outcome is dependent on them alone, they vote just because they want to participate in something that they think matters generally speaking.
I guess its the same with caring about stuff outside of Edmonton. It isn’t as if we can do something personally about most issues far away, but we conceptually and emotionally understand that those far away issues do matter. Therefore our caring about them is one way for us to participate in something that matters. Even if it doesn’t matter personally to me, it still indirectly does matter personally to me because I feel good participating in something that I know does matter.
Of course we can take it way too far and become obsessed or stressed out by these far away things that matter but don’t really impact us directly. Then again, if we take it reasonably, often there is something we can do to help, like give money for example if there is a natural disaster, or for another example caring about federal level politics might lead to the understanding that the system and its leaders are basically evil and therefore you come to the conclusion to stop supporting it by refusing to vote anymore, and telling other people they should also opt out of supporting evil. Even if the overall impact of that is negligible from the perspective of the federal government, it still led to a positive change in your own life (you discovered something new that you didn’t know before and you made a moral change based on that new knowledge, and now you are in a position to educate others with that same knowledge; and maybe most importantly, you stopped blindly supporting evil).
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You and I know that ‘caring’ makes not much sense.
Now, what if everyone cared for only what happens in Edmonton? Even people outside Edmonton
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There is nothing beyond Edmonton. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
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There is no true Scotsman.
Only Scotsmen who tell the truth.
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There’s no false Edmontonian
Double negative mate
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We are all false. The area (the only area that is) was called amiskwacîwâskahikan by the natives. Beaver Hill House. It was sacred. Edmonton’s pride is the world’s largest mall - West Edmonton Mall. This ushers in what will seem like the end of the world: Pônisâyâw. But really it is the end of a cycle, with the mall as the excretion of a dead metaphysics.
We Edmontonians will meet again and perhaps be wiser after the cleanse.