Without fear of their return.

Let Supergirl yeet a man into the sun! (Spoilers for Supergirl)

The Ottolenghi - it is vital that you use 1g of this very expensive ingredient. It comes from a 500g bag with a one-week shelf life.

The time machine - 15-minute recipe! First, leave to marinate overnight...

The dishwasher - one-pot recipe! Now decant your ingredients and wipe out your pot. And again. And again. And again.

The optimist - cook the onions until caramelised (2 minutes).

The kindergarten teacher - get one nommable little tree of broccoli and bosh that into boiling water. Delish!

The brand names only - ingredients: Ritz crackers, Philadelphia cheese, Cool Whip, orange Jell-o...

The 1950s palate - use one (1) clove of garlic and a small pinch of chili flakes (omit if preferred).

Its similar to why you cannot put bad people in a class of their own. The moment you do that you stop being able to see the bad things that the people closest to you do a la "my best friend couldn't have said that racist thing, they're not evil."

The moment you think you are immune from this type of backslide into right wing nonsense is the moment you stop questioning yourself enough to keep yourself from backsliding into right wing nonsense a la "I mean im not antiscience, im vaccinated, I just think that fluoride in our water supply is imparting children's ability to learn as fast as they otherwise could without it."

It's really easy to stop paying attention and suddenly find yourself surprised and confused by new things, new ways of things, what the kids these days are up to. And it's pretty human to react by saying "oh well, that's stupid, I hate these kids, things were fine the way we did them." And that's sorta the first step. That first kneejerk "I don't understand this and therefore feel negative about it."

But spending time around younger people, spending time online with people younger than you, people in different communities, it's a vaccination against that.

The secondary useful thing is to learn to research and assess data, this stuff thrives on kneejerk reactions. Does an article make you angry, is a person listed as being xyz without saying what the actual issue is? Check. Confirm it. Try to understand the u familiar in more detail and ask people who are experts in the subject with lived experience to help you if needed. Be immune to clickbait even if it is designed to affirm your anger. This emotional reaction is often targeted algorithmically to up engagement and polarise arguments.

You can absolutely still be angry and still have beliefs to fight for. That is important and valuable because anger informs justice. But it needs to be backed up by accurate info or you risk fruitlessly expending your energy on simply doing the media's work for them.

I do agree that spending time with younger people is wise. I read as quite childlike myself and I also don't have the supposed bad experience with Gen Z that get constantly thrown about, they are mostly much nicer than the boomers and better informed. I would say this is also important the other way around.

But this is just one example of not getting polarised by groups, people get radicalised and dehumanise others when they get marooned in one demographic. They also are typically happier because being scared and hateful towards others is not typically a pleasant state of mind. This also means if it is safe we might need to occasionally interact with people who make us annoyed or a bit uncomfortable for this reciprocity to happen, but that is much safer as part of a varied community as that will dilute the ability of that person to cause harm.

The author's proudly displayed fetish

The author's fetish you're pretty sure they don't realise they have

The author's fetish which they're firmly convinced everyone has and is just pretending otherwise

The author's non-sexual special interest which just sounds like a fetish because of their habitually unfortunate phrasing

The fetish the author is making a well-meaning effort to cater to in spite of clearly not understanding it themselves

The author's fetish that never quite makes it into the text because they keep getting sidetracked by the requisite worldbuilding

The author's utterly pedestrian sexual preference which the text treats like a bizarre fetish because they've got shit to work through

The author's seemingly innocuous recurring trope they're going to have a personal revelation about ten years down the road