I usually remain pretty silent, only posting articles and quick replies to everyone else's comments. Today stands uniquely as a good opportunity to share some more detailed thoughts.

I voted for Mitt Romney to be the President of the United States of America, but Barack Obama's re-election didn't raise an ire, disgust, or sadness in me. My intent is not to portray myself as some paragon of rationality who doesn't respond emotionally. If I was completely emotionless, that would be completely unhealthy. Rather, because of what I've learned over the last four years, what I'm emotionally invested in has changed drastically.

When Obama was elected president in 2008, I was disgusted and depressed. I'll always remember Florida being called early, turning off the TV, getting into my car with my good friend, and driving to the bowling alley in an attempt to spend the rest of the evening tuning out the noise of everyone else's political chatter. In 2012, all I heard was that chatter and the harsh, vindictive sentiment behind it.

I voted for Romney because the presidential election is a result, not an influence. It is a macro-level event that shows what is going on in the country, not what shapes it. Walking into the voting booth and punching a chad or inking a circle isn't a statement on your deepest held principles, it's a small choice between the limited options you're presented with. In other words, it's like going to a store and buying a PS3, Wii, or X-Box 360. If you want a video game system, you have to choose one of those. It's what the market has presented us.

The market, be it economic or cultural, laissez faire, or controlled, is the only "calculation" the can properly measure the totality of human existence. The government can't do it. Analysts can't do it. Only the market can do it. Why? Because it includes all the small choices and actions each of us takes every day that would be impossible to include in any man-made calculation. It is scientifically impossible for humans to observe every other human on that detailed of a level, even if technology continues to advance. If hypothetically such a technology were to be invented, do you know what it would be called? The market.

To simplify, life is the result of how we live, not any single presidential election because that is part of how we live.

The chatter drew out my sorry in the aftermath of the 2012 election because of what it demonstrated to me about how we live. Ideas are no longer tools for the improvement of human existence, they're lines in the sand drawn to give your side something to rally around. Politics have become no different from professional sports. It matters more to the population of a state if a candidate is a Democrat or Republican than what they actually stand for.

Don't believe me? Look no further than the margin with which Obama won Massachusetts. How could that state have elected the right-leaning Romney as governor and then turn around and elect such a leftist candidate for president by such a large margin? Yes, the voters could have decided that Obama was simply the better candidate, but to have it happen on that large of a scale is simply contradictory except for one thing.

Massachusetts went blue because Massachusetts goes blue. It's a backwards form of reasoning that doesn't move anything, ahem, forward. It's the same thing as Chargers' fans continuing to go to games and buy merchandise despite Norv Turner and Phillip Rivers proving to be failures. It's why the market gave us two candidates that really weren't that different. Change starts on the micro-level with you, not on the macro-level with the President.

The massive amounts of money spent in this election for no change is not a failure of the market, the government, Obama, Romney, the media, or the two-party system. It's us. It's booing Obama or Romney when they appeared on screen election night. It's cheering Romney for finally giving the speech you believed he should've given. Most of all, it's looking at the person next to snidely or sympathetically based on something as simple as a chad he punched or circle he inked.

Basically, to quote a hopefully uncontroversial figure that won't make you roll your eyes at me and automatically assume I'm an idiot, "Be the change you want to see in the world." If you want life to be different, make how you live different. That's the realest change anyone can affect.