For what it's worth I completely agree with you. Engaging in politics is a complete waste of time, unless you happen to have a platform with enough reach to influence a meaningful number of people. Unfortunately, almost all of the communication you will see comes from people with such a platform, and boy do they want to convince you to vote like them.

Once the political climate is polarized enough, choosing to not engage in the discussion about how evil the other team is will get you lumped right in, because if the other team really is evil and you don't care, then you must be pretty bad yourself.

The "Oh, but it's your civic duty to improve your community/state/nation (which obviously means voting the way I want you to, not the way the other half the country wants you to)" tries to frame political engagement as some moral good, but if they redirected the time and energy from political engagement to working at McDonalds and funding charity with the paycheck they would have 1000x the impact, even if you assume there is a Good and Evil team and they are on the Good team.

It’s a nice luxury to be able to ignore politics. There are people in some places who would be imprisoned or killed if the wrong political party came into power. A major political party in my country would love to find a way to deport half of my family if they could and split us up forever. I wish I could ignore politics and just stay neutral.

"Chi tace acconsente" (he who is silent says yes)