Being around too many antagonistic people is stressful.

“The impact of election stress: Is political anxiety harming your health?: Psychological science shows that politics can harm our physical and mental health, but the positive aspects of political engagement can lead to greater well-being”

“In polarized communities, they found that bonding ties, or bonds between people who are similar (in this case, politically similar), were linked with better physical and mental health (International Political Science Review, Vol. 75, No. 3, 2022). Bridging ties—connections with dissimilar people—were associated with worse overall health for people who were politically isolated.”

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/10/managing-political-stress

There’s a big difference between analyzing your enemy and letting them shout at you constantly. I can research conservative evangelicals attitudes without having to let one set up a loudspeaker next to my house.

The conservative troll types are also the ones most likely to try and argue about echo chambers because their style of rage farming doesn’t work if everyone avoids them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/01/owning-the-libs-is-the-only-gop-platform/676692/

Take it up with men and current gender stereotypes.

“The research, conducted with three other colleagues, consisted of seven experiments involving more than 2,000 American and Chinese participants. We showed that there is a psychological link between eco-friendliness and perceptions of femininity. Due to this “green-feminine stereotype,” both men and women judged eco-friendly products, behaviors, and consumers as more feminine than their non-green counterparts. In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female. In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-resist-green-behavior-as-unmanly/

It’s likely using nature is coded as masculine, while showing you care about nature is coded feminine.

There’s definitely the genetic component too, but the scents from soap is an interesting thing to test out.

And for what it’s worth some types of oil of lemon eucalyptus works reasonably well, if you don’t want to use DEET. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/oil-of-lemon-eucalyptus-insect-repellents-a7989538414/

Some friends really like this stuff “Repel Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellent2 Pump” and consumer reports also thinks it works pretty well.

There’s some reports that the interaction of soaps and shampoos influence how tasty a person smells, so it might be worth trying different products.

https://www.prevention.com/health/a43863971/different-soaps-may-make-you-more-attractive-to-mosquitoes/

Write MP3s to them and use them to play one song in a modern car.

(I saw a video of someone playing a clip of music using a USB floppy drive)

I run my own XMPP server. https://joinjabber.org/ has some introductory information Snickket is a all in one service you can host or your can pay them to host https://snikket.org/start/

XMPP servers and clients are a lot lighter weight than matrix, though I think matrix has more fancy features.

They’re both self hostable and are federated to share the costs of running the network.

With signal there’s a non-profit that needs some pretty steam funding to stay in business. (Though they’re popular so maybe they can get it) https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-run-an-encrypted-chat-app-youll-need-50-million-signal-says