I voted leave. I think my reasons are quite different from those of most people. I didn't vote against immigration, or to have an extra £350m spent on the NHS, or any of the other tripe that was circulated by the likes of Farage.

If I'm honest, I feel sorry for the people who bought into any of it. They're victims of a cynical political game played by masters, the mass distribution of mis/disinformation that drowns out the legitimacy of solid information, and of their own lack of intelligence, their own naivete.

I voted leave out of a fundamental disagreement with the political philosophy of the European Union. I disagree with centralised government, bureaucracies, unelected officials, socialism to a degree more than necessary, and I voted out of the political superstate that I predict coming a long way away in the future. I could go into more depth (I don't want anyone to think my reasons are shallow or without justification), but instead of investing my time and going down an off-topic rabbit hole, I would like people to grant, for the sake of argument, that my stance is a principled one worthy of sympathy.

Now, it's very hard to materialise the success or failure of voting for such reasons. I suppose it suffices to know that we as a country are now going down a fundamentally different path to the EU.

I think, however, that the remain side did in fact win the economic argument. A leave vote probably will have a negative impact in many of the ways predicted. However, having said that, I also think that humans, for all their intelligence, cannot predict everything. I suspect there are going to be unforeseen upsides to leaving in real economic terms that will reveal themselves as we readjust ourselves to this new situation. I am sure being in the EU is not the only viable way of existing in the world. Though all this is an aside because I did not, like many people, make a simple utilitarian calculation of better off or worse off. I still voted leave because this was never about economics for me. I didn't vote for myself, if I had then I would have voted remain for the more comfortable economy and the free movement. Nor did I vote for my fellow countryman, for the same reasons.

Whether or not my vote was the right one I will never live long enough to see, and it can only really be validated by the hindsight of history. I wanted to see our fate diverge from that of the EU. I made my decision on behalf of the unborn. My thinking is not a two year recession, nor a five year disintegration from the EU, nor a decade long negotiation process of trade deals, nor about my pension or yours, nor about whether in the long run I will have more money in my pocket because of it. I'm thinking long, long-term. Britain is going to outlive all of us, and our children. It will be here longer than a hundred years, and given the political, economic, and national integration of the EU member states in only the last few decades, I can see what I perceive to be a major problem only getting far worse.

I'm willing to incur short-term damage in order to avoid that.