Sometimes I feel like whatever I’d do it won’t be enough. What/where I buy or where I donate seem trivial in the larger scheme of things. From extreme power concentration to world hunger. From climate change to AI safety. Too many things that I’d like to change, but I feel powerless sometimes. The feeling comes coupled with a sense of guilt of not doing enough and not being enough. Do you guys get this feeling too? How do you deal with it?
I do believe in the necessity of optimism in order to affect change, but sometimes hope is hard to cultivate. How do you guys keep your optimism up?
Thanks for reading my mini-rant.
Also, the meme is not OC
Recognize that changing the world is beyond your remit, it’s mostly for navel gazers and those unable or unwilling to change themselves
That doesn’t mean wallow in self pity, change yourself, vote wisely, help others when you can. Those are all within your control and aim for being content and achieving that is a goal in itself. Most of us go about our lives blithely consumed by frippery and mistake ignorance for fulfilment.
aiming to be happy is the wrong goal, i am wary of people who say they are happy, they’re either psychopath’s, or are unmoved by the suffering and inequality around the world or the don’t care, stay away from those happy clappers.
I stay optimistic through humanity, through organizing with others, through connecting with my local community and sticking up for communities around the globe.
A lot of what keeps me optimistic is spite, though. I hate that the future of my kids will be worse than my present. I want to change that, for them and for all future life on Earth.
There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.
I don’t feel like I’m optimistic, I think we are doomed and all I can do is enjoy my last days in this world. I do what I can, but it’s not in my hand what those fucking leaders do. They are going to destroy the world no matter what I think or do, so I keep on drinking and jerking and doom scrolling until they are done.
whether you die at the middle of human civilization or the end makes little meaningful difference to an individual.
Yeah i just gave up on trying to save the world, it’s really nothing more than a hollywood trope, it’s nonsense. Best you can do is make your little corner of the universe better, help your neighbors etc. Even someone like MLK jr, what did they do to help anyone in europe asia africa south america?
Like what could i do to help anyone on a different continent? Donate money via the Internet to some NGO and hope it’s not a scam because i really would have zero control over what happens to the money after i click send.
So i do what i can instead, volunteer at the local high school, donate clothes to the local homeless shelter, do stuff where i can see the impact. Vote in local elections (MUCH more important than voting in national elections), help my elderly neighbor bring in groceries etc etc. Idk what else can we do??
MLK helped inspire the movements of the 60s and 70s which put pressure on the US forcing it to leave Vietnam. His speeches have inspired activists and rebels all over the world, why do you think he was killed?
If you are in the US there are ample ways to help the world. Many parts of the armaments for the military industry are produced in small factories around the US with relatively little security. The soldiers that fight in the imperialist wars are recruited in US cities. Drones are cheap and can even be assembled by yourself with fairly low amounts of money.
You can’t “save the world” by yourself, but the systems that are causing the massacres and ecocide across the earth all have weak points and are only comprised of so many people. The working people always massively outnumber the forces against us.
Some of our local fast food chains don’t even give us cardboard straws anymore. Just drink from the sad cup. With a Sad Turtle warning label on it. [EU single use plastic label]
It just gives the public a pause to think. To plot for the revolution.
Me, I’m beyond that, I usually can’t afford fast food, most parts of the month I buy potatoes from the local store.
Get your paper straw. Immediately poke it through a massive plastic lid. All of it’s still coated with plastics so it can’t be recycled anyway. Top drawer.
Weren’t straws introduced so that restaurants wouldn’t have to clean lipstick off of glasses? At this point, the straw is a gargoyle without a water gutter. What are we even doing
What’s sad is watching people falling from world leaders propaganda even here on lemmy
I don’t get the whole soggy straw pseudo-controversy. While yes, the paper ones are awful, it skips over the much more obvious solution of: …just don’t use a fucking straw.
Lift cup. Open mouth. Play Interstellar docking scene music. Let gravity move the noms into the face-hole.
No straw needed.
Drink on the go from a disposable cup and don’t want it splashing around? Use the kind of lid they put on heated drinks, with the little elevated sippy hole.
Like, we had working straw substitutes well before the paper bullshit came along.
Bro I love the sippy cups. Drinks actually taste better that way. Besides that, I’ve got metal straws. The paper straw stuff is just odd and unnecessary.
While in general I agree, I never used straws anyway even before the whole thing. There is no good way to drink a chunky milkshake in a car without a proper straw, however, if I drank it more than once a year I would probably buy a metal one.
Don’t drink from paper straws. They contain forever chemicals like PFAS. This change away from plastic has just been a fuckup.
If you want to truly make an impact, I think getting a metal straw and cleaning it, taking it around with you is a better idea.
Somehow i got away with not using a straw for like 12 years
Metal straws are a great way to chip a tooth. Just buy plastic straws in bulk and keep them in the home and office, or you know, drink from the rim.
I got a few different sizes and our household really enjoys the metal straws. They get as cold as your drink, which is satisfying. And the big ones are great for homemade bubble tea, which the kids are always asking for
The connections we have with individual people, as individuals, are world-changing. Think small. Don’t think about fixing the world, think about fixing things for your loved ones, your local community, your town, etc.
There’s an idea I read about recently in Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown which says to consider a flock of starlings, wheeling and swooping above a field. There is no leader; each starling acts only in accordance with the starlings that are nearby, yet all together they create a beautiful, intricate, coordinated pattern.
Be a starling and act according to your nearby starlings. Change is made by a thousand small actions, a thousand small starlings becoming a whole flock. I don 't think I’m doing the idea justice here, but it’s brought me a lot of comfort <3
Why use a straw?
when I couldn’t afford to fix my teeth, using a straw was less painful than not using one
I’d recommend you get a reusable one and take it with you for that duration.
Very easy. Control what you can, accept what you can’t.
The world may be burning around us, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. When the house is on fire be the one toasting marshmallows.
the world was always burning. it’s just the vast majority of folks never knew about it.
40 years ago you only found out about it for 30m on the evening news. most folks read the newspaper too, but the amount of media you consumed related to what was going in in the world was very tiny.
there 1000s of hours of media about it being produced every single day. most news streamers are on for HOURS a day about a single topic in vivid detail. imagine how horrorifc historical events would have been had they had today’s media enviornment? like the massacres of the Khmer Rogue, the Chinese annexation of Tibet, the multiple genocides in Serbia, Rwanda, etc. The scale of these statistically, dwarfs the current ‘horrors’ we see…
and in both cases, almost none none of it has any significant impact on your life. the stuff that impacts your life is boring, trite and most folks are totally ignorant about. like the budget of your local Public Works Dept.
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Unless you are a world leader, using a paper straw, recycle, advocate to consume more responsibly, might be as much as you can do as a single individual.
might be as much as you can do as a single individual.
Therefore, do all of that but also: organize. Collectively, we have more power. Depending on one’s situation, e.g. a union, tenants’ union and/or mutual aid groups can be things that not only help your own life, but also build power against the oligarchy and gives the feeling you can enable change.
The argument isn’t that we should stop doing all that because billionaires ruin everything. The argument is that we need to stop billionaires from being able to do that.
