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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s the neat part, you don’t!
I don’t stay optimistic, at least not all the time. I just can’t. I don’t think any sane, realistic person can.
I try to be kind and empathetic towards others. I try to be a decent person. The world needs so much more than I’m capable of giving. Sometimes that’s overwhelming. I try to remember that my own personal responsibility has reasonable limits. Sometimes that’s enough.
I take some “me time” whenever I feel I need to. I know that self care helps me be better to others. That’s what matters most, in my opinion.
This is why they say ignorance is bliss.
I put energy into hobbies and spend time doing things with people IRL whenever possible.
I don’t plan on having kids but I’ve worked with them my whole life. I would recommend spending time with children and vicariously seeing the world through their eyes.
My last line of cope is thinking about how many problems we’re facing have either always been a problem that we’re still trying to solve, or a problem that inherently doesn’t get solved until reality forces us. By framing fascism, climate change, bigotry, etc this way the problems seem less immediately existential. Like, it almost seems obvious that human beings would consume the planet unless the consequences of such forced us to change our ways.
Remember (per our current scientific understanding), entropy goes in one direction from orderly to chaotic. No matter what you do, the total entropy goes up, and doing nothing does increase the total entropy less.
However, instead of letting that fact let you down, it is possible to do things that locally reduce entropy and make things more ordered in your local environment. All this to say, don’t focus solely on the inevitable, focus on that which you can control, what you can hope for, and what you can make better for yourself and your world.
That’s not a good analogy. The entropy of the universe can only ever go up, but local entropy can and extremely often does decrease.
Humans have never lived in an environment where entropy only goes up.
Every plant that grows from seed, water, air, and sun is a decrease of entropy. For the past five thousand thousand thousand years, the sun has bathed us in free work that the entire ecosystem uses to decrease entropy, that verdant power barely kept in check by forest fires, rot, and rendering of plant matter into fossil chemicals that are so low-entropy that tapping into them created an destsbilizing overgrowth of industry.
For those of us living in these weird two hundred years where we’re burning through a hundred hundred hundred years of fossil fuels per year, it can look like entropy only goes up - those fuels will never be replaced quickly enough to sustain this consumption - but this is only a brief blip in Earth’s history.
It is inevitable that entropy will decrease again worldwide, that after the extinction event there will be repopulation. But whether that’s with drones and data centers or with bacteria or with human communities is up to us.
There’s not much one person can do. But there are a lot of us - if lots of people each work on something small it adds up. There are probably plenty of things in your community that have been getting a little better over time for exactly that reason.
When I felt hopeless about politics joining a DSA chapter helped. It makes me feel like I’m doing something helpful, even if it’s something small.
What you can do for climate change depends on the opportunities near you. But some ideas might be:
- plant trees
- lobby the school board to install solar panels over a school parking lot
- join an activist group to protest for closure of a local oil refinery
- tell friends an neighbors about benefits of EVs, heat pumps, and other electrification options
- write your elected officials regularly about climate measures you want them to vote for, to thank them when they vote correctly, or to chastise when they don’t
I’d focus on one thing instead of trying to do all the things. Working with a local group is ideal.
I just do the best I can and smile at any achievement no matter how small.
As for dealing with the bigger problems like “enter latest global conflict and genocide here” that is where community comes in. Current campaign going on is stopping the ploriforation of Data Centers.
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.
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.
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.
Ok first of all that’s a completely unrealistic flight formation
I try to maintain a balance. I try to accept that a lot of the problems in the world are beyond my reach, to keep informed and to help in the small ways I can, and to draw motivation from it, but without throwing myself into despair. It’s hard and I’ll admit I err on the side of ignorance these days.
Mostly I focus on solarpunk fiction projects (I think we need to be able to imagine better futures and that fiction gives us roadmaps and chances to explore these possibilities safely), project research, and ways to help at the level where I can effect things.
I help fix things for people so they don’t have to buy new, I help organize and give stuff away at my local swap shop and on the free groups online, I try to help with local land conservation. And I take the small victories where I can get them. If I fix something or find some ewaste electronics for a neighbor and save them spending $60 on Amazon, the world isn’t changed but Amazon didn’t get that money and maybe my neighbor won’t reach for it as their first choice next time. If we conserve a hundred acres of forest it’s not stopping any of the big impending climate disasters, but some habitat is preserved, and perhaps some of the routes animals follow as they roam won’t get as fragmented as they would otherwise. And I imagine better worlds and try to show them to others.
Just be the good example for others to follow. If you “give up” you consequently make it impossible. Lower the optimism in favor of realism. Also the world we live in runs in cycles, there is no change at all from a universal viewpoint. Everything has been before and will be in the future. It is just your relation that may change. By the way, the earth will get rid of us anyways. Very philosophical topic, there is no final answer.
Whenever I feel guilty about leaving a light in, I just pull up a picture of Las Vegas and then stop feeling guilty.
Same with if I forgot to recycle something, I just zoom out on flight radar and realise I’m not the problem.
