The only person you can control is yourself. Do what you know needs to be done, set the examples for others, but place no value on whether they see you or not. The effect of your actions will be apparent.

The despair you feel toward the average person’s lack of interest or outright dismissal of these very real problems is unfortunately common. As others have said, the magnitude of the problems we face is often paralyzing. How to begin addressing these massive problems was a question asked by a mother to Noam Chomsky in 1992, and I think his answer still holds up quite well. One of his big points is that it’s pretty much impossible to tackle any of this alone, you need a group to brainstorm ideas on how to solve things and not feel so helpless as a single individual surrounded by a sea of uncaring people.

In a way, this community, slrpnk.net, and even the fediverse as a whole is acting as a place for people to come together and know that they’re not entirely alone, though finding a group in real life who shares your values would allow you to really start enacting change, even if on a small scale.

Reminder. 2/3rds of the Internet is bots or paid people in other countries.

I’m not saying this to make you feel better. I’m telling you because it’s true.

Trust your conversations with real people in real life.

Don’t assume the discord online reflects real people’s beliefs.

Go to protests and talk to people.

There are more good people than bad in the world.

I wouldn’t necessarily say people don’t care. I don’t think they have the capacity to care. I think there’s so much going on in their lives and right in front of their faces that they can’t even see what’s happening.

That doesn’t make the solution any better though…

A lot of people don’t know they are supposed to make the world better. A lot know but don’t know how to. Still others know but don’t have the capacity left after just surviving. But there is a significant subset who knows and don’t care, they just chase more dollarbucks.

I think of it as situational, in your orbit, you have coworkers wasting time on simple problems. In other parts of the world, in remote villages, solar is changing people’s lives for the better.

I have known too many people lost in their own bubbles of reality, never considering the larger picture and impacts of personal choices. They are the majority, unfortunately.

Just focus on what you can do for yourself, find like minded people to share on larger efforts, and don’t waste your own time and energy (especially emotional) on people that never put in a second thought into efforts for improving the world.

Unless you are working at a cooperative, people are getting paid for their hours not for their labor. You absolutely should not improve things at work in any way unless you can get value out of it, because doing so feeds capitalism at the expense of everything else. Capitalism is a game where each side tries to get the maximum value out of the time. The capitalist wins when they maximize the value of your time, the worker wins when they maximize the amount of money they get for the minimum effort.

Some people are overwhelmed, some people are just trying to survive. A lot of people see that any effort they put in making things better, like at work, will just be turned against them to make the world worse. It’s really hopeless sometimes. A lot of time there just isn’t any space in people’s lives to even think outside survival.

But don’t confuse masking for happiness. People are angry and depressed. Very very few people are happy with the world the way it is. A lot of folks have just given up. People telling you that you should give up only want to feel better about their own failure, their own acquiescence to the void. Trauma does this to people. It traps people. It makes people give up. It makes people feel hopeless. It makes people uncreative. It makes it hard for people to believe in the possibility of hope.

Your work is probably not the place to focus on improving things, unless you’re either working in a cooperative or you’re organizing a union.

Personally, I think we’re all thinking about this whole thing wrong. Capitalism is a death cult. But in spite of that, we have hope. We have faith that we can create a better world, and we have evidence that is true. The world we live in is full of zero-sum games, games that pit us against each other. When we can turn these games into non-zero-sum games, games of cooperation, we can change everything. Capitalist labor markets are zero-sum because whoever wins it’s always at the expense of the other player (spoiler, the game is rigged for capitalists to win almost all the time).

The choice to cooperate or compete is similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. There is a clear optimal strategy for a single game of the prisoner’s dilemma: betray your opponent. But things get interesting when you play multiple times. Iterated prisoners dilemma (that is, playing the game multiple times while knowing all the previous moves) flips that strategy, making the optimal strategy one of guarded cooperation.

The secret here is that you need to have other people. At a high enough density, cooperation defeats competition. The better news is that you are here. From this core, we can support each other in building this world. We can continue to support bringing hope into the world.

There’s a book called Change: How to Make Big Things Happen. It’s about how movements happen. At first they are invisible, or small. But at a certain point they cascade and move very quickly. I’d recommend reading this book to think about how everything changes. I’d also focus locally. The thing that snaps people out of this hopelessness is actually just seeing what is possible. Make something that seems impossible happen. Start small, and build from there. What solar punk thing can you make real?

Can you start a tool library? What about even just a media library among friends? What’s the smallest thing you could do to bring a bit of the solar punk world you want into the current dystopia? Do one thing to prove it’s possible, then see what becomes possible next.

My original post comes out of a place of deep sadness, so I didn’t take much time in proof reading. I should have been more precise in my words on the internet. 😓 I’m sorry for generalizing.

If you want to improve things you can’t wait around for a good moment or depend on the involvement of the depoliticized and hopeless to join in. You can just do things. There are other people doing things, too and you can find them. The change you make can inspire some others too, but the disaffected will always be frustrating to see and deal with. There will always be more to do but the thing is to keep trying to move toward the ideal even if it’s just by inches and there’s miles to go, it’s the long haul

I’m also struggling with this, I feel like I lost a piece of myself and I’ve been grieving a lot of this year with this realization.

People do care. But there are a lot of people. Not everyone does.

When one does things, you end up with other people who do things. Won’t be your neighbor, won’t be your colleagues (unless you do the Good Thing™ professionally) so do not waste time trying to convince them.

Do your own thing. Life is short and there are billions of people out there. Spend it on the millions that want change, that’s a big enough crowd.

One of my favorite and best teacher was a biology teacher, and I remember being taught about population cycles of various living things. I like how that teacher showed us humanity’s population trends, and how it resembles boom and bust species. It was subtle, as if they knew it wouldn’t stick with many of the students.

I think most people can see the rat race they are in, but for whatever various reasons, cannot or will not notice the incoming cliff fall. But, some of us stand taller, and can see the cliff fall coming. Stopping in the middle of humanity’s stampede to warn everyone is going to be met with all sorts of problems, like being left behind, or being berated for slowing others down, or even violence if you create too much impact that impedes the flow of humanity. It’s really awful to deal with seeing a horrible thing happening, care about it, and are not able to make a difference to obvert a tragedy you see coming.

To me, it takes almost no effort to just think the correct way, to voice the correct thing in pertinent moments. It’s the holding of the tongue that takes effort when you realise the ears in the moment won’t listen. You can learn about people quickly by saying some off hand comments and seeing their reaction. Most of the time, people are oblivious or react negatively hearing about the cliff. Pardon my French: Most people only care about themselves and their own shits, sometimes so much that they actively shove their heads up their own asses, purposely so they cannot see anything else other than their own shit. Sometimes you might find someone aligning to your views, but be careful of circumstantial situations, like the rat race hitting a road bump and everyome complains about it. Lots of people only cared about covid when it knock on their door step and infected the nonbelievers.

I could go on, but have to stop atm, but know that you are not alone and it’s a struggle, like everything else in life, unfortunately.

This isn’t new.

The realisation as you go through life that things just aren’t as good as they should be is hard. The more you learn, the more you are exposed. What is new, perhaps, is that the scale of bullshit is bigger and the spread of it more actively pushed than before.

How to cope? Damned if I know. I just try to shut it out as much as possible.

(BTW, your colleague may just be exhausted with change, or demoralised or depressed themselves. It’s hard not to judge people when you see the answer so clearly, but it’s a trueism that everyone walks their own path and you just don’t know what’s going on in their life)

Whenever I’m struggling with the fact that everything is bullshit, I try to remind myself that there isn’t that much stopping me from living my own life as if I was already living after the revolution, or in utopia, or after the apocalypse, or whatever you want to call it or think it might be. Ultimately, I want to hang out with my dogs, garden, hike, cook, listen to and play music, hang out with friends, run rivers, ski, etc. etc. All achievable now, mostly. Do I also have to do bullshit I don’t want to? Sure. Are a lot of other people living in a crappy way and doing stupid and destructive bullshit? Definitely. But for the most part, if you just do what you can and try to live your life as if you already won the war, it’s pretty ok.

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