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
We humans have a natural bias towards negative news so we can protect ourself. It is really important to understand the limits of anybody personally. We are 8billion people. That anybody can single change the world alone is quite frankly impossible and therefore a stupid burden to place on you or anybody else for that matter.
A good point to start is to deliberately filter news. There are two ways of doing that. One is to just ignore certain problems, if you can not do anything about it. Your time is better used for something else. A good point to start is imho to filter out news further away from you. So cut out global news not involving your country, then national news, then state or whatever more local level and then municipality level. It is probably better to be informed about some bike lane being discussed in your city then the civil war in Sudan, since you can actually do something about the bike lane.
The other important part is to limit your news sources to the most useful ones. A good part of that is to go towards more traditional high quality media. They tend to be less emotional and more facts based, which helps. I personally really like business newspapers. They are extremely facts based, as people actually make decisions on what they write, but unfortunately neoliberal. When you feel down stay away from social media. That is designed to make you feel bad. A good way of dealing with that is using the fediverse as it is not for profit and also to subscribe to local groups and accounts, which provide you with actionable news.
Also really important is to just chill sometimes. As in go out have some fun, whatever that might be. Play video games, sports, hiking, music or whatever you like. You will do no good, when you burn out.
Oh also the current large wars, seem to all involve destroying fossil fuel infrastructure. Certainly Ukraine bombs a lot of Russias and both side have hit fossil fuel infrastructure in the current Iran war as well.
Thanks for the idea bro. I had never considered filtering news. I didn't think news would get to my head, but clearly it did.