Solarpunk

When I was a kid I really thought the leisure society will happen. Now I'm simply counting down the years to death.

Just do what you can do to make things better for people. It'll drive you crazy if you're worrying about what other people are doing. Even crazier than that if you want a reward for doing things right. Do the right thing (even if no one else is) simply because it's the right thing to do.

Serenity is to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

People are simply shutting down their head. If you can't see it, it doesn't exist.

I get it and I have felt similarly. I get annoyed that people don't put in the recycling right but then I also look at the recyclying rules and realize the company that does it is pretty much setting it up to fail and are itching to just dump it. Its hard to reduce, reuse, recycle and I look at the folks who can't return a grocery cart and realize they are not likely trying. My economic situation prevents me from having as energy efficient lifestyle as I would like (being able to purchase or remodel my place on more efficient lines). It sucks but im going out trying to be as least responsible for this mess as I can be.

You have to remember we aren't all that far away from cavemen. Some 10,000 years ago we were hunting and gathering. That's only somewhere between 100 and 200 generations of modern humans. We still have alot of the traits that were important for survival like greed and tribalism. People simply havent had enough time to evolve to this world of abundance, technology, knowledge, laws, and so on.

However, there are things within people’s control that doesn’t change. At work, I listen to a coworker frustrated about a simple problem. It would be a simple change to make this person’s job much less painful, but he “just works here”. It’s just such a dumb problem to waste hours of someone’s life on.

Does solving that problem threaten their access to food and housing? Capitalism doesn't care about negotiating the most profitable deals, it cares about maintaining power dynamics, so the company cares more about keeping employees in a servant role than improving their bottom line, so employees are often unable to make their life better without threatening their own livelihood and those of their colleagues.

Capitalism has existed alongside people with good intentions for centuries now. It has many ways of bending kindness into accumulation of power for the rich. Helping people out means people will be less likely to riot when social services get cut, so the rich are more likely to cut social services and lower taxes. So it takes almost no work at all for the system to turn charity into a wealth transfer from the charitable to the rich.

If you want to improve the world, you have to be clever about it. You have to choose things that the rich can't just leverage into exploitation - things that they would pay to get rid of, not things they would pay to exist. Mutual aid networks, labor unions and other unions, exchange of anarchist ideas and skills, blockades and sabotage, decreasing the number of hours people work at things capitalists would have paid for them to do, etc.

There are people who are cynical to a fault, who have more faith in capitalism's ability to exploit you than your ability to circumvent undermine it. But realistic cynical skepticism is warranted, and you need to be careful that your good intentions actually produce good outcomes.

Disagree.

Most people want to make the world a better place, we just can't agree on what a better world would look like, and how to get there.

There's a lot of people out there, for example, who think that the "right to self determination" is a bad thing because they believe humanity has an intrinsic self-destructive aspect. I disagree, but they firmly believe that a dictatorship is the solution and I'm being unhelpful because I don't want that.

One of the hardest things I've been through in therapy was realizing that my parents really did think they were doing the right thing. They listened to the "experts" at church who told them that in order to protect their kids, they needed to hurt their kids. My mother dropped out of college when she got pregnant, and my stepdad is mentally ill, so neither of them were particularly well educated, and they landed in a cult.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all. People can be horrible and think they're doing it for the greater good.

This is a remarkable amount of main character syndrome, frankly. It doesn't read like excess empathy to me, it reads like privilege.

You're not saving the world. You'll never be saving the world. Your contribution either way is irrelevant. The big problems that you are frustrated about are about mass incentives, big numbers and geopolitics, not about people coming together for the common good because they care so much. It's not naïveté, it's arrogance. You get to vote on the big overall direction and, if you have the time, resources and disposition, to collaborate in activism with millions of others, assuming enough of them agree with you.

The small stuff? The "I could do this marginally better for mine or someone else's sake"? That's worth it. That you can do yourself. It still works on the same set of incentives and dynamics, but if it's something you personally can do to make something marginally better for someone, then... you know... go ahead? It's just much more valuable to do it in your own life than to get frustrated by someone else who you think should do it. Because, again, you aren't that important. Nobody is waiting for your command or judgement unless you're supposed to be giving it for some reason.

And let me be clear, I'm not mad about this. I'm not outraged at your worldview or anything. It's just that, honestly, in good faith, I think this sense of despair at everybody else refusing to fix things by acting as a hive mind with your same set of values and priorities is not a problem of ethics as much as a problem of narcissism and an inflated sense of one's own impact, and both that individual and their surroundings are better served by understanding the actual scale of their agency. Because... you know, that way you don't get discouraged when it comes to doing the small things you can do on the large scale, like voting or protesting, and you don't get angry about doing the big things you can do in the small scale, like not being an asshole or being too deflated to actually act in the spaces you control.

So no hard feelings but this is a get over yourself moment. In a constructive, positive, agency-filled, collaborative, collective action-driven way.