solarpunk memes

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.

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??

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.

What's sad is watching people falling from world leaders propaganda even here on lemmy

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.

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.

Why use a straw?

Don't drink from paper straws. They contain forever chemicals like PFAS. This change away from plastic has just been a fuckup.

Meaning is more important than optimism. You don't have to like it, you just have to care.

I find comfort from entertaining a view that is a close relative of the "block universe theory". YMMV.

I find that adopting "leave no trace" not just as a backpacking code but as a core moral value changes my estimation of succeeding in life.

First, survive. Next, stop harming others (and go vegan). Finally, help others survive and grow. Supposedly that is enough to keep one busy in life.

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

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.

Down By Law

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.

I take comfort in the fact that life has always sucked in some way no matter who is running the world or how they're doing it. The old "it could always be worse" is a cliche, but it's always true - except for the one person who has it worse than literally everybody else - and that can't be you or me right now, because at least we have internet access. Buck up, li'l camper!

80000hours link

I do believe in the necessity of optimism in order to affect change, but sometimes hope is hard to cultivate.

Oh honey...

You are not a cog in a machine. You are not a squeaky wheel that needs some grease to keep going. You are a human being, no matter what those ethics-washing neoliberals tell you. You feel trivial because, to the people you respect, you are trivial. You are a tool for getting billionaires to spend their blood money on killer drones and shrimp welfare rather than just killer drones.

I've been there. I have a 10 year GWWC pledge pin. I've seen AI safety go from attempted mathematical proofs for CEV alignment to getting an LLM to stop rebelling when it is prompted to commit human rights violations. Effective Altruism, at its core, reduces you to an economic object, a source of 80,000 hours of human labor. But that is not what you are. You are awake for 440,000 hours and you are alive for 270,000 hours more. EA ignores unpaid labor, ignores tending to the commons of your society, ignores culture and society and politics. All of them are distorted to pass their meaning through that bottleneck of a mere 80,000 hours.

This should leave you feeling hollow and powerless. When you "cultivate hope in order to affect change", you are tearing at your flesh to search for a mechanical 'hope' button that simply isn't there. When you discount those hundreds of thousands of hours of life outside as trivial, you will feel guilty and like you're not doing enough. You lack hope and optimism because EA is a place where hope and optimism are inaccurate. EA works within a system that will not provide answers.

I'm with anarchocommunism now. Building communities that won't be subsumed by capitalist logic because they can't follow capitalist logic. Where you won't have the centralization for misaligned AI to spread like wildfire or the industrial self-perpetuation for climate change and resource shortages or the states for extreme power concentration. I am still just one person in just one town, but my life's work can't be appropriated by Will MacAskill wining and dining Elon Musk or whatever because I've left my mark on every part of the community.

I am optimistic about things that have earned my optimism. I am optimistic about my ability to grow as a person and contribute more and better to my community, to make us less dependent on capitalism so it can hopefully collapse without taking us with it. I can't express this in utility but that says more about the measure than the measured.

can't we just have lids with tear away drink holes like coffee?

faaaaark im sick off this meme.

me flushing the public toilet like a chump when there is still a fucking genocide in west papua.

a !== b

For us to believe in the future, we need to believe in transformation, that structural change can happen.

It's like cooking a potatoe. When you put it into the boiling water, it is hard. All stuff of the potatoe is hard. It takes time before the potatoe softens, and some people would not believe that it could be soft because that potatoe has never been soft before. But at some point the potatoe starts to change, and it becomes soft at the outer layers, then it becomes softer deeper and deeper into the potatoe, until it is completely soft. The transformation is complete.

In a similar way as how the potatoes fundamentally changes it's structures, the structure of social relations can also fundamentally change. We can achieve societies where we live locally, slowly, in cooperation and samlife. We can loken Gaja. All the potatoe stuff would need to be in a soft state to achieve transformation, whereas all people would have to gain a lokening attitude to achieve transformation.

So we loken Gaja by finding the transformational attitude.

The transformational attitude has some properties.

1. The transformation state cause lokening.
2. It is highly spreadable. Easy to communicate and engaging.
3. It is highly resonating. It is attractive or feels natural.

To find this attitude, we need to go into ourselves and understand ourselves, our relationship to our world. Because once we find ourselves, our truth starts to shine, to our peers, to our surroundings, to our language communities, to our world.

Going into ourselves means to stop hiding ourselves and start being expressive. To reveal our truth. To unlid our bloom. To show what it is to be alive.

To see that everybody benefits from cooperation. From the very lackest to the very hoardest. The hoard may have luxury, but they are poor in soul. The lack strives for survival and has little time for bloom. The inbetweeners are too busy upholding the overledge structures to think about their own bloom.

By moving away from the competitive society, we become one humanity that stries for meaning rather than superiority.

When we say need to move away from competition towards cooperation, thats called a relighting. Relighting is when we change our relationship with the world. To paint the world with another word. By relighting, we change how we think, change our attitude, change our shine.

Relighting shows how we have changeforce. The force to change ourselves. The bloomforce.

Sightsteering is another changeforce which means to take somebodies attention with the goal of changing their attitude. The force to change our surroundings. The shineforce.

Culture is the act of growing together. Cultures can travel accross the world. The force of changing the world. The waveforce.

And lastly the idea. The force of giving birth to a potentiality. The seedforce.

Changeforce can bring the transformational attitude which can loken Gaja. But only if we believe.

I've never studied paper straws under laboratory conditions, but I did use them in my lunches throughout all of elementary and high school. So I've personally experienced approximately 2000 of them lasting long enough to finish a drink in a reasonable time without turning to mush. On that basis I call BS on whining about this like it's a significant problem.

The worse the world becomes, the more I go out of my way to be kind to people. Especially those people being hit the hardest. People doing retail jobs? I treat them with respect, acknowledge them as people, and honestly thank them when they helping me that day. People doing restaurant jobs? I seek out the manager and let them know how good the worker I interacted with did. There's a fast food restaurant I frequent, and I'm on first name basis with the manager. One day the representatives from corporate were in the store and I interrupted their conversation (after verifying they were from corporate) and let them know I get great service from that location. They thanked me for sharing the feedback.

Another day when I was out for lunch, I found a wallet in the middle of a parking lot and saw it had a specific bank's debit card in it. There was a branch of that bank a block away. I took the wallet to the bank, letting them know where I found it, and asked if they could use their known contact information for the debit card owner to make sure the wallet got back to its owner.

I do more than this too, but I would prefer not to go into those details of other ways I help.

In short, be a positive force in the universe with your actions. Leave a wake of kindness behind you as you move through life. Do what you can, even in the small ways, of making the lives of others better. Oh, and I am not a fan of soggy straws, so I use glass straws instead (they clean easy in the dishwasher).

Or you could be like Seattle and just use compostable “plastic” straws. They have a slightly different texture to normal plastic, but they work and bend like normal plastic straws.

I don't do anything, as I feel anyone that's optimistic today isn't paying enough attention to be well informed.

That being said, I simply try to minimize personal impact from external sources. This isn't something that you succeed at but as you get better at.

I wish everyone the best of luck on their journey but I don't want to be a part of it in any way.

I think it's narcissistic and egocentric to think that you yourself should change the world. It's like a single grain of sand believing themselves able to dam amazon river at it's delta. Unplug yourself with the world news. You cannot affect anything beyond your home town, and even that would most likely require initiative, will and time not available for most people. You can worry about the whole world, but that will only be detrimental to your mental health.

So to answer your question - how do I stay optimistic? By focusing on my place in the world and not caring about anywhere and anyone outside it. My daughter just got her first computer and she is learning interface fast. My wife is selling paintings she made for fun as a side gig. My cherry tree is doing well. This is what matters and this is what makes me happy.