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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.
whether you die at the middle of human civilization or the end makes little meaningful difference to an individual.
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.
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.
Recognize that changing the world is beyond your remit, it's mostly for navel gazers and those unable or unwilling to change themselves
That doesn't mean wallow in self pity, change yourself, vote wisely, help others when you can. Those are all within your control and aim for being content and achieving that is a goal in itself. Most of us go about our lives blithely consumed by frippery and mistake ignorance for fulfilment.
aiming to be happy is the wrong goal, i am wary of people who say they are happy, they're either psychopath's, or are unmoved by the suffering and inequality around the world or the don't care, stay away from those happy clappers.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Optimism and pessimism are qualities that are independent of the underlying reality. There is no situation too good or too bad that cannot be viewed optimistically or pessimistically. Humans at baseline have an in-built bias for optimism that is invisible to oneself unless you know how to look for it, and even then, only when you look, and only sometimes. It's quite certain that you are being ridiculously optimistic about several things in your life. It's one of the tricks our meat plays on our mind so that our mind doesn't just lie down and wait for death.
I concede your point on everything but
It’s one of the tricks our meat plays on our mind so that our mind doesn’t just lie down and wait for death.
The number of medicines I'm on to keep me from driving into a telephone pole with my seatbelt unfastened would point toward the theory that some of our meats aren't like the others and some might not be ridiculously optimistic about anything.
Well, I did say at baseline. You are probably familiar with the concept of "depressive realism?" The idea is that since depressed people can have a pessimistic bias, there is a point between being able to do laundry and being a puddle on the floor where the effects are perfectly cancelling out, and we see things as they are. I think it's mainly bunk, we never see things as they are and complicated things don't cancel out cleanly, but there's something to it.
Honestly, I'm done being well informed. There's literally nothing I can do about any of the stuff happening on the global level or even national level apart from get depressed and angry.
So I'm narrowing my attention to what I can change around me.
That's my aim as well, I was just saying anyone optimistic about the dumpster fire we're living in has not been paying any attention.
I filter all my stuff here so I see maybe the a ragebait political post once every day or two and never anything that involves trump, maga, etc. I have no desire to read anything about it.
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.
the world was always burning. it's just the vast majority of folks never knew about it.
40 years ago you only found out about it for 30m on the evening news. most folks read the newspaper too, but the amount of media you consumed related to what was going in in the world was very tiny.
there 1000s of hours of media about it being produced every single day. most news streamers are on for HOURS a day about a single topic in vivid detail. imagine how horrorifc historical events would have been had they had today's media enviornment? like the massacres of the Khmer Rogue, the Chinese annexation of Tibet, the multiple genocides in Serbia, Rwanda, etc. The scale of these statistically, dwarfs the current 'horrors' we see...
and in both cases, almost none none of it has any significant impact on your life. the stuff that impacts your life is boring, trite and most folks are totally ignorant about. like the budget of your local Public Works Dept.
Don't drink from paper straws. They contain forever chemicals like PFAS. This change away from plastic has just been a fuckup.
If you want to truly make an impact, I think getting a metal straw and cleaning it, taking it around with you is a better idea.
Somehow i got away with not using a straw for like 12 years
An appeal to futility isn't helpful though. We can still have an impact, especially when movements grow.
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.
Weren't straws introduced so that restaurants wouldn't have to clean lipstick off of glasses? At this point, the straw is a gargoyle without a water gutter. What are we even doing
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
You cannot single handedly solve climate change. Stop expecting that from yourself, do what you can, and accept that you are doing your part. Journey before destination my friend.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok first of all that’s a completely unrealistic flight formation
I'd always wondered what people's problem was with those straws until I realized you lightweights just don't drink fast enough.
Ooooohh I just want something to sip while I eat and chat~
Weak. Cowardly. Unthrifty.
If the waiter hasn't brought you at least three refills by the time you leave you wouldn't survive a real winter.
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.
The argument isn't that we should stop doing all that because billionaires ruin everything. The argument is that we need to stop billionaires from being able to do that.
might be as much as you can do as a single individual.
Therefore, do all of that but also: organize. Collectively, we have more power. Depending on one's situation, e.g. a union, tenants' union and/or mutual aid groups can be things that not only help your own life, but also build power against the oligarchy and gives the feeling you can enable change.
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.
I don't think the world has gone to shit, I think I have just matured enough to understand all the corruption and despicable acts humans are capable of. Looking back in history it's easy to notice, the world has always been shit, people with power have always stomped on everyone else, nothing really has changed on that front. My feeling is that there have always been about 30% of good people, 30% assholes and 30% that just let the current take them wherever.
But I can still find things to be optimistic about. The space race seems to be back on, the new crispr research is really exciting, my friend has a potential vaccine to look forward to to cure her cancer once and for all, solar power is cheaper than ever and my country has been majority renewable for some years already, etc. On a smaller scale finding those 30% that are decent humans to spend time with is a good idea.
Personally I don't go hungry, I have a warm bed and a roof over my head and I can get endless entertainment either mindless or through hobbies. Again looking at history, most of our race's existence, chances are that none of this would have been the case if I lived even 100 years ago in most places.
It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay, simple acts of love and kindness. -Gandalf
I follow the scientific/tech progress on climate change and pretty much only get my news from TLDR which don't do the doom and gloom.
Yeah, it's bad and all but there are loads of people in the background putting in the work to avert the climate crisis. "It's hopeless, don't even try" is fossil fuel propaganda. We're pretty close to electric prices catering everywhere which will make going electric with stoves, heaters, cars and the only viable option.
For personal contribution: Buy less, less plastic, recycle your metals and electronics and bike if it's safe enough to do so and your commute is less than 10k and buy chicken instead of beef. This alone will reduce your climate footprint by a massive amount.
Good shit's happening but it's not ragebait enough to get clicks.
P.S. I'm not delusional, it's all happening way too slowly but it is happening way faster that most think.
can't we just have lids with tear away drink holes like coffee?
You really don't need to be optimistic. I'm not. That doesn't mean that you need to have any problems.
The real issue in your comment is your guilt, and of not feeling like you're doing enough. My first question would be: are you actually not doing enough? If every person on Earth would behave/live like you, would the problem exist? If the answer is no, then you're doing enough. Then the question becomes how to get rid of that feeling, but this answer comes first. Because if the answer is yes, then you should be feeling like you do!