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.

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.

You do what you can. Doing something, no matter how small, is better than doing nothing.

You do what you can, and no more. Don’t burn yourself out or work yourself into an early grave. Show compassion to yourself.

Ally with people who share your concerns. It’s easier to get things done as a group, and you’ll have support that way. You keep talking to people who don’t care, and that’s ruining your morale. Find people who do care.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

I’m there.

I’ve tried to live like compassion is a renewable resource. Well, mine ain’t.

And you don’t have to apologize for generalizing me. I’m sad, tired, and worn out and sick of it.

… like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.

I’m basically stuck in a Bilbo-like ARRRGGGHH! reaching for the ring from Frodo at Rivendale. I’m no longer reaching for the ring but my being is stuck in that look and my heart and soul are dead.

I’m sorry that retracting into myself is the only safe space that I have left.

And I’m sorry.

I think a lot of it is people are struggling to just survive. Barely making ends meet, putting food on their own table and a roof over their head. There are probably many people that wish they could do more, but don’t have the time or resources to do anything more.

I feel exactly the same way! I’ve been struggling to accept this fact for years and years. Really the only thing that’s helped is looking far and wide for like minded people, as few as there are, and chat them up so I don’t feel so alone in my thinking. If ever you want to share your feelings and talk about the ways you’re trying to live a life of integrity and long term thinking, I’d love to chat!

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…