The reality is setting in that people simply do not care about making the world a better place. It is breaking my heart, and I do not know how to reconcile my thoughts. I’m sorry to be such a downer here but I don’t know where else to share.

Perhaps the climate catastrophe, human suffering, and inequality is so large and so much out of people’s hands that even people who care have come to a state of learned helplessness. 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. To a certain extent, I can’t blame him, because a lot of people just work to survive.

I want to make the world a better place. A world where people have all there basic needs met, live in balance with nature, and have a right to self determination. A world where humanity strives to be the best version of itself. I can’t help but get sad or frustrated when I see something wrong. I can’t help but feel like I’m a downer to my friends when I point these things out. They don’t disagree with me, but it just seems like a depressing topic. People seem generally content to live their normal lives. In the same way, I can’t blame them. It won’t build a better future, but they deserve to be happy.

Maybe my coworkers are right, and that I’m too naïve. Maybe my friends are right, and that I’m too empathetic for my own good. I am envious that they can turn off the thing in their head that worries, or wants to make things better, and that they can just enjoy life. A more utopian future is generations away, or maybe never. If I can’t effect change, maybe I should find an outlet, or stop caring, or something. idk, sorry for yapping. if you’re reading this i hope you have a good day

  • hex_m_hell@slrpnk.net
    9·
    2 days ago

    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.