Sometimes I feel like whatever I’d do it won’t be enough. What/where I buy or where I donate seem trivial in the larger scheme of things. From extreme power concentration to world hunger. From climate change to AI safety. Too many things that I’d like to change, but I feel powerless sometimes. The feeling comes coupled with a sense of guilt of not doing enough and not being enough. Do you guys get this feeling too? How do you deal with it?
I do believe in the necessity of optimism in order to affect change, but sometimes hope is hard to cultivate. How do you guys keep your optimism up?
Thanks for reading my mini-rant.
Also, the meme is not OC
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.
The part about local entropy I said precisely that in the second paragraph and is essential to my analogy. Thanks for clarifying that.
Humans have never lived in an environment where entropy only goes up.
Every plant that grows from seed, water, air, and sun is a decrease of entropy. For the past five thousand thousand thousand years, the sun has bathed us in free work that the entire ecosystem uses to decrease entropy, that verdant power barely kept in check by forest fires, rot, and rendering of plant matter into fossil chemicals that are so low-entropy that tapping into them created an destsbilizing overgrowth of industry.
For those of us living in these weird two hundred years where we’re burning through a hundred hundred hundred years of fossil fuels per year, it can look like entropy only goes up - those fuels will never be replaced quickly enough to sustain this consumption - but this is only a brief blip in Earth’s history.
It is inevitable that entropy will decrease again worldwide, that after the extinction event there will be repopulation. But whether that’s with drones and data centers or with bacteria or with human communities is up to us.