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
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.
While in general I agree, I never used straws anyway even before the whole thing. There is no good way to drink a chunky milkshake in a car without a proper straw, however, if I drank it more than once a year I would probably buy a metal one.
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.
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.
Filter and focus
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.
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
Metal straws are a great way to chip a tooth. Just buy plastic straws in bulk and keep them in the home and office, or you know, drink from the rim.
I mean… I have used metal straws for years without chipping a tooth. I have miraculously also managed to go through my entire life using metal forks and spoons without breaking my teeth on them. Maybe Im just built different.
I got a few different sizes and our household really enjoys the metal straws. They get as cold as your drink, which is satisfying. And the big ones are great for homemade bubble tea, which the kids are always asking for
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.
Thanks for the thoughtful and elaborate response. I hadn’t heard such a critique on 80k hours before, though I still think their resources on problem profiles and existential risk analysis are quite useful.
Like jeet kun do; take what is useful, drop what is not. Thats what all the industries do to humanity anyway, so turnabout is fair game.
Why use a straw?
when I couldn’t afford to fix my teeth, using a straw was less painful than not using one
I’d recommend you get a reusable one and take it with you for that duration.
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.
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.
