Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I know there are many people feeling similar. And I have some thoughts that help me not to give up hope.

1. change doesn’t come fast, it’s growing slowly under the actions small or big of people who want it.
2. there are likeminded people in the world. We are not the majority but we are not alone
3. there is no alternative to aim for a better, healthier world. Even if it looks dark, giving up is not an option
4. go on your own pace. Small steps can make the difference. Don’t expect major changes. Revolutions happen once in 100 years, even less I guess.
5. find at least one or two friends or comrades who share your values. Join a union or a political movement, try to engage and find your place.

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.

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.

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.

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…

I’d argue they don’t care because they aren’t issued the resources necessary to care. Our workers also don’t have enough time / energy to parent or to engage in their civic duties of working out what is in their best interests and voting accordingly. Let alone the impetus to imagine a better world and strive for it.

It’s difficult to say if this was intentional all along, or just a happy(?) accident of overworking our labor force out of sheer greed,¹ but it belies the drift of abusive systems towards greater dysfunction, which is why we need ironclad protections against labor abuse.

Not that we’re going to get it necessarily without blood…or with blood for that matter. It’s why violent revolution is on the table since the masses can’t afford the time and energy to conduct non-violent protest.

I’d credit our oppressors for being thorough, but they really aren’t all that bright, so I no longer give them the benefit of the doubt.

¹ We now have studies that show a well-treated labor force is worth the extra expense, from sheer productivity increase alone. Our upper management is just too short-sighted, too divisionist and too paranoid to bother to make their companies worth putting the effort in for, even though optimizing for profit is their job description.

I think of it as situational, in your orbit, you have coworkers wasting time on simple problems. In other parts of the world, in remote villages, solar is changing people’s lives for the better.

I have known too many people lost in their own bubbles of reality, never considering the larger picture and impacts of personal choices. They are the majority, unfortunately.

Just focus on what you can do for yourself, find like minded people to share on larger efforts, and don’t waste your own time and energy (especially emotional) on people that never put in a second thought into efforts for improving the world.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 want you to know that I feel incredibly seen and validated by this post.

I’ve never had the chance to meet people like you in real life, so I’ve had to hold on to the few instances in which I’ve seen my feelings reflected in media. The one instance I keep coming back to is How To Be Hopeless by Carlos Maza. It’s an absolute masterpiece of a video essay, written from the depths of the personal and existential despair of a man who dedicated his adult life to fighting far-right extremism, and was rewarded with the end of his professional career and the victory of his serial harasser. Its message has become a core part of who I am now, and when I experience the kind of despair you’re describing, I return to it. It’s saved my life before. I cannot recommend it to you strongly enough.

Whenever I’m struggling with the fact that everything is bullshit, I try to remind myself that there isn’t that much stopping me from living my own life as if I was already living after the revolution, or in utopia, or after the apocalypse, or whatever you want to call it or think it might be. Ultimately, I want to hang out with my dogs, garden, hike, cook, listen to and play music, hang out with friends, run rivers, ski, etc. etc. All achievable now, mostly. Do I also have to do bullshit I don’t want to? Sure. Are a lot of other people living in a crappy way and doing stupid and destructive bullshit? Definitely. But for the most part, if you just do what you can and try to live your life as if you already won the war, it’s pretty ok.