I think I’m having a bit of an autistic burnout moment over politics. I’m moving a lot more left over the years but just don’t feel like I can do anything. I have 2 years left on a work contract and it would be killer to lose that job, but also I want to help people in ways where quitting might be the best option. I want to learn about politics and history more, but I also don’t want to stress about it because I don’t feel like it changes things that much. Id like a community that talks about these feelings and I feel like this should be that community for me. Let’s just chat about it.
Interconnected points about time and scale:
1 We don’t realize our impact. Over time we can change lives and never know. I could tell many stories about this, but you can inspire people and never know - or change their lives and they’ll never have a chance to thank you. After working in customer service, an important truth of life is easily recognized: people complain more than they say thank you. Besides, people who do good often do it behind the scenes and can’t always see the fruits of their labor.
This can be true of one time meetings or by being a constant light in their lives.
2 The amount of news we intake is literally incomprehensible. I mean this without intending to sound uncaring, but the human mind was not meant to care about billions of people (or me, who has been cursed by caring about all the fucking animals too). We’re animals that evolved in small tribes and then small communities. Caring about all the hurt in my city of a couple million is wild in and of itself, but my state? The country… the world? Are you kidding?? It’s literally impossible. Every being that exists suffers so much - from the roadkill gasping for life on the side of the road to the family trapped underneath rubble in an earthquake across the globe. You’re not responsible for taking on that mental load. It’s an unbearable weight that you were not programmed for. You’re not mad that your calculator can’t drive you to work.
3 Shit spreads in water better than more clean water. Put a little shit in water, it’s fucked. People freak and it gets attention. Add more good to good, nobody gives a shit. This metaphor brings me a lot of clarity.
4 We are too close. Over time things are, in fact, getting better. Many times, many well-meaning (mostly white) liberals push back against me here by trying to downplay historical progress. (Even with overturning Roe - support for a women’s right to choose has never been higher - we’ve just been overrun by Originalist Christofascists.) But to my point, even with how shit everything is now it’s materially better to be a person of color today, for the most part. Schools aren’t segregated (they are, of course still segregated in many cases - GOP has dismantled public education pretty well here), you can get a loan from the bank, run for office, etc. This is NOT trying to say everything is even approaching good or acceptable… but we have to take stock sometimes and recognize things aren’t totally doom and gloom. To make sure I wasn’t being a stupid man, I asked my fiancée if she thought being a woman of color now was better than at most points in history and she laughed, saying “of course, that’s undoubtably undeniable.”
So there ya go. A bunch of anecdotal bs from a sleepy dude.
This is very helpful! Sometimes I get stressed out about not keeping up “enough” with all the local, regional, national, international news…and it’s good to remember that we have access to way more news than our brains can handle sometimes.
oh yeah. this is a defining feature of the world which goes unremarked: there is a general asymmetry in how often people vocalize good things versus bad things, and in how much attention the former gets over the latter. this is true of the news, of social media, of interpersonal relations, and more. in some ways it just sort of follows from how most of us orient things—if something is good, in how many circumstances would you really need to remark on it? but if something’s bad obviously you would! we should confront bad things!
Makes me think this phenomenon has something to do with how humans have evolved. We are tribal in nature so we tend to perk up in response to negative stimuli, while we tend to relax and become irresponsive in comparison to the opposite.
It seems like a lot of the bad we’re seeing in the world is a result of the human condition butting heads with the conditions we have created as a result of this human condition.
Thank you for your service, sleepy dude! You made many fine points that I’ll use.
This is a really good post, thanks!