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 stay optimistic, it’s perpetual disappointment. I just do what’s in my capacity to do to make the world a less shitty place knowing my actions don’t change the world but they at least change the moment for someone else for the better. Moving a worm you find dying on a sidewalk back to the soil doesn’t change the world, but it changes the world for the worm. It’s never going to thank you, nobody else knows what you did, and it still might die, but you had the ability to do something selfless and without reward and did it because it was the right thing to do. It’s basically that every day, every situation. And sometimes, a lot of the times, you don’t even stop harm, you just reduce it. The world doesn’t “get” better, we just make it less worse through our contributions as meaningless to the grand scheme as they seem.