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

Don't drink from paper straws. They contain forever chemicals like PFAS. This change away from plastic has just been a fuckup.

can't we just have lids with tear away drink holes like coffee?

I think it's narcissistic and egocentric to think that you yourself should change the world. It's like a single grain of sand believing themselves able to dam amazon river at it's delta. Unplug yourself with the world news. You cannot affect anything beyond your home town, and even that would most likely require initiative, will and time not available for most people. You can worry about the whole world, but that will only be detrimental to your mental health.

So to answer your question - how do I stay optimistic? By focusing on my place in the world and not caring about anywhere and anyone outside it. My daughter just got her first computer and she is learning interface fast. My wife is selling paintings she made for fun as a side gig. My cherry tree is doing well. This is what matters and this is what makes me happy.

Or you could be like Seattle and just use compostable “plastic” straws. They have a slightly different texture to normal plastic, but they work and bend like normal plastic straws.

I never had an issue with a soggy straw or I don't remember it. It's the same as the attached caps in plastic bottles.

Do people really have issues with those things or is this just some stupid propaganda from the plastic industry? I feel like only really fragile people would complain about such silly things. If drinking through straws is so fucking important part of your life get a metal one and shut up.

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.

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.

I follow the scientific/tech progress on climate change and pretty much only get my news from TLDR which don't do the doom and gloom.

Yeah, it's bad and all but there are loads of people in the background putting in the work to avert the climate crisis. "It's hopeless, don't even try" is fossil fuel propaganda. We're pretty close to electric prices catering everywhere which will make going electric with stoves, heaters, cars and the only viable option.

For personal contribution: Buy less, less plastic, recycle your metals and electronics and bike if it's safe enough to do so and your commute is less than 10k and buy chicken instead of beef. This alone will reduce your climate footprint by a massive amount.

Good shit's happening but it's not ragebait enough to get clicks.

P.S. I'm not delusional, it's all happening way too slowly but it is happening way faster that most think.

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

I don't think the world has gone to shit, I think I have just matured enough to understand all the corruption and despicable acts humans are capable of. Looking back in history it's easy to notice, the world has always been shit, people with power have always stomped on everyone else, nothing really has changed on that front. My feeling is that there have always been about 30% of good people, 30% assholes and 30% that just let the current take them wherever.

But I can still find things to be optimistic about. The space race seems to be back on, the new crispr research is really exciting, my friend has a potential vaccine to look forward to to cure her cancer once and for all, solar power is cheaper than ever and my country has been majority renewable for some years already, etc. On a smaller scale finding those 30% that are decent humans to spend time with is a good idea.

Personally I don't go hungry, I have a warm bed and a roof over my head and I can get endless entertainment either mindless or through hobbies. Again looking at history, most of our race's existence, chances are that none of this would have been the case if I lived even 100 years ago in most places.

Honestly, just do whatever you can do that let you sleep well at night. It's all most people can do. Maybe we can't stop these things, but eventually we all die, even those in power. What we can do is not being part of the problem and teach those who come after the same in hopes that in the future (if there's one) there will be more good people than bad.

Just keep your conscience clean in hope that the next generation get inspired by that.

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.

Do not hope, plan

I work in nursing. Even while I unionize to improve working conditions and report my facility to improve living conditions, that isn't something that happens over night. Instead, I can take joy in spending extra time to make someone's day a little better.

Find the joy in those moments of power. Some people make entire careers trying to improve the lives of those around them. Find something you can do to help someone in the immediate all while acting to affect a wider good.

We humans have a natural bias towards negative news so we can protect ourself. It is really important to understand the limits of anybody personally. We are 8billion people. That anybody can single change the world alone is quite frankly impossible and therefore a stupid burden to place on you or anybody else for that matter.

A good point to start is to deliberately filter news. There are two ways of doing that. One is to just ignore certain problems, if you can not do anything about it. Your time is better used for something else. A good point to start is imho to filter out news further away from you. So cut out global news not involving your country, then national news, then state or whatever more local level and then municipality level. It is probably better to be informed about some bike lane being discussed in your city then the civil war in Sudan, since you can actually do something about the bike lane.

The other important part is to limit your news sources to the most useful ones. A good part of that is to go towards more traditional high quality media. They tend to be less emotional and more facts based, which helps. I personally really like business newspapers. They are extremely facts based, as people actually make decisions on what they write, but unfortunately neoliberal. When you feel down stay away from social media. That is designed to make you feel bad. A good way of dealing with that is using the fediverse as it is not for profit and also to subscribe to local groups and accounts, which provide you with actionable news.

Also really important is to just chill sometimes. As in go out have some fun, whatever that might be. Play video games, sports, hiking, music or whatever you like. You will do no good, when you burn out.

Oh also the current large wars, seem to all involve destroying fossil fuel infrastructure. Certainly Ukraine bombs a lot of Russias and both side have hit fossil fuel infrastructure in the current Iran war as well.

Hope for a better tomorrow

ATLA: "In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength."

Having hope isn't easy, but without hope for a better tomorrow you can't make it happen.

You really don't need to be optimistic. I'm not. That doesn't mean that you need to have any problems.

The real issue in your comment is your guilt, and of not feeling like you're doing enough. My first question would be: are you actually not doing enough? If every person on Earth would behave/live like you, would the problem exist? If the answer is no, then you're doing enough. Then the question becomes how to get rid of that feeling, but this answer comes first. Because if the answer is yes, then you should be feeling like you do!

Worked in a small event managing company (planning, gear, etc). It produces so much waste in a week that a typical 10 floor 10 staircases living building house wouldn't in 2 months. There are much more and bigger companies. I can only speculate how much waste they produce.

This is only a microscopic part of all businesses in our city. Production lines, grocery stores, commercial buildings must be producing thousands of tonnes more. I doubt that all of the households in town produce as much as all the companies combined. We are not the problem.

Just be the good example for others to follow. If you "give up" you consequently make it impossible. Lower the optimism in favor of realism. Also the world we live in runs in cycles, there is no change at all from a universal viewpoint. Everything has been before and will be in the future. It is just your relation that may change. By the way, the earth will get rid of us anyways. Very philosophical topic, there is no final answer.

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).

It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay, simple acts of love and kindness. -Gandalf

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.

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.

Ok first of all that’s a completely unrealistic flight formation

I just do the best I can and smile at any achievement no matter how small.

As for dealing with the bigger problems like "enter latest global conflict and genocide here" that is where community comes in. Current campaign going on is stopping the ploriforation of Data Centers.

An appeal to futility isn't helpful though. We can still have an impact, especially when movements grow.

Whenever I feel guilty about leaving a light in, I just pull up a picture of Las Vegas and then stop feeling guilty.

Same with if I forgot to recycle something, I just zoom out on flight radar and realise I’m not the problem.

I try to maintain a balance. I try to accept that a lot of the problems in the world are beyond my reach, to keep informed and to help in the small ways I can, and to draw motivation from it, but without throwing myself into despair. It's hard and I'll admit I err on the side of ignorance these days.

Mostly I focus on solarpunk fiction projects (I think we need to be able to imagine better futures and that fiction gives us roadmaps and chances to explore these possibilities safely), project research, and ways to help at the level where I can effect things.

I help fix things for people so they don't have to buy new, I help organize and give stuff away at my local swap shop and on the free groups online, I try to help with local land conservation. And I take the small victories where I can get them. If I fix something or find some ewaste electronics for a neighbor and save them spending $60 on Amazon, the world isn't changed but Amazon didn't get that money and maybe my neighbor won't reach for it as their first choice next time. If we conserve a hundred acres of forest it's not stopping any of the big impending climate disasters, but some habitat is preserved, and perhaps some of the routes animals follow as they roam won't get as fragmented as they would otherwise. And I imagine better worlds and try to show them to others.

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.

I'd always wondered what people's problem was with those straws until I realized you lightweights just don't drink fast enough.

Ooooohh I just want something to sip while I eat and chat~

Weak. Cowardly. Unthrifty.

If the waiter hasn't brought you at least three refills by the time you leave you wouldn't survive a real winter.

Yeah, but think of the children. We have to do this to distract from the Epstein files!

Those kids are dangerous, they could put a lot of awful, evil people in prison!

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.

There's not much one person can do. But there are a lot of us - if lots of people each work on something small it adds up. There are probably plenty of things in your community that have been getting a little better over time for exactly that reason.

When I felt hopeless about politics joining a DSA chapter helped. It makes me feel like I'm doing something helpful, even if it's something small.

What you can do for climate change depends on the opportunities near you. But some ideas might be:

• plant trees
• lobby the school board to install solar panels over a school parking lot
• join an activist group to protest for closure of a local oil refinery
• tell friends an neighbors about benefits of EVs, heat pumps, and other electrification options
• write your elected officials regularly about climate measures you want them to vote for, to thank them when they vote correctly, or to chastise when they don't

I'd focus on one thing instead of trying to do all the things. Working with a local group is ideal.

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.

This is why they say ignorance is bliss.

I put energy into hobbies and spend time doing things with people IRL whenever possible.

I don't plan on having kids but I've worked with them my whole life. I would recommend spending time with children and vicariously seeing the world through their eyes.

My last line of cope is thinking about how many problems we're facing have either always been a problem that we're still trying to solve, or a problem that inherently doesn't get solved until reality forces us. By framing fascism, climate change, bigotry, etc this way the problems seem less immediately existential. Like, it almost seems obvious that human beings would consume the planet unless the consequences of such forced us to change our ways.

That’s the neat part, you don’t!

I buy plastic straws online and keep an emergency supply with me at all times. I melt any plastic I use.