Betterment and Praxis

The feeling comes and goes for me. Sometimes (often, tbh) it feels completely hopeless. But focusing only on the bad and not being able to find the good, or to let go of the despair, leads to burnout - as you already know - and burnout is where you can, unfortunately, get the least done.

I'm not really good at knowing how to get out of burnout. My whole life is really immersed in "the bad news", so it's hard to not be around it. I do think there's a lot of value in finding good news outlets (like Reasons to Be Cheerful or Grist's Beacon newsletter) and, contrary to how it may feel or what people might say, it is healthy to disconnect from the bad news sometimes. You have to put on your own lifejacket before helping anyone else. Do the things that make you happy and don't read the news or look at your phone, if you can.

As for doing things - it's helpful to pick an area of focus. What are you most passionate about? What's the most pressing issus to you? That's where you should put your energy, as much as you're able. That could mean volunteering, doing research and contacting your representatives, spreading the word about the issues, or finding little ways you can make a difference. My issue is environmentalism, which means that I try to focus on my individual actions as a form of self-care - buying less, buying secondhand, reducing food waste, composting food scraps, contacting my reps, spreading the word. Find your little things that you can affect; those are the ones you can look at and be proud of, and let that heal you.

I feel this. When I start looking at the whole political climate I get very distressed, angry, and hopeless but I've found focusing on the small and my own local community has really helped. I can't change what policies are happening in other regions but I can try to make positive changes in mine. I can see what gaps our community has and try to fill them. When you set your eyes too high you can miss some important steps you need to take to get where you're trying to go.

With the alt-right push to get involved in school boards and local councils, now is THE time to get involved and push back. Real changes start small. Get involved in the established community groups that interest you, start your own if you have something particular your community needs, and learn local politics as its will be much more applicable and just much less to learn than remembering everything happening all at once on a national level.

Burnout is real. When I'm feeling good, i organise the things i want to do into checklists with big and small projects so when the burnout comes for me i can find a few boxes I have the energy to tick. (Things like picking up rubbish at the park, side of the road, baking something for a neighbour) Ticking them off and feeling like I've done something positive really helps light the fire again.

You can only do what you can do. Starting really small and building up your involvement is the best way to starve off burnout.

Take a break from the news. You can ease back into it later.

It’s not selfish to put your own mental health first. Even when your work contract is up, you won’t be able to do much if you’re a burned-out wreck.

When I start feeling like that, I pick up my garbage-grabber stick and a bag and stroll through my neighborhood picking up trash.

It’s a small thing, but it’s a physical and immediate thing. It’s almost meditative due to its simplicity.

And random people stopping to thank me is pretty nice, too.

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.

I feel you. My job is also preventing me from putting my limited energy into things I think are way more important, and I'm not sure about what to do about that.

With burnout, it's helped me to focus on the things that have gotten a lot better without denying the things that are absolutely unacceptable. Straddling past successes and present problems helps me deal with stress, because I know the past successes I live within included lots of the little failures, false starts, and periodic feelings of impotence that I'm experiencing now

Learning about the internal lives of anti-oppressive people from the past also helped me because this feeling of burnout is totally normal in people who were successful in winning liberation, throughout history and across various movements

A new thing I'm trying to do is focus on feelings of care/respect for people who are the most precarious more than I focus on the enormity of harmful systems or hostility for people perpetuating the harmful systems. I find I can maintain more energy when I focus on feeling excitement for how someone's life (and our lives collectively) might improve if I work to end various oppressive influences rather than if I focus on grief/stress about how folks needlessly suffer (though all these feelings are important). Letting all of the feelings exist has been good instead of focusing exclusively on the lack-oriented ones

Have you read or listened to “the life that you can save” - although some of the more… extreme… parts of “effective altruism” can be off putting there is a good part of this book that talks about the huge positive progress that’s already been made in the world and what a big difference we as individuals can personally make to help.

It’s a good counter to the feeling of “what’s the point” and the burn out that comes with feeling helpless what’s going on in the world

I can't tell you what will work for you but I can share what works for me when I'm overwhelmed and mad at the world for all the things I see are going wrong. Accept that the only thing you truly have the power to change is yourself. Expecting other people to change is just setting yourself up for disappointment, resentment, and giving up. Focus on you and the things that make you happy and help you feel like you're accomplishing something, even if it's small. Try to spend less time trying to do the things you think other people are expecting of you and more time on getting to know yourself and what is important to you.

All I can say, your not alone. I know my wife and I struggle with how much to be involved. We were going to pass on this years political process... we are in a caucus state. But in the end we did go and then to two conventions because we felt it was important.

Not saying I have any answers. I find remembering "doing something is better then doing nothing", meaning things do not have to be perfect. My wife and I are both kind of perfectionists.