solarpunk memes

Recognize that changing the world is beyond your remit, it's mostly for navel gazers and those unable or unwilling to change themselves

That doesn't mean wallow in self pity, change yourself, vote wisely, help others when you can. Those are all within your control and aim for being content and achieving that is a goal in itself. Most of us go about our lives blithely consumed by frippery and mistake ignorance for fulfilment.

aiming to be happy is the wrong goal, i am wary of people who say they are happy, they're either psychopath's, or are unmoved by the suffering and inequality around the world or the don't care, stay away from those happy clappers.

I stay optimistic through humanity, through organizing with others, through connecting with my local community and sticking up for communities around the globe.

A lot of what keeps me optimistic is spite, though. I hate that the future of my kids will be worse than my present. I want to change that, for them and for all future life on Earth.

There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.

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.

I don’t feel like I’m optimistic, I think we are doomed and all I can do is enjoy my last days in this world. I do what I can, but it’s not in my hand what those fucking leaders do. They are going to destroy the world no matter what I think or do, so I keep on drinking and jerking and doom scrolling until they are done.

Get your paper straw. Immediately poke it through a massive plastic lid. All of it's still coated with plastics so it can't be recycled anyway. Top drawer.

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.

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

Yeah i just gave up on trying to save the world, it's really nothing more than a hollywood trope, it's nonsense. Best you can do is make your little corner of the universe better, help your neighbors etc. Even someone like MLK jr, what did they do to help anyone in europe asia africa south america?

Like what could i do to help anyone on a different continent? Donate money via the Internet to some NGO and hope it's not a scam because i really would have zero control over what happens to the money after i click send.

So i do what i can instead, volunteer at the local high school, donate clothes to the local homeless shelter, do stuff where i can see the impact. Vote in local elections (MUCH more important than voting in national elections), help my elderly neighbor bring in groceries etc etc. Idk what else can we do??

Some of our local fast food chains don't even give us cardboard straws anymore. Just drink from the sad cup. With a Sad Turtle warning label on it. [EU single use plastic label]

It just gives the public a pause to think. To plot for the revolution.

Me, I'm beyond that, I usually can't afford fast food, most parts of the month I buy potatoes from the local store.

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).

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

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.

Why use a straw?

Meaning is more important than optimism. You don't have to like it, you just have to care.

I find comfort from entertaining a view that is a close relative of the "block universe theory". YMMV.

I find that adopting "leave no trace" not just as a backpacking code but as a core moral value changes my estimation of succeeding in life.

First, survive. Next, stop harming others (and go vegan). Finally, help others survive and grow. Supposedly that is enough to keep one busy in life.

Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Unless you are a world leader, using a paper straw, recycle, advocate to consume more responsibly, might be as much as you can do as a single individual.

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

What's sad is watching people falling from world leaders propaganda even here on lemmy

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.

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

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.

Down By Law

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

I take comfort in the fact that life has always sucked in some way no matter who is running the world or how they're doing it. The old "it could always be worse" is a cliche, but it's always true - except for the one person who has it worse than literally everybody else - and that can't be you or me right now, because at least we have internet access. Buck up, li'l camper!

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.