A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
Plant those trees, even if your life sucks, even if you have no children or family or your own. You never know who will end up using your good works for more good. The fact that they may not be used is not a reason to not bring them into this world.
Humans are in an endless battle against entropy. Anything you build for the sake of the future is a little win.
Does it matter if our names will be remembered with reverence for what we have done? No it does not, the act of giving the future opportunity to thrive is what matters most, because all of us have stood upon the works of millions of nameless men and women whose work supported our way of life. We don't know all their names, and that's okay. What matters is the evidence of their works, and those things will truly be remembered. (For good or ill)
Even if you don't have hope for yourself, please don't lose hope for others.
Thanks for the ref
I can also recommend Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age by Benjamin R. Barber But start with the preface and the go directly to Chapter 7. The rest is nerd shit for political theory. It can be nice to know but will get quite boring pretty fast. But Chapter 7 will have you jump of your chair and start rebuilding your local community.
I'll check it out! (Added to my TBR.)
I'm sorry, but I just have no hope left. I don't know how other people do it.
Did you read Murray bookchin?
Hope is hard sometimes.
It may not help, but I do enjoy this poem by Caitlin Seida:
Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat
- Hope is not the thing with feathers
- That comes home to roost
- When you need it most.
- Hope is an ugly thing
- With teeth and claws and
- Patchy fur that's seen some shit.
- It's what thrives in the discards
- And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
- Able to find a way to go on
- When nothing else can even find a way in.
- It's the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
- diseases as
- optimism, persistence,
- Perseverance and joy,
- Transmissible as it drags its tail across
- your path
- and
- bites you in the ass.
- Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
- Emily.
- It's a lowly little sewer rat
- That snorts pesticides like they were
- Lines of coke and still
- Shows up on time to work the next day
- Looking no worse for wear.#
meme is from srslywrong podcast iirc
Merry Bookchin. I wonder how long the Anti-Civs take to visit as well. The cycle continues.
There are so many authors to let into my soul and digest. I operate a small 501 ( c ) 3 think tank so I've been in the process of letting Paul Feyerabend into my soul. It's a real emotional move to sit down and start absorbing a new author, to be honest. I was going to start on Marcuse next.
Can you promote or mention your organization? Sounds cool.
Cascadian Laboratories Incorporated "CascaLab" on Facebook pages. Our website is down and our donation mechanism doesn't work right now. We're very small and new, since 2022 we were founded. We do almost nothing but feyerabend-inspired research remote from one another. It's kind of coddiwompling and we try to research ways of making sure we're not doing armchair research, that we're actually testing real world things. One thing I test is home economics solutions. We're actually wondering about creating a federated network of nonprofit think tanks of similar size just meeting the minimum requirements for a 501 ( c ) 3 each of them rather than actually scaling. I picked some of my closest friends, those among them who were most excited about doing it. I used legalzoom to create it.
I hope they are real
