And this is why it is all the more important to regulate one's own news intake and engage with activism in a feasible, healthy way. This is why I encourage local action and things like community gardening so much - federal policy is such an existential monster to so much of us. You CAN'T and should not be EXPECTED to care about everything at once, we are not designed to do that. Is not being negligent or avoidant by focusing on one thing you can work on and impact greatly.

I don't know if I've talked about this explicitly, but I've become greatly aware this semester that I am handling the weight of the world much better than some of my fellow environmental students. I was confused at first - after all many of these are kids who are much richer than I am and come from fuller families and can afford to do things like ski. But I realized a lot of these are people who have no way to interact with the world in a visibly positive manner. Sure, they can ski, they can hike, but all this does to them in isolation is remind them of the weight on their own shoulders and their own impact. These aren't kids who are doing campus activism. These aren't kids who are working in the garden with me. They are so enshrouded in despair and become convinced that the only way they can do *any* good is to be hired by a solar company once they graduate.
When you focus on something like a community garden, you can SEE your impact. You can see the bees. You can see the food harvested that goes to the food bank. You can see the fruits of your own labor. Having something like this - and I have noticed the students who hunt and fish do feel similarly - to center your attention and activism in a feasible way is *so* important.

A lot of these are students who are so utterly convinced that the most we can aspire for is to be a neutral impact on the world, but a lot of us *know* we can be a positive impact and a keystone species.

And yes, there are a plethora of reasons for why someone might be barred from participating from the activities I described. But I am asking you to *fight* for the chance to garden, that is how essential I believe it is.

And shit, you can also guerilla garden. You can seed bomb. You can go out and just start removing invasive species from local open spaces. You can refuse to weed your lawn. There are so many tiny things you can do that matter.

Missing from the conversation
https://redd.it/rofpjj
@r_latestagecapitalism

Murder

"And this is why the future, be it NFTs or Memoji or the howling existential horror of the Metaverse, looks so ugly and boring: it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.

It is also obviously a pyramid scheme, in which the need for a salable commodity is imperative and endlessly renewed, but the commodity itself does not matter because it is useless — not even useless the way all art is useless, because you can get the images and whatever grains of nourishment your hungry little soul might find in them for free, but useless the way a canceled stamp is useless, useless like a receipt or an envelope that has been torn open. NFTs are an occasion for commerce masquerading as art, just as so many ostensibly meaningful experiences of the 21st century turn out to be occasions to spend money masquerading as life."

https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-future-is-useless-expensive