Something I want to (gently) push back against is the idea I've been caught up in too often myself that if you're not either actively building for The End of the World/The Revolution/The Collapse or having entirely almost just given up in the face of overwhelming hopelessness, that makes you a bad person or complicit or not a Real Leftist or not concerned with the state of the world or whatever
LONG POST AHEAD. Seriously you should pay me for writing these essay posts (that was a JOKE, I don't expect to be paid for my drivel, I'm not turning capitalist beyond "maybe someday I want to make enough money to help others and be safe")
Because this is a great way to make your mental health worse, to fall deeper into depression and learned helplessness, to become (as I too often still am) "what's the use, it's all going to burn anyway"
Like, I never expected to live until my present age. I was pretty sure that I'd die well before being in my 40s of something, that the political situation would reach its ultimate boiling point, and the more I think about this, the more I directly trace it to my indoctrination in the concept of the Rapture as a child/teenager.
That might be you too, or it might just be from looking around you and seeing how horrible and evil everything is, even from people who are actually trying to change the world or make things better but think it has to be done a specific and certain way, etc.
Of course we can and should be concerned and prepared for whatever we may face in a world that seems to be entering the worst times ever, in a country seemingly on the verge of collapse into fascism and hate, for the apocalypse climate change will bring upon us all, etc
But in the meantime, live your life BOTH for the day and for assuming you will, too, someday, have a future. Like, yes, the world needs revolutionaries and mutual aid communes and doomsday planning - it also needs people who can learn new things, not just heritage skills for use After The End.
It needs your art, your writing, your music, your creativity even if that seems "worthless" or "indulgent" or "we won't have that after the grid collapse/while we are all being hunted down for sport/while the world burns/etc etc" If you want to find a life partner - go looking or hold that intention. If you want a career but can't think of how that will "fit in" or "be something people need/like/want," pursue it anyway for yourself.
If your idea of fun isn't something everyone agrees with or likes, as long as you aren't harming anyone directly (or within a reasonable degree of indirectly - I say reasonable degree because there could be a moral harm argument made for anything, even breathing takes up air someone else could breathe and exhales CO2) - include that too, even IF it "may be gone," especially if it "may be gone."
Also... there's other possibilities even when all seems lost. The world ends for a lot of people every single day (look at daily death totals and realize the world ended today for each one of those people), and yet there's also "thankfully, my friend saw how I looked and called an ambulance." There's also "I felt tired that night and skipped the event where things went horribly wrong." There's also "I hit the brakes just in time." Etc etc.
And the same can happen for the world or for our various countries as well. Butterflies flap wings, black swans appear, etc. For all any of us know, someone somewhere is on the path to making a discovery that will render oil obsolete and useless, or one that will allow for farming without dependence on phosphorus, or one that will make anything in the current space race look like little rich boys' toys.
For all we know, any one or all of the current far-right/fascist leaders will fall somehow, someway, and while they may not be replaced with perfection, they WILL be replaced with people who are damn sick of fascism and hate and want to move on from it and live in peace (even if "moving on" only kicks the can down the road and gives us another 70 years of uneasy awareness it could and will happen again and not be stopped in time.)
Even if somehow something Really Big and Good never happens - and it probably won't, and you shouldn't pin hope on that any more than you would the Revolution or the Rapture or whatever - maybe the world just keeps on keeping on being shitty and evil, but even then... I saw a video recently about people cleaning up a trap house, and even people who were devastated from near-hopeless addiction and living in a nightmarish living situation by most normie standards... still decorated their spaces to a degree, even if the decorations were a stolen street sign or some wilted flowers or a random bit of seemingly trite mass-manufactured dollar store junk.
Even if our world, our countries are terrifying, horrible places by any good standard, even if they're running on substances that we shouldn't be running on and that are destroying us, even if they're a cycle of consumption and violence...
There's no reason why you can't paint a bottle and put it on the sill of your boarded window. There's no reason why you can't put a little something in that life other than awareness of what a shitty and scary and evil place it is and how you're likely going to die any day now, even if you never become a world-renowned artist or the person who finds the absolute cure for addiction and goes back to save everyone you knew and... it's only a piece of struggle art discovered by someone cleaning up the place who sees that art, that creativity, that survival under circumstances and understands.
