Why Bother?

On Individual Action

Unless you just came out of a decades-long coma, you are well aware that we are facing an staggering array of oppressively large problems, many of which have been brewing for decades.

We have been warned of climate change, and now we have hurricanes drowning cities that were thought safe. We have experienced “once in a century” wildfires, tornadoes, floods, and droughts multiple times in recent memory. We have been warned about the rise of oligarchy and a global trend toward backsliding democracy for over a decade. And now the US Government is in the process of being dismantled.

Pretty much. Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

The reality, Dear Reader, is that these problems are bigger than you or me. In fact, they are bigger than you and me and everyone else who reads this article combined.

I don't know about you, but that kind of scale can leave me feeling overwhelmed and helpless. I don't think I'm alone given the undercurrent of nihilism that seems to run through so many of these issues—Why vote when every candidate sucks in one way or another? Why should I recycle, curb my own consumption, or change my own behavior when the scale of what I, as an individual, do is practically nothing compared to what a corporation does?

I hear this argument. I even see the appeal of it. I suspect essentially everyone at this point feels a deep anxiety about the sate of the world today, even if we choose to cope with that feeling in different ways. However, as with any sort of anxiety, avoidance only makes things worse.

Today I am going to try to convince you that doing what you can do is worth the effort, even if it doesn't feel like it will have enough impact to seem worthwhile.

Action Builds a Sense of Agency

The first and most basic reason you ought to take individual action to create and support the world you want to live in is that it builds in you a sense of agency. Many of the problems we face are far to large to solve on our own, but we are not so small that we can do literally nothing.

Despair is cheap and easy to come by these days, but it really doesn't serve us. When you feel overwhelmed, when you feel that nothing could possibly change, that things are too far gone for anything to be of use, take a minute and consider: Who benefits from you feeling helpless? Because there are people who absolutely do benefit from our feeling powerless, from our falling into self-numbing and hollow despair. They are the very ones feeding this whole planet, with us on it, into the metaphorical wood chipper.

But they think that they will make it out unscathed, so they are fine to let the rest of us burn.

Does that piss you off? I know for damn sure it pisses me off, and while anger burns too hot to sustain action over the long term, a burst to get off the couch and do something is a fabulous use for such intensely-burning fuel. As you work toward something bigger, doing your small part to fight back against those who watched The Matrix and thought the machine overlords had the right idea, you will find a more sustainable fuel: genuine righteousness.

Align Your Actions with Your Values

And how do we discover this righteousness? The more we align our actions with our truly-held values, the more we become aware of what those values are. The more aware we become of what is in alignment with them, and what is not. Pay heed to what irks you and to what fulfills you, what serves you and what does not. Adjust your action accordingly.

One thing you will learn as you go through this often-fumbling, highly iterative process is that much of the world as it is currently imagined does not fit well with your true values. This is why so much effort is given to installing into us imaginary values that cause us to chase what is profitable for the few as opposed to fighting for that which is good for ourselves and the whole.

Take Imperfect Action in a Good Direction

One of the most useless things we do in this life is seek perfection. In anything. In everything.

Let me be the first to tell you: Your action will not be perfect. You will stumble. You will fall. You will find yourself in a tight spot and have to choose which devil to dance with.

Such is life in the 21st century.

Even so, do it anyway. Perhaps you wish to boycott a certain retailer, but they are also the only place that sells something you truly need. Maybe you are horrified by single-use plastic and also have a medical condition that means your life, quite literally, depends on it.

In all of these situations, focus on what you can do, and accept that reality will never align with any ideal we have in our heads; it is far more complex than we can understand, so the best we can do is, quite literally, all we can do (and "best" is most likely a moving target).

Action Helps You Find and Build Community

Once we start taking action, a sort of magic starts to happen: we begin to stumble onto communities of people who value the same things that we do. When we go looking for information on how to do something, when we go looking for new resources that will help us take right action in our own life, our path crosses with others on the same journey. And with this, our action—and our power—multiplies. Our individual actions become the seeds of collective action, and as we all plant them together, quite a crop can grow.

Our local April 5 protest was organized only a couple of days before the event. And still, hundreds of people showed up and marched in solidarity with their neighbors.

Actions Change our Environment; Environment Influences Behavior

Back when I was a college pup, my fraternity adopted a mall at our university. We spent a few hours each month, usually on a somewhat-hungover Saturday morning, picking up trash on a section of campus. Part of our adopted area was a low concrete wall enclosing a raised landscaping bed outside of the science library. Despite having no infrastructure to support this behavior, it was clearly a preferred spot for cigarette breaks.

The first cleanup, we spent several hours of a glorious Saturday morning picking up litter around a fairly large section of a very large campus, but the vast majority of the cleanup was picking up cigarette butts by the thousand near this wall. The rest of the litter was randomly distributed, but the smokers who used this area did not seem to think of their cigarette butts as trash and did not consider dropping them on the ground to be littering.

Any cheer in my heart or do-goodery feelings were, I admit, replaced with muttered oaths and resentment toward deliberate litterbugs.

When we came back for the second round of cleanup a month later, I made directly for the cigarette-butt dumping ground to get the worst over with. But here's the thing: It was close to pristine. I will guarantee you that hundreds, if not thousands, of cigarettes were smoked on that low wall over the course of that month. But when it was obvious that someone cared enough about the area to pick up all the trash, the vast majority of people stopped throwing their trash on the ground. By picking up those cigarette butts, we shifted the social norm of that little area.

When we live in a world that feels like it has given in to nihilism, when it feels that no one else can be bothered to care, so why should I?, very many of us will behave with that exact same nihilism. We reflect in our behavior the world we perceive around us.

But when we are in a space that is clearly cared for, our behavior once again reflects the world we perceive around us. And thus, when we take action, when we make our world a little bit cleaner, a little bit better cared for, we slowly shift how others act in ways that we will never see, let alone quantify.

We take our cues from the world around us; none of us is immune to the context in which we live.

I will close today with wisdom from Tahnee Henningsen, a member of the Konkow Maidu tribe, because she has said it better than I could dream of:

What goes on in my community is a reflection of the world. We're in pain right now. My tribe is, and the world is, and when you look at everything that's going on right now, it feels too big to fix. It feels unachievable, unattainable, and it's just too much for one person to even comprehend how to handle.

[...]

So we shy away from it, push it away and try to ignore everything that's going on.

[...]

When you look at it on a smaller scale, like looking at my reservation, I know there are things that I can do there to make a change. There are things that my community needs, and things that I can do to help. When I tackle it on that scale, it doesn't seem too much to deal with. So look at your community and try addressing it first, because if everybody does that, that's how we start to heal the world.

[...]

We're not powerless in this fight.

We are not powerless in this fight.