Recommended Listening: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Omnium Gatherum,
Thanks to Lena
Editors note 8/30/25: made some edits from the original posting for claritySometimes I want a very specific change in my life. I want to be less stressed. I want to be happier in my day-to-day existence, I want to solve a specific problem. When I've asked people for advice, I find a common response to boil down to “Sometimes stuff sucks and you can't do anything about it.” I find this answer eternally frustrating, as I am usually seeking a very concrete answer that I know exists. I want step-by-step instructions with supplementary information as necessary. I think a lot of people see simple goals as unachievable, and I've met far too many folks who use that as an excuse to not solve their problems.
On the one hand, I can't broadly blame people for this mindset. What I'm absolutely not trying say is that people need to bootstrap their way out of poverty and misery, and if they just think hard enough and work hard enough they'll solve all their problems. That's just capitalist grindset nonsense that shifts the blame and responsibility for widespread suffering onto individual people's individual decisions. What I am saying is that I have met a frustrating number of people who stumble at a single roadblock during a very important task and give up, to the point where even if I've done 80% of the research and legwork on their behalf, any difficulties presented in the last stretch will cause them to throw their hands up and say it's not worth it, or it's impossible. I had a girlfriend who operated like this, and it strained our relationship. She would tell me about her problems, and I would try to listen sympathetically, but ultimately I would end up seeing a clear and achievable solution to some of her problems. Nearly every time I tried to discuss the larger issue, it would be shot down. At one point I asked her, “What do you get out of venting to me and then not doing anything to change the situation causing your distress?”. Her answer: “I don't know.” Perhaps the solution was just to attentively listen, maybe she did just want to vent and have a trusted ear to respond “That really sucks and you deserve better”, but I found it difficult hearing about the same problems week after week and seeing how she would just passively let it all happen without resistance. .
I believe there is a solution for most human-scale problems - it's often just not popular, simple, or “allowed”. I find that so often the solutions to my problems are as simple as communicating how I feel and what I need. If that doesn't feel viable because the other person/people/system wouldn't listen if I did, or would punish me for speaking up, that's a strong indicator that the next logical step is to get away from that situation as soon as possible.
Perhaps the mindset is one of hopelessness. I have coworkers who are absolutely miserable in a job that's clearly killing them, a job they've already been at for 10-20 years, in which their goal is to retire in another decade. Like, I get the benefits are decent, but really? I've been in my current job for a year and change and the reason that I've been able to last as long as I have is because I like this job (as much as one can truly enjoy labor under capitalism). For me, the workload is manageable, the pay is pretty good for the area, and most importantly there are only intermittent days where I really hate what I'm doing. I've found that if I dread going to work, I start looking for escape options, and generally last a couple months at most. In contrast with my coworkers who are having an awful time but are just resigned to riding it out for a decade, I just do not understand this mindset.
This also makes them miserable to be around, as their only outlet and relief is complaining. I can barely endure a bad roommate situation for six months. Perhaps it's a sense of learned helplessness and fear that anything else would be worse. It just makes me sad and frustrated on their behalf, while also pushing me away from wanting to be around them. Clearly they are past the point of looking for a better job.
And I know this feeling. It's one that comes once I've tried everything and there truly is no way out, all there is to do is complain and pass the time as best I can. But I don't know if they have tried everything. It's so easy to freeze up when faced with a big change. Perhaps they have become comfortable in their despair and I think the thought of hope is overwhelming.
I'm usually the polar opposite — I chronically problem solve. This approach has its own shortcomings: I struggle with accepting powerlessness because it always feels like there's always more that can be done, especially when grappling with problems that are much larger than me. I think the most helpful perspective has been that for any large, important problem, there are many people working very hard to fix it, and if I can imagine that dropping everything and dedicating my entire life to a problem would not make an appreciable difference, it's probably out of my control.
So I try to focus on human-sized problems, and fewer of them — My close relationships, my community, my own well-being, and one or two social causes I think I could help make a change in. This provides me with achievable and realistic goals instead of overwhelming dread. I think it's still important to be involved in large movements sometimes, but I definitely fell into the social media trap of urgency in 2020. The rhetoric that these worldwide problems are hurting so many people and need to be fixed RIGHT NOW, when that is not realistic and I can legitimately dedicate my entire life from today on to fixing them and it probably won't do much, resulting in me getting prematurely burned out and discouraged.
Maybe the issue is that people have been taught to miscategorize the problems in their life. If I thought having hard conversations in my relationships was a hopeless endeavor in the same category of singlehandedly ending capitalism, I probably wouldn't try either. I think hope is what's missing, as well as a better evaluation of what changes are realistic and necessary. Things can get better, and just because some problems are beyond our individual control and scope doesn't mean they all are. Plenty just require doing the scary thing and making a change.