Do Not Despair

It's hard not to get blackpilled.

Seemingly anywhere you look, Rome is burning.  The cost of living only seems to go up, savings keep going down, our rulers' hatred of us is ever more apparent, and there's at least a year and a half more of this before there's a reasonable hope of even marginal improvement.  

It's hard not to get blackpilled, but you shouldn't.  

I know.  It's not that easy, right?  It takes far more effort to leave a rut than to fall into one, and most of the time you need a helping hand up.

Well, here's mine.

The best way I've found to address anxiety or fear around a problem is to do something about it. So I can't destroy the Fed (or the universities, or the bureaucracy, or the mainstream media, or mainstream social media, or any number of other evils).  So I can't revoke the 16th, 17th, or 19th Amendments.  So I'm not rich.  So what?

I can start a garden.  I can cook and clean.  I can plan projects to make my home better insulated and prettier. I might need to rethink some of the organization of it, too, to make it more functional.  

I can take care of this kitten that wandered up to my little sister's house (and that she subsequently decided needed to be my problem, since I committed the great sin of petting him).  I can look for a better home for him, one without a middle aged cat who keeps hissing at him for no better reason than him existing in her space, and enjoy his company in the meantime.  

(That's another great method of combating stress, by the way; pet a friendly, furry animal. No creature on this earth will ever or could ever love you the way a dog does, and a purring cat is one of life's great joys.)

I can ask my friend who knows how to sew to teach me what she can.  I can help those neighbors and coworkers who are worthy, and my friends, and my family, as best I can.  I can make a habit of improving things around me, to the point that when I walk in people who know me see my face, breathe a sigh of relief, and say," Oh, thank God, she's here."

That choice - that continuous, small choice to do what you can to make things better around you - has an outsized impact.  A friend was once giving me a ride and we wound up in a traffic jam on the Interstate.  She hadn't gotten gas when she should have, so we had to turn off the car- there on the road, fully in the sweltering Florida summer sun. 

She was apologetic. It would've been easier to be mad- but instead I chose to smile at her, thanked her for giving me a ride, and we picked wildflowers off the side of the road.  

She brought it up years later; what could have been a bad memory instead was a good one, and all it took was a small choice - a deliberate framing of the situation on my part - to redeem it.

And it is this, more than anything else, that we can do to make things better.  Your reach is limited.  That's fine!  You'll do the most good for the people you love most by bettering yourself and improving things around you.  So what if that's small? Everything is, if you zoom out enough.  The very galaxy this planet is in is small compared to the vastness of space.  That doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

The size of the things you can do matter less than the fact that you do them.  The limit of your reach matters less than how you use it.  The impact of your choices- the full extent of which it is humanly impossible to know- do matter, and they'll matter the most to the people closest to you.

Maybe it sounds trite. Maybe it seems insipid. I don't much care, because I've lived long enough and seen enough to know that I am not wrong when I tell you: there are many things you can't change, but one thing you can change is yourself.  You can continually choose to be a better person.  

Start there.