Betterment and Praxis

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The community for cool things you've done out in the real world, or are doing in the real world!

Covers things like volunteer work, community gardens, political activism, organizing clubs and communities in your public circles, and all the information surrounding how to do that stuff. Also covers self-help and betterment, because to help your community it helps to help yourself!

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So like, what do we do? Political burnout. (self.betterment)

submitted 1 year ago by EthicalAI to c/betterment

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I think I’m having a bit of an autistic burnout moment over politics. I’m moving a lot more left over the years but just don’t feel like I can do anything. I have 2 years left on a work contract and it would be killer to lose that job, but also I want to help people in ways where quitting might be the best option. I want to learn about politics and history more, but I also don’t want to stress about it because I don’t feel like it changes things that much. Id like a community that talks about these feelings and I feel like this should be that community for me. Let’s just chat about it.

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[–] escaped_panda 8 points 1 year ago

I feel you. My job is also preventing me from putting my limited energy into things I think are way more important, and I'm not sure about what to do about that.

With burnout, it's helped me to focus on the things that have gotten a lot better without denying the things that are absolutely unacceptable. Straddling past successes and present problems helps me deal with stress, because I know the past successes I live within included lots of the little failures, false starts, and periodic feelings of impotence that I'm experiencing now

Learning about the internal lives of anti-oppressive people from the past also helped me because this feeling of burnout is totally normal in people who were successful in winning liberation, throughout history and across various movements

A new thing I'm trying to do is focus on feelings of care/respect for people who are the most precarious more than I focus on the enormity of harmful systems or hostility for people perpetuating the harmful systems. I find I can maintain more energy when I focus on feeling excitement for how someone's life (and our lives collectively) might improve if I work to end various oppressive influences rather than if I focus on grief/stress about how folks needlessly suffer (though all these feelings are important). Letting all of the feelings exist has been good instead of focusing exclusively on the lack-oriented ones