Betterment and Praxis

As someone who has needed a friend's couch to crash on during periods of instability, just in order to keep other portions of life from falling apart too, I think what you're doing fits well.

This absolutely fits. Creating a safe space and a sense of community amongst friends (and beyond!) is exactly what we want more of. That is such a beautiful goal to work towards and it sounds like you're friends are feeling the love and support ❤️

Yeah for me personally betterment would be self reflection and acceptance leading to the kind of stability/confidence needed to better support your community. For some people it might be getting to a place where they feel healthy enough physically to spare some energy for more community work. It's a spectrum and in today's world I think finding yourself and finding that contentment in life is a massive task. Consumer culture and spcial media scream individualism, it's hard to break back into a more collective mindset.

I see betterment as a progression toward being satisfied or content more of the time. Now being content means different thing for different people, but I specifically feel it is not the same as chasing "happiness".

I can feel sad but content, or know that I've messed up but be content in my self evaluation and steps taken to do better. To me it's all about crafting a better journey, the processes behind what I do, and good outcomes are just pleasant results of a better journey. For example being healthy might make me more confident in the interactions with people, or give me more energy to do more comfortably, but in practice the betterment tied to that might be finding a way to exercise in a way that I enjoy, and I can measure, and that I can improve upon over time.

As for individualism vs. collectivism I think it's a balance. I think hurting yourself because someone expects it is never good, but if you have extra capacity to help others that is very positive. I don't think any person needs to feel like they are expected to move mountains, but as long as we all are careful to have only neutral or small positive impacts (not negative) then collectively we'll be moving forward.

As for society's unhealthy priorities (consumerism is a big one): over the last several years I've been learning to try to think back to "first principals" with respect to what I want in my life and attempt to remove other people's expectations and especially society's expectations from the equation entirely. I choose to do things because I want to, or because it contributes to the rule of not being negative above. If I do choose to do anything only because society expects it, it's only to better situate myself to further ignore society's expectations in the future.

this sounds like the dream! Free pots but also keeping waste out of the landfill.