How to Change the World

You cannot.

Everyday I am bombarded by people wanting me to weigh in on some law being put through congress or what I think about some criminal case in the media. In theory, people want to be prepared to know how they would react if the situation happened to them. However, in practice, people are just worrying about everything happening in the world whether it affects them or not. With our global communication systems today, everyone feels they need to have an opinion on everything.

You do not need to have an opinion on everything.

Information overloaded, socially oversaturated, emotionally overworked, we need to stop. We need to breath. Our bodies and our minds were not built to do what we do today. Does that we mean we shouldn't do it? Does that mean we should abandon all industry, all science, all technology to seek a primitive life? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean that we can't stop to appreciate the fact that we are still only human. As the ancient greeks used to say...

All things in moderation.

Write a reply

Replies

~eaplmx wrote (thread):

> "I'm gonna have an opinion about this text"

Well... I think we (many of us) love to fix problems, and create new problems to solve later. The issue is aiming for relevant problems.

We love to feel connected to things, and due to the lack of significant challenges, life and death problems, we fight for stupid reasons like the OS we should not use, that we must be allowed to consume more, or that our favorite social network is gonna change and that's not fair.

Some research has found that

Residents of Poor Nations Have a Greater Sense of Meaning in Life Than Residents of Wealthy Nations

so we could assume that when we have less significant challenges, we'll magnify small things in search of things to fix, but that's another discussion. When technology fixes something, another need for comfort will appear soon. And defining a primitive life is extremely relative. Not using a GPS device could be primitive. Not writing on a digital device could sound extremely ancient.

And finally, we are tribalistic beings. We must follow or be followed. We have to be in groups. So for me, this diagram helps me to understand where we are as a society, and where I am as a part of it.

Stages of Tribal Leadership

If my life sucks, I'll forget about everything, I'll be apathetic. The goal is to have a great society, but how do we reach there?

Obviously, I'm generalizing for the sake of the discussion, but I agree... We can't fix everything. We shouldn't feel upset about everything. We shouldn't have a negative opinion on everything as well... The tricky part is how to change that behavior for the masses, basically aiming for good mental health. Forget world peace for a while, let's start with inner peace.

~tetris wrote (thread):

Voting helps though, even on tedious change.org petitions - it signals to the elites what is acceptable and what is unacceptable amongst the progressives, and the elites social circles usually like to seem progressive in some respect, at least to curry more favour with the masses to keep them in power/likeable.