Withdrawing from school was probably one of the best individual decisions iâve ever made in my life, for reasons too numerous to list here, but I have obtained vital wisdom that I will share here:
Log off and talk to old people
Your brain is being microwaved by exposure to almost exclusively under-30s who donât get outside very much. Thereâs nothing inherently wrong with being young or indoors, but itâs really starting to click for me that your 20âs are a garbage fire, and no one in their 20âs knows shit (including me). We are all just so unfinished and terrified and confused.
You need role models that are older than you. If your role models are all your age youâre admiring a lot of people that have fewer challenges than you, and not very many people that used to be like you and bloomed.
It wonât click for you until you make friends with âboomersâ who are the most blisteringly self-actualized people youâve ever seen, actively involved in their communities, cool and thoughtful and full of stories, and 80% of the things that seem important to you burn away. You Will Be Okay.
Let me tell you a secret: The bigger part of the fight for good in this wretched world is invisible to the internet, rippling past without surfacing on Twitter or Instagram.
Iâm organizing right now to launch a âre-wildingâ project around my hometown, and joining forces with a lady who runs a native plant giveaway sort of thing, and she [coolest person ever] [gives off the powerful aura of a level 999 human] doesnât have a cell phone let alone the internet
Iâm here to tell you that there are a billion awesome things in your community for you to join with, and it seems to you like they donât exist, simply because the people that run them donât know how to social media
f.f.f. (farmer family friend) is the president of the farmers market in his hometown and they have a facebook page and thatâs basically it and iâm like, there are so many farmers markets that 20somethings donât know about, arenât thereâŠ
But if you talk to a person like this and say âhey i wanna grow native trees/start a community garden/grow a food forestâ chances are you will get pelted with connections to 75 other people who are exactly who you need to talk to
Thereâs a guy who just started where I work who is interested in urban and suburban food forests, and because of my brotherâs volunteer work, I happen to know that a local food bank is about to buy land to start farming on, and I tell him âHere, hereâs this guyâs number, talk to him heâll be SUPER excited to hear what you have to sayâ and then I think to myself âNetworking? Is this networking? EEEEE!â
And listenâŠ
you, a Young Person, may be ALSO just as vital to these not-as-internet-adept folks who are doing good work, because YOU can get THEM connected to all the folks on the internets and link them to resources THEY canât access
When I meet people who are like âoh how can I DEAL with my very special and personal climate anxietyâ and âIâm working very hard to save the world with my bamboo toothbrush* but it doesnât feel like ENOUGH,â and âhow can progress possibly be made,â then itâs like⊠oh have you met your local eco group? You really need to meet your local eco group. They admittedly spend a certain amount of time doing strange little Extinction Rebellion activities and âbug hotelsâ but they spend an equal amount of time on repair cafes and fairs/festivals and if you hang out with them it will, regrettably, cure the parts of your brain that have been scorched.
You, personally, individual citizen, are not in any way ârewilding the parkâ when you dump a seedbomb on the grass where the dogs of the town are explicitly coming to wee because itâs the most accessible grass for the apartment dwellers. That does not, in any way, make any sort of progress. You make progress by following the toddlers clutching small shovels with fierce expressions, old retired people in handwoven shawls, old British men with Hats who Tell You About Concepts, extremely young genderless people apparently in their teens with owlish glasses and large raincoats who are always the Government Ecologist, loud dads in incongruously overengineered boots and possibly hi-vis vests, mothers with an Ergobaby who ask you for tips on gently ending breastfeeding on your toddler, the ENTIRE elderly committee of the allotment, extremely small babies being passed around like teddy bears, and the mayor who is for some reason in full mayoral regalia, who are all Officially Rewilding The Park. And none of these people are even remotely cool. There is no coolness to be found here. You might not have chosen to be friends with them; you might have said âwhat does a cool twentysomething have in common with a MOM who will talk about her BABY or an OLD MAN IN A HAT or a STICKY CHILD,â but it is actually quite normal for humans to regularly hang out with people of different ages and interests. It is abnormal in the span of human history to not hang out with toddlers and practice graciously accepting the leaves they hand you. These people have leveraged a free donation of 25 native saplings and the full permission of the council to change the unloved-part-of-the-park-where-dogs-donât-piss-and-kids-donât-play into a âwildâ place whose primary function will admittedly be a place where the park squirrels can hide from said dogs and kids and smoke a quick cigarette in peace, but which also separates the miner bees from the other park users, who keep calling the council and complaining about the âwasps.â An informational signage board about miner bees has been commissioned. Your first job as a Part of the Community Effort to Save The Whole Damn World will to make a quick pass to collect all then especially unsavoury or dangerous trash (condom wrappers, broken glass, suspicious pieces of discarded clothing, godforbid needles, etc) so that the toddlers can litterpick the safe stuff in safety. None of it will be cool at all. It will be a fantastic cure for your climate anxiety or the equivalent. I am not being judgmental or thomas_edison_was_a_witch.jpeg when I say that it is demonstrably better for you and the planet than fighting on social media.
Like if you can learn to tolerate Morris Dancers and their international equivalents, whatever admittedly crunchy and cringey things that people do without shame around you, you do unlock some of the things youâre looking for; elder queer communities exist around you. Eco-groups exist around you. Skill-sharing communities exist around you.
Also, to support @headspace-hotel please see above: photos of a larger-scale cross-county event attended by thousands that wasnât really advertised at all. Everyone of a certain group of interests simply Knows about it.
A really good way to find these folks is also to ask at your local library if they have or know about any ecological programs - or any other cause you want to get involved with. People Who Go To Library Programs are a distilled concentration of the kind of deeply-uncool community people you absolutely want to Networkâąïž with. They have been rigorously pre-filtered by the programâs registration criteria to be People Who Go To Library Programs. They may include but are not limited to: the Turbomom, the Floaty Shawl Boomer, the Extremely Interesting Repair Guy (who can and will trap you in a corner telling you fascinating things well beyond your social interaction threshold for the day), the townâs Single SCA Lady, a lone Homeschooled Teenager, and possibly an interested library staff member for flavour.
Bonus points if youâre not in a large city - if your town is under, say, 20,000, going to a library program will also put you in contact with one of your townâs mandatory Five People who secretly run everything by being on 6 boards, volunteering with another 4 organizations, and generally giving themselves a hernia by carrying the entire town on their backs. Finding a member of your townâs Five People is the single most efficient way to figure out where to plug in.
Todayâs Extremely Interesting Repair Guy encounter goes out to all of you nostalgic for the early utopian promise of the internet: a Gen Xer, as EIRGs so often are, sitting in the air-conditioned library on his laptop. He was using freely-posted YouTube tutorials to teach himself the open-source CAD alternative FreeCAD, which he had equipped with a long list of âworkbenchâ tool suite plugins from Github. He was designing a 3D printable Archimedean wind turbine small enough to fit in his backyard and provide power even in low winds. His intention was to hook several up together to provide enough low-but-constant power to do something like charge his phone. Every part of this was powered entirely by volunteer work from random geniuses around the world, created on their own time and given out for free to the world.
okay here’s the random question of the day. what specific word or phrase in your vocabulary is a dead giveaway for the local or regional dialect from where you grew up? like for me it’s saying “chonies” instead of underpants. that’s just very southern san joaquin valley/maybe southern california in general, but like, VERY southern valley
“awhile” as in “can I get that for you awhile?” which means “while you do this other thing”. It’s apparently only a thing in certain parts of PA, and it confused the shit out of Emet when she moved to PA.
“where’s that to” rather than “where is that” to enquire about the location of a place/object is VERY Southwest England, confuses everyone else I meet!
The EU is doing a big survey for LGBTQ people who live in the EU about how it is for them right now. That’s the kind of survey that’s used for official reports and for laws so it’s super important that it has as many people taking it as possible. You can take it in every EU language. (You can change the language in the top right corner) Share it with your friends!
in season 3 every time aziraphale and crowley see each other crowley is going to be wearing his sunglasses and then finally aziraphale is going to gently take them off for him hold his face in his hands and kiss him and I am going to die :))))
[fully aware that making anything at all is an act of tremendous effort and difficulty, to say nothing of the additional challenge of the quality of the thing, all of which are made much worse and thornier by corporate productions] right but why didnt they just make it good instead of bad
gender to me is like a car i dont really want one and society would be much better if it was not structured around it. but i got one because it helps me get around and sometimes its fun to make it go fast
and people tell you to move to one of a handful of cities if you want to avoid having one, but when you get there the majority of people have one anyway and jobs expect you to as well
pro tip? stop having ur personal tag be something self deprecating like #nameshutup or #namesaysstupidshit like that’s so bad for you and your self esteem
đ 22 â they/them â nb butch lesbian đ
âȘ we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars âȘ trans inclusive âą white + able + British
