People are simply shutting down their head. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

When I was a kid I really thought the leisure society will happen. Now I’m simply counting down the years to death.

I’d argue they don’t care because they aren’t issued the resources necessary to care. Our workers also don’t have enough time / energy to parent or to engage in their civic duties of working out what is in their best interests and voting accordingly. Let alone the impetus to imagine a better world and strive for it.

It’s difficult to say if this was intentional all along, or just a happy(?) accident of overworking our labor force out of sheer greed,¹ but it belies the drift of abusive systems towards greater dysfunction, which is why we need ironclad protections against labor abuse.

Not that we’re going to get it necessarily without blood…or with blood for that matter. It’s why violent revolution is on the table since the masses can’t afford the time and energy to conduct non-violent protest.

I’d credit our oppressors for being thorough, but they really aren’t all that bright, so I no longer give them the benefit of the doubt.

¹ We now have studies that show a well-treated labor force is worth the extra expense, from sheer productivity increase alone. Our upper management is just too short-sighted, too divisionist and too paranoid to bother to make their companies worth putting the effort in for, even though optimizing for profit is their job description.

I have been going through a very similar experience to you. The more coworkers I have over the years, the more people I realize are extremely jaded and having a tough time caring at all about the world at large.

This is a pretty complicated issue. I think that means you need a sort of patchwork of paradigms to apply to the issue at the right moment.

Sometimes you need to give yourself a break and let yourself live your life - you only get one, and joy is an essential part of a functioning human, and you must continue to function if you are to continue impacting your world.

Other times you must keep in mind that it is literally completely illogical to say that your actions have no impact, obviously each individual action on it’s own is small but the actions humanity makes are made up of individuals. Change happens one person at a time, and individuals are difference-makers.

Consider professional sports teams where the stars elevate the team to the next level - they cannot do their work by themselves, every member of the team is needed and makes an impact, but the impacts are not all the same. You will see the same dynamic play out in the typical workplace - a relatively small portion of people really make things happen at most workplaces in my experience, but they still need the team to help them get it done. So you should continue to think of your actions as being important/having meaning in my opinion, and you should keep striving to make the world a better place.

Sometimes when there is a situation that frustrates me but that I know I cannot change (or cannot change immediately or in full), it helps to quiet that thing in my head that worries by practicing mindfulness techniques. Personally I find “box breathing” (a style of controlling breathing to regulate heart rate and perhaps lower cortisol) to be most effective. Maybe this or some other method could help to quel your feelings when you know that it is a situation to let go of.

I think of it as situational, in your orbit, you have coworkers wasting time on simple problems. In other parts of the world, in remote villages, solar is changing people’s lives for the better.

I have known too many people lost in their own bubbles of reality, never considering the larger picture and impacts of personal choices. They are the majority, unfortunately.

Just focus on what you can do for yourself, find like minded people to share on larger efforts, and don’t waste your own time and energy (especially emotional) on people that never put in a second thought into efforts for improving the world.

Disagree.

Most people want to make the world a better place, we just can’t agree on what a better world would look like, and how to get there.

There’s a lot of people out there, for example, who think that the “right to self determination” is a bad thing because they believe humanity has an intrinsic self-destructive aspect. I disagree, but they firmly believe that a dictatorship is the solution and I’m being unhelpful because I don’t want that.

One of the hardest things I’ve been through in therapy was realizing that my parents really did think they were doing the right thing. They listened to the “experts” at church who told them that in order to protect their kids, they needed to hurt their kids. My mother dropped out of college when she got pregnant, and my stepdad is mentally ill, so neither of them were particularly well educated, and they landed in a cult.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all. People can be horrible and think they’re doing it for the greater good.

Just do what you can do to make things better for people. It’ll drive you crazy if you’re worrying about what other people are doing. Even crazier than that if you want a reward for doing things right. Do the right thing (even if no one else is) simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Serenity is to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The only person you can control is yourself. Do what you know needs to be done, set the examples for others, but place no value on whether they see you or not. The effect of your actions will be apparent.

I think a lot of it is people are struggling to just survive. Barely making ends meet, putting food on their own table and a roof over their head. There are probably many people that wish they could do more, but don’t have the time or resources to do anything more.

One of my favorite and best teacher was a biology teacher, and I remember being taught about population cycles of various living things. I like how that teacher showed us humanity’s population trends, and how it resembles boom and bust species. It was subtle, as if they knew it wouldn’t stick with many of the students.

I think most people can see the rat race they are in, but for whatever various reasons, cannot or will not notice the incoming cliff fall. But, some of us stand taller, and can see the cliff fall coming. Stopping in the middle of humanity’s stampede to warn everyone is going to be met with all sorts of problems, like being left behind, or being berated for slowing others down, or even violence if you create too much impact that impedes the flow of humanity. It’s really awful to deal with seeing a horrible thing happening, care about it, and are not able to make a difference to obvert a tragedy you see coming.

To me, it takes almost no effort to just think the correct way, to voice the correct thing in pertinent moments. It’s the holding of the tongue that takes effort when you realise the ears in the moment won’t listen. You can learn about people quickly by saying some off hand comments and seeing their reaction. Most of the time, people are oblivious or react negatively hearing about the cliff. Pardon my French: Most people only care about themselves and their own shits, sometimes so much that they actively shove their heads up their own asses, purposely so they cannot see anything else other than their own shit. Sometimes you might find someone aligning to your views, but be careful of circumstantial situations, like the rat race hitting a road bump and everyome complains about it. Lots of people only cared about covid when it knock on their door step and infected the nonbelievers.

I could go on, but have to stop atm, but know that you are not alone and it’s a struggle, like everything else in life, unfortunately.

Your coworker is reaching out to you in his own way, and you are making his life more bearable than you may know. What seems a little bump in the road may be a mountain to him. But life’s a marathon, and he might come around yet.

I wouldn’t necessarily say people don’t care. I don’t think they have the capacity to care. I think there’s so much going on in their lives and right in front of their faces that they can’t even see what’s happening.

That doesn’t make the solution any better though…

People don’t and won’t care until more their more immediate and drastic problems will be resolved. I’m happy for you, you’re not too empathetic, you’re simply privileged enough to care about such things. Meanwhile people who have no civil rights see vegans as class traitors, people being bombed would roll their eyes 360° at a mention of fighting light pollution, etc etc.

Activists of the privileged world. Your preaching audience is forever limited to about half of the population more privileged than you. If you want others to care about what you consider problems, SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS FIRST.

(steps off a soapbox to use it as a makeshift shield)

For the longest time, I could have written out these thoughts of yours almost verbatim myself. I hear you, and I believe I know that pain very well.

I’ve recently clawed my way out of that mindset, mostly. A total, unrelated stranger on the Internet now suggests you try the same, for your own mental health and The Greater Good™ alike. I’ll share my own story instead of preaching to the choir, with the faint hope of giving faint hope that there at least exists a way out of this mental mess you’re in.

I was almost afraid of being thought of as naïve, considered it a weakness to not show. Cynicism was my shield. Nevertheless I always went and still go out of my way to be a “good guy”, in the most inconsequential ways. Don’t picture the ranting, vitriolic uncle here nobody wants to be with in the same room, I kept this negativity pretty much to myself and only let it out in controlled drips of sarcastic jokes. I, too, was convinced that humanity surely is doomed, if only for it’s insufferable ignorance, and by extension do whatever I can to support those precious few who I deemed as “not lost” in all the ways I could. Voluntary extinction of humans seemed like a pretty swell concept, overall.

I did organize convention security of Eurofurence for more than a decade, going from ~150 to thousands of attendees. All staff are unpaid volunteers. I just recently realized how the “staff side” of the convention is a practical, well-working example of a practically anarchistic collective organisation (yes, security, too) managing a metric shit-ton of complex stuff just for a few thousand fellow furry queers to have fun for a week, and paying €1000+ and PTO for the privilege to boot. You may rightly assume I have seen a fair shit of crazy stuff, first hand, but violence, hate, or even just ignorance? I can count those on one paw, over all these years combined. Even trouble with “outsiders” in Berlin Mitte clashing with the colorful crowd was very limited and ultimately civil.

It took me this long to reflect how this personal experience is NOT a glitch in the Matrix, but actually the “resting state” of human consciousness. People are, in an exceeding majority, “good”. I cannot ignore a decade of first-hand (anecdotal, granted) experience and further tell the lie of “people are ignorant, assholes, or both”. They are not. People are however, broken. Like me. Possibly, like you. By “truths” about “reality as it is”, colported by profiteers of misery or other broken souls trying to dilute their pain by finding, nay, creating company to normalize their struggle and feel a tiny bit better. Not out of spite or hate, mind you, but to soothe themselves and survive in a world that is perceived as harsh, uncaring, and downright belligerent. Which it is, for many out there. But it is not “the world” we are up against— the hedgehogs dozing off in the pile of autumn leaves didn’t raise your rent last week. Neither did your neighbor, or the Mexican lady three cities over making ends meet. Why can’t “they” see that and do something? Likely the same reason why I can’t do a lot of things, I lack the energy. Instead of being on the streets or organizing a local repair cafe, I’m typing a stream of consciousness into the void on the Internet. Whoop-de-doh! I’m such a revolutionary! Welp, there’s the sarcasm again. :)

If you’re wondering how to pay for your damn food, shelter, and medicine tomorrow all day, every day, you literally cannot concern yourself with a long-term solution. You are eternally stuck in stopping the bleeding, and cannot focus on the guy stabbing you over and over again. It is too late, you’d bleed out if you shift focus now.

“You keep them dumb, I’ll keep them poor.” said the King to the Pope. And then propagandize this status quo as the only way to survive, with no alternative, and your survival is constantly at risk from… well… whatever threat we can conjure up.

So. If one agrees, at least roughly, with this (gesticulated wildly) being our shared reality, we have also established that people are, by a large margin, victims in need of help, but afraid to ask for it. This is why I follow the guideline of unconditionally offering help in whatever way I can.

There is no shortage of need for any kind of assistance or help in the world. It’s a seller’s market for positivity and aid out there, and it’s up to you to set the price as low as you can.

No effort in that direction is ever “wasted”, as some want you to believe. For every beneficial action you take, no matter how tiny, is a SHITLOAD of eager and needing recipients. Plucking the candy wrapper from the ground? Pointless, right? Surely inconsequential. Not when scaled up by the thousands. Smile at people, just because you are going to interact with them, and set the vibe. It’s ridiculous how many people are visibly starved for a sliver of positive, human interaction, particularly in retail jobs, for obvious reasons.

Once I began actively looking for the effects of my “inconsequential” actions, I realized that the opposite is true. The act of giving freely, unconditionally, and convincingly is the only way to reach those in need who are convinced they don’t deserve anything, or nothing would help them, anyway. It’s difficult to target aid, hence the 'obvious" pointlessness of it all, but an indiscriminate shotgun approach definitely, eventually hits some of the good people, you just won’t notice it right away. For them, however, any bit of empowerment is very real and sorely needed. Do not underestimate the power of decentralized action, it isn’t limited to Lemmy. :)

If you stop anyone’s bleeding for a moment, they may muster up the energy and focus one day, to give the stabby guy a little push. And take a figurative breather, for the first time in years. And then use that new-found strength to maybe, eventually, throw a punch.

I decided to be a part of that avalanche, from my very privileged position, instead of betraying myself and what I desire to be, in order to feel “normal” and be part of a “normal society” that doesn’t actually exist in the callous form so many claim it to “just be”. Fuck 'em if someone considers me naïve for believing in the possibility of creating a net positive with my life, even if we’re on a doomed ride into oblivion. At least enjoy the view, then, you’ve got nothing to lose but your prejudice.

Okay, I’m done, this is getting ridiculous.

TL;DR: Don’t give up, so many more people are “good”, every action has consequences, even if unseen.

At work, I listen to a coworker frustrated about a simple problem. It would be a simple change to make this person’s job much less painful, but he “just works here”. It’s just such a dumb problem to waste hours of someone’s life on.

This person is aware that the only reward for fixing the problem is more work. He’s still going to work the same hours with the same pay.