• Gardening. I’ve had no gardening land until yesterday so I have filled my terrace with pots and bags of soil. Very proud of my (admittedly shitty) beans and tomatoes. I’ve made raised beds out of rubble in my backyard. A friend has offered me to use some of her land, so that will be next to plant.

• Cat. I was really awfully depressed so I adopted a sickly kitten to have someone else to care for. It helps. The cat doesn’t give a shit about world politics. It’s now growing more healthy and becoming too powerful for my furniture. When I wallow in bad moods it will let me know without delay. It’s currently sitting on my lap making sure I don’t get too much screen time.

• Community. The local community is poor, rural and divided into (very conservative) locals and foreigners (who come here to live in more natural settings than where they come from). Since I’ve turn woefully old I feel like I am now the adult in the room, so I try to work on bringing people together, and a few others are doing the same. That’s how we fight the fascists and xenophobes who seem to be everywhere these days. There was a small group of at least four different nationalities banging pots for Gaza in our tiny town yesterday. When it feels that there is not enough community I will come up with some way to create it through common activities. Two or three people meeting and doing something together is a success!

• Bread. I bake sourdough bread because the local bread sucks. Some people buy it from me and enjoy it very much, and that makes me happy.

That said I am often nearly succumbing to all the doom out there. There have been days in the last few months when I was really not wanting to live anymore. I then return to one of the points above and carry on, and the doom passes. I’ll keep doing that, sometimes out of spite, till I’m booted out of this place or this life.

All of the points I wrote down connect with caring for human and non-human life (even the sourdough is a friend!). One more point I should add is ceremony/prayer, which sounds stupid to the average anarchist/atheist, but it has become important to me and connects me to ancestors and landscape. The land is alive and my work is to participate in caring for the land and its inhabitants - a lot of that philosophy is borrowed from native and indigenous people. I’m not caring for others because some god tells me to, but because being a good neighbor to people, plants and animals makes everyone involved more happy.

All I do is purposefully small. No big ambitions that would eat me (been there, done that). Just my tiny self doing my best. Plans and ideas don’t have to be - shouldn’t be - big and sparkling.

Touch grass is what we need to do. I do as much as I can in my surroundings - raised beds, gardening, and sharing stuff with people. I work as much as I can in my local community. That’s how we beat this shit and keep our souls alive.

I feel you, I know what you mean. End of the world - as we know it. I hope that while everything comes tumbling down we re-learn how to be in community with others, humans and non-humans. I hope we re-learn how to be and not spend so much energy. The tiredness people feel these days seems to indicate that the great mother is taking care of that for us - nothing we have to do, just give in to feeling tired. In the meantime, I am coming to accept that together with many others I might die in this process of unraveling, but that’s not important.

Slow down, do less, achieve less, buy less, worry less. More casual hanging out with trees, birds and lizards in my neighborhood. Eat the rich.

To create is even more important now. To fight this machine, this soul-less destruction. I’m more of a crafts person and only rarely a writer. Everything I do can be done by a machine faster and cheaper, so there is seems to be no reason to keep making it. A lot of the time I stare at my little felt figurines and my plant-dyed yarns and wonder why I even bother, and lately have stayed alive only because it would make my dad and my kid sad. But every now and then someone’s eyes get a certain sparkle when they see what I do. There’s life in it. My wonky basket contains life and love - the plastic basket with the fake wicker pattern does not. People at the moment can’t afford to buy my basket instead of the plastic one, but it has to exist to keep the real craft alive. We crafters, writers, artists, musicians need to keep alive the knowledge of how to make the real things. Some day it will matter again, I believe at some point the machine will eat itself.

Got some of this as well, started with pain in the throat last week, I slept a lot for two days, came down with migraine a day after that, and the last week I have been mentally really unwell feeling more anxious and depressed than usual. Something is going round.

Yay low cost nuclear reactors! /s

“Invasive seaweed” is not a very nice name to call UK tourists.

@Pastel_Problem@slrpnk.net @alexcleac@szmer.info And I love you both for letting me know! Gives me the courage to post stuff that I’m not always sure is relevant or helpful. Seeing the comments and upvotes for this I’ll consider giving it its own post somewhere, but today I’m too lazy resistfully restful.

I found it easier after understanding that everyone else is also struggling, everybody feels like they don’t have their shit together, and everybody needs help. There might be a few people who claim they have it all figured out, they are not the ones I want to take advice from because they are full of shit (often they are some guru type and/or just want your money).

Also helps to realize that a lot of people feel bad because things are bleak - we struggle with climate change, alienation at work, being disrooted, at the brink of yet another war … it’s objectively hard to live during these times. The only thing that makes it easier is talking to each other. A woman visited me yesterday, told me about her problems with her health and her main problem seemed to be that she feels unproductive and too tired to get the things done she believes she should be able to do. After telling her that on most days I was pleased with myself for simply getting up, feeding the cat and brushing my teeth, and that I know so many more people who tell me they feel like this, she was visibly relieved, and I was as well.

So when we talk to each other it helps to realize there’s nothing wrong with us personally - we are not failing at being a person, we are just reacting to the best of our abilities to an onslaught of trouble around us. Plus, when we talk to each other we often find out how we can help each other out in very practical ways - like sharing resources, supporting each other with our different strengths, ganging up together against the hardship. Community is how we can survive the hard times!

So is there someone in your life you can ask for help? Are you thinking about enlisting professional help like a doctor or therapist? What do you need right now?

Something I wrote about laziness recently, kind of fits here:

The concept of laziness is propaganda, brought on by a logic of destruction

In a world where a philosophy of infinite growth causes us to destroy everything that is not dedicated to the production of goods, doing nothing is political. At a time where burnout is on the rise while we still carry the internalized belief that our self-worth is tied to our productivity, doing nothing is an act of self love. In a world that is overheating, doing nothing is an act of self preservation and of protecting Mother Earth.

Rest is resistance. Rest doesn’t mean you are lazy while the world is on fire, it means you do not participate in fanning the flames even more. Feel like doing nothing? Do nothing, because that’s what Mother Earth wants you to do in this moment. Close your eyes, rest, let life find its way.

The idea that we have to be active to save, protect, improve is part of the lie that we are the crown of creation, the stewards of the earth, the ones who run the show. None of it is true. We just have to stop doing damage. We just have to stop. Are you always tired? Mother Nature asks you to rest, let life find its way.

And as rocket fuel we use? You are all a fucking bunch of nuclear cartoon clowns, please just go and switch yourselves off.

Who the fuck cares how others are dressing?

“Wenn wir einen fressen, lernen die anderen, sich zu benehmen” - die Wahnis drehen eh durch weils nirgendwo mehr zum würdevollen Leben reicht. Und dann werden wieder irgendwelche Nazis ins Amt gewählt, die Wahnis in den Krieg geschickt damit sie ihrem Ärger in der Fremde Luft machen können und der Überschuss an Dummvolk reduziert wird, und das Ganze läuft für immer auf Repeat. Bin kein Gewalt- und Rachetyp aber das Ungleichgewicht ist so arg dass ich da allmählich kein Land mehr sehe. Seit Jahren sind wir alle höflich und zurückhaltend, um die Demokratie zu schützen. Aber was beschützen wir da eigentlich? Dass wir so tun dürfen als würden wir irgendwas zu sagen haben?

Ist ja noch schlimmer als ich dachte. Den Dreck in dem wir gezwungen sind zu leben noch Demokratie zu nennen ist echt ein Witz.

Stimmt, wer mag mit in die Ferien nach Monaco? Aber die haben ja bestimmt auch Zweit-, Dritt- und Viertwohnsitze wo man nicht gleich ans Mittelmeer fahren muss. Umso besser wenn niemand zuhause ist wenn der Eiertransporter kommt.

I guess I have to keep asking every time this shit idea of nuclear as green energy pops up: where to put the waste? Have we figured that out yet? Or will we continue hiding that stuff somewhere and hoping it stays there? 20 years ago I joined the protests in this location, where they were going to store nuclear waste in an abandoned salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome

Despite thousands of people blocking roads the train full of nuclear waste arrived anyways. Guess what, briefly after that (or who knows, they probably knew anyways) they found the salt mine wasn’t such a great idea. And now that shit sits there in some storage building waiting for an accident to happen. Maybe Russia wants to drop a drone onto it when they feel like it, or in time the whole thing just gets abandoned because nobody has money to care anymore.

Only way to make energy green is degrowth, so spending less of it. Every single way of producing energy is damaging to the environment, and inventing new stuff or rebranding old stuff as “green” isn’t going to change it. They tear up the country I live in for lithium and the people can’t grow their gardens anymore, common lands are now filled with wind power and the people cannot send their herds onto the mountain anymore, they produce fuel out of maize and large areas of monoculture now grow fuel instead of food, huge areas of agricultural land are being filled with solar panels. It all causes damage, just stop spending so much energy. Don’t produce shit nobody needs, switch the fucking AI off, stay at home and just relax.

Ich finde es wird mal Zeit für eine Liste wo man schnell und einfach nachschauen kann, wo diese Leute wohnen. Es wird Zeit, dass es zu unbequem und peinlich wird, so viel Reichtum anzuhäufen. Und ich meine das nicht als Aufruf zur Gewalt, sondern zur Kreativität. Zum Beispiel könnte ja aus Versehen jemand dort, wo die Bonzen wohnen, eine oder auch 15.000 Millionen Ladungen vergammelte Eier abliefern. Also wer die Zeit hat könnte ja mal eine “Eat the Rich”-Karte basteln, damit direkte Aktion ihren Weg dorthin findet.

Can’t be arsed to get bogged down by anarchist theory word salad or watch kung fu movies, but to ask “How do we feel about […]” in an anarchist community seems a little ironic to me. As an anarchist I don’t really want to have to care about how others think I should feel about something.

If anyone wants to give an ELI5 to an old and tired punk about who the situationists are or were I’m happy to listen, and I might even let you know how I feel about them …

There were times where I was more boyish, and times where I liked being girly. On average I prefer being boyish but mostly because I don’t want to make an effort to fulfil the expectations of being girly - I can’t really bring myself to care about fashion, makeup, hairdos and all that. I never really had a problem with the body I was born with. I never wanted to have a dick. All in all I just don’t want to have any work with looking a certain way or defining my identity around bodily characteristics.

Then again, while not caring at all about which body I happen to have been born into, I find the inner limitations of having been brought up as a woman really problematic - the making oneself smaller, learning how to be quiet and demure, the not being as convinced of oneself as guys tend to be, the not being taken seriously. But that’s nothing to do with the body and everything to do with the mind and my upbringing.