Category: Short Opinions

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Do more proactive good in the world

1: LeGuin, “We all do harm by being.” 2: Marissa thread.

We all do harm by being.

Ursula K. LeGuin

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and how we have cultural and subcultural constructions of what is harmful, which often bear no resemblance to the truest harms we do every day. I don’t think the vast majority of us — myself included — are equipped to grapple with the very real harm we do by just, say, getting on a plane or heating a house. We prefer to crow loudly about things like not using Spotify anymore due to the J*e R*gan contract. (I specifically chose there a platform I’ve never used and have no opinion about others using. I’m not trying to get too personal in this thread.)

All too often, whatever subculture one is a part of will have very rigid ideas of what is harmful and what its members should refrain from in order to stop them from doing harm. I don’t think these things are pretty much ever meaningful. But the more rigid and meaningless the rules, the more rabidly they’re policed on social media. (I’m truly not subtweeting one group; this is damn near universal.) All under guise of preventing harm. Which is impossible, as Ursula reminds us.

I would like to try to move myself to a different lens, where I’m less invested in stopping whichever of my harms I’ve imagined to be the greatest ones (definitionally subjective anyway) and more invested in choosing to do positive acts that I believe are beneficial to the world. Which in a nutshell would be: much less time worrying about my sins, much more time worried whether I’ve actually done anything purposefully good in a given week. We all do harm by being! But we can choose to also do good. /🧵

@ MarissaRae on Twitter

A friend posted this tweet, and I want to write more about it: about how I’ve started trying to document the companies and products that seem genuinely good to their people (even if it’s not all perfect), and so forth.

But for now, I’ll just link to this. The next time you’re anxious about a given shibboleth, instead try to think about one small change you can do to have a positive impact on the world.

Related concept: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the “adequate and you get to sleep”

Another related concept: don’t let The Discourse fool you into thinking that you, personally, are responsible for doing Zero Harm to the humans and the world around you. You cannot fix a systemic problem with individual solutions. (I know this is not something everyone agrees with. That’s okay. I am stating my opinion on it.)

Nothing you do is enough. Nothing you do will ever be Enough. But that is OKAY. It means you get to decide what is enough, for you. And I just realized that this all clicks into my general philosophy of Cheerful Nihilism, so, there we go!

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The Genesis Cinematic Universe

This weekend, I was trying to explain Jacob and Esau to a friend who didn’t grow up hearing Bible stories (but was playing the video game Binding of Isaac nonetheless). And it occurred to me – we have the Hairy Ginger Lunk versus Clever Birthright Stealer dichotomy in another story: Thor and Loki.

I wish I was the first person to come up with this, but a quick Google shows me that I’m not. Still, though, I wanted to mention it, because it’s cool.

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Insulin should be free

Today I saw this tweet, and I agree.

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Grand gestures

This week, I sent my therapist the following comic after our session because it was making me think.

Two foxes, discussing self-care (full alt txt later)

And I think something clicked for me today. We claim to want to make these grand gestures, because they are so impossible and so far away that we will never have to face the reality of doing them.

Doing small things, close to home, is both more effective and more scary. It’s scary because we’re afraid of the possibility that we might do them and they might not work. With the big things, we know they’re impossible; so the uncertainty of trying, and maybe failing, is blessedly absent. We can continue to go about our business, not doing either the epic or the mundane, with certainty.

Uncertainty is scary. It just is.

But throwing yourself into the mundane, and really doing your best at it, is so worthwhile. Yeah, you might fail. But you’re a rad person and you work hard. You’re pretty likely to succeed, too.

(Do I need a category for “embracing Hufflepuff” ?)

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Organ donation

Here is another short form post!

One of my strongly held personal beliefs is that organ donation after death should be mandatory, with religious exceptions allowed. Broadly speaking, it should be opt-out, rather than opt-in.

There is no coherent reason (again, other than religious ones, which I’m not required to understand) to not err on the side of saving lives rather than on the side of more embalmed flesh in the ground, not even allowed to rot and give its nutrients back to the ecosystem.

At the same time, I’m aware that this is a very minority opinion, and I don’t work too hard to convince people that I’m right. It is what it is, you know?