I openly talked about depression half my doctorate. I told my host research society how they contribute to making me sick. I even filmed that and put it on YouTube. My resilience – or rather: the lack of it – made me drop out of the academic career latter-shaped running wheel I was caught in. It made me found a research institute dealing with the topic of “sustainable well-being” – of course also following the idea of reshaping the concept of working and living for me and for others.
After that, I had a phase where I met my inner demons, my childhood traumas, the thorns still sticking and wounds still festering within me. My own limitations. I’m still heavily working on that (who is not?), and it will most likely be an ongoing process forever. But I started it, because I had a reason now to figure it out: I’m researching it. This still keeps me motivated, to find the way out – sharing it, maybe lighting the way for others, could literally save lives. There is no alternative for me to sharing my experiences with darkness openly so others could potentially benefit from it. What else could I practically do with it, better than participating in the process of normalizing mental health conditions and neurodiversity and at the same time researching it in order to find a way to deal with it?
Well, here I am and I think I boiled my own story down to a couple of factors. Some are related to how I physically deal with myself, for example how I move and how I eat, but also how I treat myself intentionally. There are some factors, though, that exceed the realm of what I can change. Climate Change is one of them, or Mass Extinctions. But also Social Injustice and Exploitation.
This brings me back to the beginning of this post. There is a significant amount of sadness rooted in the capitalist, patriarchal, neo-colonialist hegemony we’re all living in. Which is, I think, true for all of us. It’s at least true for all of us engaging in activism, because I think this exact sadness – or rather the motivation to get rid of it – is the fuel activism is running on. So, I could potentially just say: well, I can try what I can and deal with my own surrounding and then I have done everything I can. But I think that’s not enough.
I believe we are stronger together and it’s a good idea to organize. I believe we HAVE to organize in order to work out the current situation. I also believe the current organizational structures are not sufficient to work it out. So I believe we have to find a new way to structure society and organize people, and I think we should build it on solidarity, not on competition. We should strive for consensus, not majority. 100% is better than 50%. Funny thing is: Capitalism is for rather 10% (current estimate). Most of the rest only believes it’s without alternative.
But let’s not get into that discussion here – my point is: I think there’s more to be done than to try ones best. There’s people to organize, because the way most people are currently organized will eventually kill all of us. If we don’t find an alternative. My currently best suggestion for an alternative is what I call “federal autonomy”, but I realized we need to base it on solidarity and antifascism, because if there is no internal mechanism against domination attempts, we’ll be doomed either way. There is no other way than Unism. Or to quote MLK: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Yes, I know I’m doing the right thing. My problem is rather that there is no amount of doing it enough. Because people are dying already, and it is only going to get worse. So there is absolutely no time to be lost. How can we be so sure that it’s not even already too late to get things started in order to save us as a species? I mean – sure, theoretically, everything is still possible, when it comes to keeping the planet habitable. But change rarely jumps. Most of change is extremely slow compared to the time we have to get things sorted. Following this thought, there is no real way around a radical change, as in “revolution”, if we don’t want to risk extinction. I believe we can not afford to wait for the system to naturally adapt. We need a disruption.
And now a central “field of tension” – how I tend to call those – arises: I know people have a certain freedom to chose how to deal with resources and everything, but people are already dying because we (as in: the global north) are too greedy, so our freedom to exploit current structures indeed DOES massively inflict other people’s basic freedoms, because it compromises their freedom to live, which is arguably one of the most basic freedoms. So, yeah, I feel the moral obligation, as an individual believing in solidarity, to change this status. And there is no “fast enough” in this change. At least not any more. And this generates pressure, because I believe that especially people like me, full of resources and privileges, are morally obliged to overshoot in the karma game, and to put an extended focus on utilizing those resources and privileges to help others, especially less gifted.
So, yeah, my currently biggest problem, I suppose, is that there is no “enough” for me when it comes to counteracting dominant logic. It’s everywhere, the very concept of nations is built on it, and it’s constantly killing people. I feel like a revolution is my only cure. And I feel like I should put everything I have, I can, and I am into fostering the framework conditions for the revolution. So, how do I do this most sustainably? Because I think I will be of better service for humanity if I can try it for decades than if I ignite all my potential at once for a big eruption. Also, because I know that no matter how much potential I collect, no eruption I could ignite would be big enough to really change something.