Unsolicited advice from the social justice mines
Except we're cleaners, not miners. I'm mixing my metaphors a lot.
This was originally posted on 22/01/25 on Facebook and Mastodon. I wrote the original post in 30min on my phone as a short punchy thing, and I've tweaked and refined it a little for substack.
1. Just knowing about something isn't the same as activism. Knowing about bad stuff happening without having a plan for tackling it results in feelings of overwhelm, helplessness and cynicism, which are barriers to actually taking action. Anger and outrage burn brightly and can jumpstart something new but they are short-lived emotions that are hard to sustain over a long period of time (and even if you manage it, it is extremely exhausting).
I'm not saying you should stick your head in the sand, but you don't need to be an expert in everything either. In most cases the broad headline is enough and reading the details or following daily updates is probably harming you and not actually changing anything.
2. You do not and will not have the energy to take action on every single thing, it is not possible. Therefore be strategic about where you spend your energy - where will your voice and actions have the most impact because of your influence, power, privilege, position etc? The best actions are low effort & high impact, the worst actions are high effort & low impact.
What is effortful and impactful is going to look very different for different people, so there will be some actions and causes that aren’t great things for you to pursue. The good news is that because we're all different we can probably cover most topics between us while taking exactly the same advice.
3. Social justice has always been and will always be a long-term project. I really disagree with those posts that were going around; they sounded like, "how can you lead a regular life while this is happening?" In fact it is essential to lead a regular life, and what I mean is a life with joy, community, connection, art - this is what we're fighting for in the first place! Depriving ourselves of the good things in life doesn't help anyone.
We also cannot pour from an empty cup, and so we must refill our cups regularly with as much good stuff as we give away.
The trap is believing our human needs are trivial compared to the injustices we fight. The truth is that the sum of a lifetime of sustained actions is greater than a couple of years of intense activity then burnout and sickness because we simply cannot keep going. The trap is believing everything could be solved if only we worked a little harder and sacrificed a little more. The truth is that if we never slept, ate or showered this work would still never end, and then we would die having lived half a life.
Burnout and unprocessed trauma can also wreak havoc in groups and networks too. When we neglect our own human needs we start thinking everyone else ought to neglect their needs too. By ensuring we take care of ourselves we’re not inadvertently passing some of this to other people.
4. Check your ego at the door. This is not about you and being the best ally, a morally perfect person, a martyr or saviour or anything like that.
We are all cleaning a giant pile of shit together while the shit machine generates more shit.1 The hope is maybe one day, generations after our death, everything won't be covered in shit, but in the meantime removing some of it is still worthwhile even if we can't remove all of it. We're doing cleaning work - essential, important, but definitely not glamorous.
There isn’t a Shit Cleaner of the Month award and you wouldn’t want it anyway, see point re: martyrs above. The rewards are intrinsic: being covered in less shit, working alongside good company and good people, and carving out some clean(er) spaces we get to enjoy on our breaks.
It's wild that some of us chose to work maintaining the shit machine instead, but that's another post.