New selves for a new world
This is something better, worse, and harder than the end of days. This is the change of days. Things are not going back to the way things were. The world is changing, and it's going to keep changing.
The way we organize ourselves is broken and getting worse. It makes us miserable, sick, crazy, and it's making the Earth less livable for us and the other beings that live here with us. We are going to need to adapt, to change, in order to survive.
There are powerful violent forces working to maintain the current organization of society and its current trajectory. They will fight and kill to maintain it even though if left unchecked it will kill us all.
It will not be easy to change things, though it is possible. We have to change ourselves, how we do things, in order to change anything else.
We have been trained to be consumers in all aspects of our lives. We approach the necessities of life as consumers, education as consumers, media as consumers, work and jobs as consumers. We accept packaged and prepared solutions and at most we get to select between options created by others.
This consumer approach to life has us implicitly buying into the way the world is currently organized.
The other thing our society has trained us to be are individuals, looking at things from an isolated and limited point of view of only our own choices and actions, and how things affect the all important me. This makes us selfish, yes, but it also makes us weak. We are unable to engage in coordinated collective action, which is exactly what we need in order to actually change things.
Alternatives to consumerism and individualism exist. We can approach things from a DIY, do it yourself, perspective. Rather than looking for a packaged product to solve our problems, we can marshall our knowledge, resources, and creativity to create our own solutions. Learn to make do.
We must overcome a sort of aesthetic distaste we have for the solutions that result from this approach, a distaste consumer society has trained into us. We can choose to cultivate another aesthetic sense. This is one of the things the punk movement was doing.
Now, we don't have to do this alone. There are alternatives to individualism, like mutual aid or co-ops. Because we have different knowledges, interests, and skills that can complement and interact with each other, a group is capable of more than an individual. Do it ourselves is more powerful than do it myself.
These shifts in perspective will change who we are and will make us more able to shape our worlds in the face of its inevitable changes.