Lately I find myself at a strange philosophical inflection point, and I want to get it right.

There’s a key truth I spent my twenties learning:

The world often mistreats people, in ways that are unkind and unfair.

I didn’t know this before! In my early life, I was trained to believe that my privilege was earned, and that other people’s struggle was earned, too. And now I understand this to be a lie.

I used to describe this as “people deserve better”… but I’m starting to move away from the idea of “deserve”, as I start to discover another truth, and try to square it:

It is unkind to our fellow people to sit around waiting for the world to save us, and to call it “mistreatment” when they do not.

Being able to see and name this, I’m… worried. I recognize this as a kernel-of-truth that is often used to lure people into conservativism: that, if people aren’t succeeding, we should not support them, because it’s mainly an initiative problem.

And the easiest way to rebuke that evil ideology is to claim that an “initiative problem” is a myth.

And so it scares me to gradually realize that there is such thing as an initiative problem. Hell, I very much had one myself. Like so much else, it’s a part of how we’re trained.

And I want to open my eyes to this common human experience, and learn how to be kind about it.

My friends and I

Part of why this is so pointedly on my mind, is frankly the same reason I imagine it ends up on a lot of radicalized conservatives’ minds: a specific frustrating personal experience.

These past couple years, some of my friendships turned weirdly sour. These were fellow queer folks who had been knocked around by systems all their lives. And I ended up in a situation that, at the time felt surprising, but I realize now must be very common for humanity: I did my best to help, and… it did not register that way.

I discovered the depth of this about a year after they moved in—that these hidden conflicts culminated in them and our other friends believing that I was weak and my wife was cruel. And… to put it pettily, but I think accurately, their rationale was largely: we didn’t proactively run our house at a hotel level of hospitality, and we weren’t proactively figuring out and apologizing for this.

So, clearly I’ve got personal feelings in play here, and I’m not asking you to just fully believe my version of the story without hearing theirs. I just think it’s important to be honest that like… I’m not just doing introspection, I’m getting here from a place of upset—and that I suspect this is part of how it often happens in the world. (Also, a lot of this has been better resolved since!)

But also… I know that I’m not one to talk. Because I’ve spent my whole life waiting for institutions to make everything clean and perfect for me, too. And I think that’s the more important part of my story.

I and the World

Right out of college, I joined a nonprofit, where the people were kind and the mission seemed good. But over time, I understood that the founder’s values were just very different than mine. And that’s a big reason why I left in 2020: I wanted a job where I could just follow orders and be proud of my impact on the world—and this wasn’t it.

But as I just wandered the world unemployed, looking for purpose… I’m certainly proud of a lot of what I achieved and how I grew, but I can also see the aimlessness in it too.

I learned how to hear and respect my body, how to process emotions clearly and kindly, and how to take better care of my health. These are skills I was late in developing, and I’m grateful to have better caught up!

But there were also long periods of feeling “stuck” until something external gave me a role to slot into. I’d join a new friend group, and re-center my world around it; then we’d have the inevitable queer friend group blowup, at which point I’d be back to waiting for the next ship to come by.

And I think what finally gave me the perspective shift I needed, was watching, of all things, an episode of Dimension 20’s “Fantasy High: Junior Year”. The party’s cleric had been sorta wandering between gods, struggling to find purpose. And someone in their life gave them a talking-to: that their problem is they’ve rejected institution, but they still crave what’s easy about institution.

Yes, it’s good to leave the evil institution that wants you to offer you a seat of comfort—but if you’re just out there looking for the good institution that’s going to offer you comfort, you’re not going to find it. Wandering the wilderness to create your own meaning is hard.

And they told her, “your problem is, you don’t like doing hard things”.

And I thought. Ah.

When something seems hard, my mind rejects it, because I’m expecting the right thing to be easy. All my life I was taught that the clean garden path I was on was the right place to be.

But if I’ve learned anything in my twenties, it’s that the world tends to offer easy or right. So, if you want what’s right, you have to go off the well-trod path. And there aren’t a lot of guides to show us the way; often, it has to be us.

What to actually expect from the world

I don’t think these realizations have changed a lot about my vision for the world. But I think I have a better grip on where we are along that path, and what I want my role in it to be.

I want a world where we’ve invested in machinery of good: where children are raised by adults who understand how to do what’s right, and who create opportunities for them to inherit that machinery, without needing to fight the machine itself.

And it’s easy to see the many ways in which our current machinery is broken relative to that goal, and harming people here and now. There’s so many bigotries and other cruelties baked into our cultural institutions, and they must be rooted out—and there’s a lot we can already do today to make that happen.

At the same time, at scale, this ideal is a vision for centuries from now. I don’t think it makes sense to expect it to already exist—it never has, not once in human history. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to be angry at our parents and mentors for not having single-handedly overhauled the system in their one generation’s time, after themselves being born into its messes.

And frankly, even in that vision for the world, there will still be struggle. If the gears of society are turning perfectly, then we still have resource issues, natural disasters, and just the normal complexity of interpersonal relation to deal with.

I’m coming to realize that there’s a hubris to thinking that humans should be the one kind of animal on this Earth who simply does not have to struggle, or that this would even be right to want.

And I’m realizing that my previous ideology, that we all outright “deserve” not to have bad things happen to us or to fight against anything ourselves, played into that romanticized ideal much more than I think is right or wise.

The world certainly has villains, and certainly has evil ideology at play in our institutions. And those villains and ideologies also want us to feel helpless against them: that our fate comes down to how Great Forces choose to harm or help us, and so if we are to be saved, we need a Great Hero.

And I’ve personally come to decide that, I no longer accept the idea that there is some kind of Great Adult who can affect these things, and that I was simply not made to be one.

Literally if not me, then who around me should have to run my life, specifically? Who is this person who rightfully should be responsible for my life and theirs, while I am responsible for none?

At the end of the day, we are the only adults we have.

But the “the world” is kinda bullshit, anyway

So, that’s the philosophizing. In practical terms, I think how this largely manifests is: I think my relationships with people are going to become very different than my relationships with institutions.

This, I think, is the key to unlocking those two ideas that I felt were in tension before. Instead of choosing to relate to “the world” as a monolith, what if:

Powerful institutions often mistreat people, in ways that are unkind and unfair.

In situtions where we are the fuel for a mighty institution that is hoarding resources in order to extract from us, we should generally consider it our enemy, and engage with negotiation and leverage.

And then:

It is unkind to our fellow people to sit around waiting for them to save us, and to call it “mistreatment” when they do not.

In situations where we are primarily just people doing our best for one another in a harsh world, we should generally consider each other allies, and engage with love and care—and hold a genuine desire to best meet all our goals, as best we can.

These things can become complicated, because power dynamics aren’t binary: if someone is offering you care from a place of privilege, are they a power broker trying to control your life, or are they a fellow person trying to do right by you? I think the answer has to lie in the details, and which toolbox seems materially best for the world in context.

But ultimately I think both relationships are made better by choosing to engage from a place of agency: we don’t need to trust the institution to save us, or put that pressure on our fellow comrades, either. We’re stronger negotiators when we have our own objectives and convictions; and we’re stronger friends and neighbors, too.

That, I think, is the common thread to it all: I didn’t realize just how much the world trains us to be non-agentic. And for my fellow people who have been inflicted with that damage, I want to offer love and support, rather than the conservative ideology of getting pissed that they won’t get off their ass.

But I also don’t want to be in denial about how common of a phenomenon it is, either. It’s so easy to just want to be angry, and to expect that someone else out there is going to respond to the anger in some unspecified way (usually ideally shame, I think?) to make things better. It is its own trap, and an active part of the machinery designed to hold us in place.

I want to choose to define my own life, and to give my genuine effort to the project of a better world—even in the ways it terrifies me.

I want to, finally, do the hardest things.