AES13 The Trappings of Idealism

When you spend a lot of time living in your own head, there’s a lot of things that you end up thinking about. The things I think about are mostly abstract concepts such as morality, justice, and how the world should be. How society could function where everyone can live a fulfilled life, where ideas are fostered, nature is protected, and suffering is minimalized. But the problem of thinking about how brilliant the world could potentially be, is that you realise how flawed the world really is. You realise that the people in power will never enact change that benefits us, that the economic system that dominates every aspect of our lives is designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. That the world is filled with flawed, greedy people only looking out for themselves, putting the eventual betterment of humankind out of reach for the rest of us.

And that’s the curse of idealism, you get to see how everything is wrong, and you’ll never have the chance to fix it all yourself. It’s like living in a house where everything is crooked, and you’re the only one who notices it. And then you realize, this is the only house you’ve got, and you have to live here until you die. If you dedicate your whole life, you can probably fix one small thing inside the house, but the rest of it lies out of reach, impossible to move. The burden of this knowledge can be too heavy to carry around in everyday life, thinking about it too much can even make you depressed, which is why I try to understand that even though lots of things about this world are bad, there are some good things too that are worth holding on to, things worth fighting for. And it’s okay if you can’t fix everything, change takes time, more time than any of us individually has. And what’s important is that you leave this world better than you have found it, and that is good enough for all of us.