Sargon of ACAB

This was always something I struggled with.

It’s something I still struggle with. I’m getting better at accepting I’m tired almost all the time, but everything else I, much harder to accept.

I know fairness is irrelevant for this, but it just doesn’t feel right that I have carefully plan my most meaningful activies because I’ll be emotionless for two weeks if I do two protests in one week. Or that a date night could be ruined by an unexpected depressive period.

I sometimes wonder If I had everything I ever wanted would I actually be happy?

Happiness isn’t about having things, I think. Of course being in a situation in which you have your needs met helps. Financial security, a partner, housing, food, friends, etc. make it way easier.

But most of the moments in which I was “happiest” weren’t about “having” or the fulfilment of a specific desire. They were much more about experiencing community and feeling like I had agency.

As someone who has treatment-resistant depression: keep inviting your friend. Keep asking them for help when it makes sense to do so. Even if they cancel a lot or are quiet when they do show up. That’s helping a lot.

People need community.

It does.

I’ve experienced symptoms of depression for as long as I can remember. Over the years I tried a lot of different treatments, medication, therapy, etc. None of it ever worked.

I lost a lot of jobs and friendships because I simply didn’t have the energy to do the bare minimum. I divorced the love of my life in part because I could see how much my chronic illness was weighing on them.

I was never suicidal but I’ve frequently wished I was because that at least would provide me with an option to stop the unending apathy.

There’s never going to be a point in my life when I’m not depressed. I’m gonna have to be very disciplined and work hard to maintain a level of functioning that I consider suboptimal. Mistakes made when trying to judge how much energy something will take or those unavoidable times where you simply need to push yourself more than is comfortable will be setback that could take days or weeks to recover from.

But I have reached a point in which I’m content a lot more. I have a partner that loves me and they’re great. I’m a more-or-less reliable member of a local anarchist collective and people appreciate me and come to me for advice. They’re respectful of my limitations. I’ve been reading more and trying new hobbies. There’s people who love me and I love them.

I can look at a sunset and appreciate its beauty. Yesterday I was singing along with some punk rock while driving and kinda enjoyed it. I baked cookies to share with people and I look forward to handing them out. I found an empty snail shell on the street and it was pretty enough to make me smile.

Is my life amazing? No. Do I have to work very hard and be very disciplined to achieve what most people seem to have naturally? Yes. Have I reached the point where I think that work and discipline is worth it more often than not? Definitely.

The best advice I can give you is to do things anyway. Seek out things that are, at least in theory, fun or enjoyable. If there’s something you’d like to try out but it feels scary or not worth doing, try do it anyway. Look for what makes it easier.

Imagine the coolest possible future version of yourself. Try to take small steps to move in that direction. For me that was things like painting my nails, going to Pride, joining a protested, learning to wield a sword… For my partner this was dying their hair, going out to party, learning to make fire… However it looks to you: try to do it.

Living in Europe this is fairly easy te remember. None of the choices are great, but they definitely exist.

Maybe “automation” wasn’t the correct term to use. I mostly meant predictive text suggestions, or your IDE handling boilerplate code and stuff like getters and setters. Maybe even auto-bracketing.

We’ve had predictive text and automation of boilerplate code for years without needing any generative AI.

Hostility towards what is now colloquially called AI seems very justified to me. The costs to society, especially the environmental ones, can’t be justified by the meagre “benefits” it purports to offer.

The biggest boons of generative AI I’ve see its champions mention (other than making horrifying imagery that makes someone feel like an artist with zero art involved) are cost-reduction and automating the “boring” parts.

The cost-reduction seems unsustainable and mostly exists because these companies are operating at an enormous loss. A lot of the automation already existed and those “boring” tasks where also opportunities for junior coders to learn their trade.

Even just very small and temporary ones would do a lot, in my opinion.

Part of what makes direct action valuable is that it temporarily creates a space for just doing what needs doing, with less regard to the reality of capitalism and the state.

I should probably take some time to think why my instagram feed is full of non-binary people, shouldn’t I?

It’s probably dangerous to think this is just any one thing. For the vast majority of people it’s likely just a form of normalization. If you’ve been involved with anarchism (or other radical politics) for a while it can be hard to remember just how normalized state repression or even state violence is. Similar to “capitalist realism” people just aren’t used to imagining that things could be differently. Addressing that would involve both arguing that certain things (such as police defaulting to violence) shouldn’t be considered as normal, while also presenting viable alternatives that we could be doing right now. For that last part I think the concept of prefigurative politics plays a big role.

I’d perhaps cautiously suggest that some sort of “learned helplessness” or a variation thereof could also be at play. When you lack agency and bad outcomes seem to happen regardless of what you do, many people will just passively accept the bad outcomes. Here I think people should be shown that through community and agency you can create positive outcomes. Getting people even tangentially involved in any form of direct action has been (in my experience) a good way to make that happen. It is, however, rather challenging to get people to take that step. Telling them about (successful) forms of direct action will be necessary here. Someone I know recently had the realization that direct action can have a much bigger impact than they thought after watching the documentary “To Kill A War Machine.”

Most people also just don’t have the necessary handholds to think about all of this. The necessity of a government or the continued existence of capitalism is taken as a given, the same as gravity or magnetism. A lot of effort gets put into making sure this is the case and most people don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to look into it much deeper.