I recently saw a post where someone commented that the incredibly charged issue they were arguing about followed them home, and they couldn’t escape it. And it reminded me why this pattern I see of people (especially young people) where the majority of their downtime is spent on tumblr, and their tumblr is mostly some form of activism, from thought out long posts to clicking reblog on a petition, is so worrying to me.
Various forms of oppression are background noise to a lot of people’s lives. Fixing that is not likely to occur within your generation. It might get better, but the chances of it completely vanishing are minuscule. Some activists go home after dealing with bigotry all day at work, and talk about oppression on tumblr. And if they sit down and watch a TV show, they think about how it’s bigoted. If they have a musician they love, they feel obliged to think about how they’re problematic.
This is awful for you, your metal health, and the people around you. You burn out, you start blowing up at people for tiny things because you’re so tired of it. It makes you miserable and unpersuasive, it’s emotionally exhausting.
And this isn’t just me saying this. When my grandpa was training to do work with the labour party, he was told that you had to have a hobby to be good at it. Because otherwise it destroys you. You have to have something in your life that is totally disconnected from the horrific things you are seeing everyday.
If you can’t find TV shows to watch because you can’t switch off the social justice analysis part of your brain, do something else your activism can’t creep into. Take up knitting. Build shit out of cans. Play the recorder. Lock yourself in your bedroom and play minecraft. Whatever you do, please, please don’t let activism and fighting oppression take over every aspect of your life.
Have a separate activism tumblr and a cat pics/memes tumblr. Or blacklist activist things on your tumblr. Set aside some time where you don’t think about how shit the world is.
You have a right and an obligation to look after yourself. Please don’t drive yourself into the ground for the sake of social justice. You can’t fight all the time, and you’ll be no good at it if you can’t take a break.
This pretty much perfectly describes my tumblr SJ obsession when I was younger and how much it fucked me up.
There is a trap that people fall into, of thinking that they have to be Doing Good at any given moment, and it’s intensely harmful. You burn yourself out. You actually become a worse advocate for your cause, because you mess up your coping skills.
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Why activism is a terrible hobby
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