Everyone’s an Activist, Everywhere, All at Once
Depart from nihilism and organize where you stand.
What if I told you that you’re already an activist? Yes, you, with your full-time job at a soulless company (your words, not mine). Okay, maybe you don’t work at a soulless company. Instead, you’re pretty happy with your job. You enjoy it, and you’re good at it, and it pays well. That last one’s the important part anyway.
You know what activists are, and you wouldn’t really call yourself that. You see people on the news being praised for how much they’ve sacrificed to draw attention to a cause. You’ve read smart people dissect the ills of society in articles, books, poetry. You’re not smart enough or self-sacrificial enough to do those things, so you don’t call yourself an activist.
And yet you know—the world is run by capitalism and we need to get to where it’s not. At this point in 2025, there’s already enough information explaining the problems. There’s a whole church choir singing the problems in Gregorian chant (very ominous, very boring). The meta-problem is we’re not addressing the issues as much as we are documenting them. Why? We’re tired and anxious and possibly depressed, and because we’ve been trained to think that only certain kinds of actions will be meaningful.
We fail to realize that we are already participating in changemaking every day. All of our actions reconstitute the world. Every day, we recreate countless complex social and structural systems, from something as large as the economy to as small as our immediate families.
Here, I echo Adrienne Rich’s famous poem “Natural Resources” published in 1977.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
Rich’s bittersweet kicker of a poem reminds us of two things: “so much has been destroyed” on our planet, our only home, and yet those of us who are still here have power—although it is not extraordinary—to recreate the world.
If activism is the work of renewing the world, you’re already an activist because you influence the world with every single choice. Whether you are conscious of that choice or not is irrelevant. You are already making a difference.
You don’t have to make incredibly difficult choices right away. If you want to organize, start at the low-hanging fruit. This is different for everyone, but two of the easiest actions with no barriers to participation are talking to people and sharing your resources.
Talk to your neighbors about how you see the world. Talk to them about your shared problems. Almost always, you’ll touch upon a systemic issue that needs to be addressed. Maybe, just maybe, you go and address it together. (pretty please?)
If your social battery is fried, try sharing resources with your neighbors. Recently, I’ve been surprised by how easy it is to create a mutual aid fund. Here’s how you do this very radical, very cool practice: Gather a group of people, give a certain amount of money to the fund, and agree together when individuals can take from the fund to support their needs. Then, keep refilling the fund based on how much you can give.
Taking a recent example from the Philippines where billions of taxpayer money have been stolen by one family, Filipinos are half-joking to stop paying taxes. Well. Um. What if we weren’t joking? What if we used what would be our taxes, pooled them together, and did something useful with them? Made actual flood control efforts, for one, or built homes for urban poor communities. Maybe we can use those billions of pesos to grow free and healthy food in the city. Around the world, the collective is waking up to their free will. What are we going to do with the dizzying realization?
The dizziness of freedom, as Kierkegaard said, is only dizzying if you keep looking down. If you keep moving forward, however, you’ll adjust and find balance. Make a choice, then stand ten toes down on it.
This is the basics of organizing where you stand. You don’t have to travel to a far-off community to do volunteer work. You don’t have to read dozens of books on decolonization. To be an activist, you just have to understand that each choice you make contributes to or hinders the project of co-creating a better world. “Not a batter world, not a butter world, a better world,” writes poet Bob Hicok in his hilarious poem “Having had a little bit of enough.”
We have to try something
don't we, to make this a better world?
Not a batter world, not a bitter world,
not a butter world, although I can see merits
in all of those. A better world. And no,
not a world where you can bet
whenever you want on whatever you want,
though we seem to be going down that road.
Vegas will let you slap dough down
on anything, even the when and how
of the apocalypse, though not the why.
There's no mystery to the why: because.
And what would a better world look like?
That's easy: different.