I have historically placed a lot of my self-worth in being smart. When I don't understand something I feel stupid, and that causes distress because it implies that I'm unworthy. I've worked on that a lot over the last few years cause I used to be mean to people when I felt stupid, and I didn't like that. So now that I can handle feeling stupid without freaking out about it, I've discovered I can get much more curious about myself and therefore understand myself better.
Politics has always been confusing for me, and also a thing I care very much about and want to stay aware of. I can remember in high school, people talking about like, thinking locally, and I knew both of those words, but I didn't understand what "thinking locally" actually meant in practice. Like, I'm a teenager, my whole life is just everything immediately around me, and ordering clothing from Amazon has nothing to do with local or not local, that's just clothing. Technically, I wasn't buying clothing from Amazon until I was an adult, cause that wasn't really a thing, but the general concept is the same.
I feel like a lot of what makes life hard is just how big the world is now - prior to the internet and the 24 hour news cycle and like, luxury worldwide leisure travel, each of our individual worlds was much smaller. We weren't as aware of things happening far, far away from us. Today, there's too much information being shoved at us from every corner of the planet and we can't make sense of it - there's not enough time to process everything we're being fed. We can't figure out what to prioritize or what we have the right to interfere with in far away places. We look at a vast and highly varied world through our own cultural/moral lens, because we generally don't know how not to. We're trying to paint too diverse a group of organisms with too wide a brush. We can't process the scope of the entire world enough to capture the necessary nuance, we only have this big broad brush available to us. And it's also really cool that we get to know about other cultures, we get to understand more of the breadth of the world, it's beautiful it's magical that is true, and I still think that in general, humans would be happier and more at peace if we lived more in our smaller, real-life worlds. I haven't googled that so there might be research on it that I haven't looked into, I have no idea.
I can't think of a way to change the size of everyone's world en masse, and it feels very overwhelming and hopeless, until I ask myself what I can do to make my own world smaller. I can't change everyone's world, but I can make my world smaller and test my theory.
I'm overstimulated and overwhelmed by information coming at me from everywhere, so I need to take in less information. So I delete apps. I spend time being bored, when I'm willing to tolerate that.
I don't want to feel guilty for my participation in fast fashion and factory farming, but I also want to be clothed and fed, and I don't have the kind of money that affords bougie ethically made fair trade organic sacrificial virgin sustainable clothing or meat. So I try to buy from thrift stores and to repurpose and upcycle clothing I already have, and I try and go to clothing swaps in my community. I can't remember the last piece of clothing I bought myself new - and I do not miss it even a tiny bit. I learn different crafts in order to reuse things, and that becomes not just a cool new skill but also a hobby. My wardrobe gets smaller and there's less turnover, I'm less overwhelmed by the constant accumulation of things, and I'm less worried about clothing. If I do buy something new, I will be kind to myself, because I am imperfect and things are not black and white.
One of my people hired another of my people to help with a renovationy job thing. They said something about how they really wanted to keep our money within our ecosystem as much as possible, and something about that really stuck with me. Like, wait, if I hire people from my own local community for services, I can nurture my community - and it feels really good in my heart to do that. I guess I thought this kind of change would happen after the eventual collapse of Amazon etc - like, that in the absence of fast fashion we would like, re-learn how to weave cotton into cloth and sew it together, or something. Re-invent clothing. Rediscover fire and the wheel. I hadn't considered that I can simply start living as though fast fashion wasn't an option. Asking, "if I can't buy new ready-to-wear clothing from chain stores anymore, how will I clothe myself?" - and feeling so relieved to find that there's a pretty simple answer to that question.
I find that asking myself that question repeatedly is helpful in imagining what life could look like outside of capitalism. If factory farmed meat becomes unavailable, how will I eat meat? Will I eat meat? Will I eat more expensive meat from a local butcher, just less often? Will I start butchering my own meat? Who knows, but it feels very freeing to know that I can figure it out, and that I can work towards living that way now, instead of waiting for factory farming to stop happening before I stop participating in it. It feels like hope that it doesn't always have to be like this. And the more I source things in my life from my own community, the better I feel about my community. I feel myself contributing to something meaningful, and reaping rewards from that in the form of connection, solidarity, and safety.
Side note: you know how they say "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism"? I think maybe I think that "there's no ethical consumption without contribution and balance". Like, if you only consume, if you're not contributing, then like, yeah, that does suck. Contribution is not a black and white concept, it doesn't have to take the form of like, "productivity" in the capitalistic ways we think about it. Capitalism encourages us to consume, and to consume faster and faster and more and more and not to worry about the consequences of that, and unfortunately the consequences are like in the Lion King, when Scar takes over Pride Rock and they just eat everything until the land is barren and they are starving and it's all dark and somber and moody. That's the part of the Lion King where we are. We remember the lesson Mufasa taught us earlier in the film, that everything is a circle of stuff eating each other, and everyone has to take a turn getting eaten in order for the cycle to work (I'm paraphrasing it but like, antelope eats grass, lion eats antelope, lion dies and goes back into the land and feeds the grass that the antelope eats.)
Oh boy oh boy this ended up being a much longer journey inside my brain than I intended but like, I've been typing for a long time so I think I'm gonna publish it but tbh if you are my friend and you're like "hey Emma this is not ready for public consumption yet", please feel free to share that with me 😅
On that note, I've attached a lil bonus zine here today - this is a zine I created for Stardust Community Cooperative and I'm sharing it in the theme of community. This one's a little wonky in that if you print it out, you might need to trim down the sides some because it's not quite the full 8.5x11 size!
Originally posted June 7 2026
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