I am a disappointing social activist

Thoughts on where I'm falling short, why that's ok, and what to do instead. 

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Transcript

 I am not active enough or left enough for a lot of people. People who I really admire. I'm not vocal enough or hard line enough. I work with brands who might not completely align with all of my values. Sometimes I don't post about Gaza or ice, or PIP performs every day. I have turned the breaking news notifications off on my phone and I haven't shared enough GoFundMe.

I can't watch videos or look at photos of dead dying, starving, grieving humans because they're my hyper empathy, which I have generously passed down to my son, means I literally can't function for the rest of the day. But who am I? I can hear the pushback from people I love and respect to opt out of their suffering.

How privileged must I be to be able to ignore it? How can I ignore it? For two reasons. My business keeps us afflict. I'm the main breadwinner on our household and for quite a while I was the only one. So many of the people I know in the online space have a partner with a steady income or savings they can fall back on when they make decisions about who to work with.

It's not true for all of us, and I really wish that this was talked about more the money my business makes, feeds and clothes and educates and houses my family. And I've weathered Silicon Valley funding crises, AI recessions, tariffs, global wars and insecurity. Countless days when my pipeline has dried up or clients have pulled back due to uncertainty or having to pay 160% to import their goods before they sell them.

I don't have the luxury of being able to switch my stories to 24 7 condemnation of any government I have to find work or we don't eat either. The second reason, nuanced is an underused skill. This is something that I firmly believe in. Rarely, if ever, is something as cut and dried, black and white, or no-brainer as it appears online or in the papers.

Labor is not evil, nor is it our savior. Governments are cowardly, but they're also responsible for navigating global circumstances that are 1000 times more complicated and interconnected than they have ever been. Republicans have some views I don't agree with, and some of them need a pretty comprehensive education on a lot of stuff, and I'd quite like them to spend some time in deep conversation with the poor and vulnerable too while we're at it, but they're also not evil people.

Trump. Well, Trump is the exception to my nuance rule. The only nuance I'll allow with him is the same one I did with all the troubled young people I worked with when I was a youth worker. No behavior happens in a vacuum. He is the result of things done to him and the things he did because of the things done to him.

So, you know, maybe the Christian tenet of every human was made in the image of God is and is redeemable. Never really left me well. So basically, I'm a hypocrite. I wanted to talk to you about how I struggled to do all the things that I encourage you all to do, that I help my clients to do, to weave your values and social conscience into your messaging.

Because the fiscal reality within our current capitalist system waves heavy on me every day because there are simply too many things I care about that are being torn apart right now. I can't talk about all the things I'm against or worried about. Or want to shine a light on because there is not enough time in my day or in my brain to do it.

But that doesn't mean I've given up because I don't have to pick between being all in 24 7 and doing nothing at all, and neither do you. It's tempting to see the discourse online and think that you only have a say or can be considered a good little activist if you hit all the whack-a-mole all the time and that you can't post about the offer that you need to sell.

That will really help someone's life or business or family because how can you be talking about money at a time like this? I heard Ray dod a fabulous money coach, say earlier this year. Every time you sold something, there was a war going on. Honestly, it's stopped me in my tracks because it's true. We pick and choose what is considered to be serious enough to make selling insensitive, but there's always pain and suffering and trauma, and we should always consider it in our words and our actions.

But, and I know this will piss someone, some people off your mortgage company still wants payment when there's a war in Sudan. And you do not owe some random well-meaning person on the internet, your potential revenue from that week's sales as tribute.

So how do you balance your social conscience with the realities of being a human with responsibilities? There is no one right answer. Sorry, but I do have some thoughts and I also have a bunch of things to help you. Whichever route you decide to take that I will pop in the show notes and mention at the end.

Change is made on the ground, not in the algorithm. Change is made through the conversations you have in the school playground, the connections you make in the doctor's waiting room and the communication lines you open with people who disagree with you. And yes, this can happen online as well as in real life.

I'm not a fan of algorithms, but I'm also not willing to throw out the biggest communication channel the world has ever seen. If you feel helpless and guilty and that visceral need to just do something, then start here. Build your community. You can do this purely by talking to those around you, finding out about your neighbors and offering support, whether that's a listening ear as they moan about an unhelpful mother-in-law, or sharing school pickups.

You can do this by tapping into community groups or starting your own. Is there a food bank you can help out? Is your town council looking for new blood? If you're in the US and there are mutual aid opportunities or signal groups giving people heads up about ICE raids in the area, can you join those?

And if you are at the stage of life where there is no time after childcare are the care and responsibilities and work and everything else, then that's okay. You are not a terrible human being. Concentrate on having conversations with the people you meet every day about things that matter. Build links, because those links are how real community happens, the kind of community that comes together when the shit hits the fan, the kind of community that makes everyone's lives better.

I was listening to a podcast the other week, and I honestly can't remember which one it is, because I listened to far too many podcasts. Um, Anna Milton Friedman quite popped up. Now I am not. A Friedman fan, but he was a smart guy. At times of crisis, the solutions will be chosen from the ideas lying around at the time.

That really struck me because when crises happen, societies can't take years to then come up with the new ideas for how to fix or rebuild them. They need ideas that are almost ready to go, that have been incubated and are ready to be born. That can now start to help now. And so we need to start working on those ideas before it all starts falling apart.

This is a task that a lot of us are neglecting in favor of running on the reactive media treadmill, and it's a task that, in its undertaking builds joy and hope and community. So yes. Use your platform to speak up for the things that matter to you, to showcase and shine a light on issues that you think deserve more attention.

Send me a dm, come asked to be on the podcast, protest and campaign, and fundraise and volunteer. All of this is vital, especially as the collateral damage of our economic and social policies. Pile up even further and join groups where you can talk about ideas. Whether they're online or in real life, where you can share stories and read books and explore different ways of building communities and societies, learn about politics and civics and advertising and propaganda, debate and dream so that these ideas are ready when we need them.

It all matters. So find the things that work for you and continue building your business because I know how vital that is. Rather than feeling guilty because you can't perform the social media activism, the ideological, purist demand of you.

Now, I've been talking about this kind of thing for a while, so I've got some great resources to help you, whichever road you go down. Firstly, there are now over 50 episodes of this podcast out in the world, and all of them, um, with a few solo episodes from me dotted in, are inspiring chats with business owners about their own personal soapbox and how they talk about them in their business and their life.

So it's worth a dive into the back catalog if you haven't been keeping up. I've also got a blog, blog post, um, that tends to do the rounds around holiday season on how to have better conversations, especially with people who disagree with you. Um, so when you are heading to Thanksgiving or Christmas or any of those awkward family conversations, that might be a help.

If you're looking for a simple framework for talking about this kind of stuff in your business without sounding like you've turned into a charity. Um, then I have a post on how to talk about politics without pissing people off. Um, and then speaking of back catalogs, particularly relevant to this topic of how we build movements and communicate in the social media age is the podcast conversation that I had with Ivanti Daniels.

Um, you should also check out his book, power Beats and Rhymes, um, which is about hip hop models and how they, um, build change and momentum and movement. It's absolutely fascinating. And also the playlist to Epic. Um. And if this idea of thinking about ideas has inspired you, then I really would urge you to check out the Portal Collective.

The Portal is a platform for course creation, community building, and conversation far away from the oligarchy and algorithms. Um, it's about building collective ecosystems over individual empires. Um, movements and new ideas and conversations are already being born over there. Um. And you should go check them out and join some more of them.

Uh, this has been a little bit of an impromptu podcast episode. It's a lot shorter than some of my usual ones. Um, I hope that you all indulge me and I hope that you found it helpful. Um, and I hope that in throwing my hypocrisy and shortcomings, um, on the altar of, um, Spotify or Apple Podcasts, uh, it will help you feel.

A little bit better about the things that we have to do to survive in this world, um, and the options that we have to make the world around us better. Thanks for listening.