I have always been amazed by people’s ability to act and emphathise with global issues like climate change or war. When I see people like Greta Thunberg or even more intellectual activists like Noam Chomsky, I always wonder how people can apply their energy and effort to the external global world when there is so much to do ‘internally’, ie. so much to do to fix my self.

Every time I try to focus my energy, I find that I am just looking at issues with me and how to improve myself and my emotions. Whether that is to seek a better understanding about myself or to improve my connection with others or improve how I feel emotions etc. All of my efforts are diverted to me because I feel there is so much that needs fixing. This is especially magnified by the fact that I truly believe the external is internal. That if I want to change the world, I need to change myself. A peaceful world cannot be composed of hateful people, it can only be created by a peaceful mind.

Yet, I feel a longing to act in the global world, in the external world where other people are working for a change. I find myself longing to have the strength to look outside myself and work on issues that affect others.

The difficutly is that I was waiting for some great emotional motivation to drive me to look outwards. In the same way that I am emotionally motivated to make myself happy, I thought I would have the same sort of emotional drive to take action on climate change or Palestine/Israel war or any other global issues. But this emotional drive has not yet come for me. While I can think intellectually about these issues, I find that I have no desire to act in the global realm.

This is not enough. If it was, I wouldnt feel shame about failing to act and such a strong desire to act.

Through the help of ChatGPT conversations, I have learnt a new perspective on this issue:

1. the reason why I feel so inclined to deal with my issues is because I can feel my pain or shame or suffering. In effect, the global issues are a reflection of the same pain. The pain that I feel is a universal pain felt by others as well, manifesting in different ways. My pain of loneliness or doubt or fear is the same pain that others feel globally which manifests itself in global issues like war and genocide, excess use of natural resources, etc etc. My internal pain is a microcosm of the macro global universal pain. This recognition helps me relate to others’ issue. Their pain is the same as my pain and the solutions that work for me are necessary for everyone as well. This kind of energy helps me do work outside of myself. It is not enough for me to solve my issues, I need others to have the solution as well because if they feel the pain I do then they need these solutions and changes. There are a lot of ways I have found to help deal with my pain and I want to share them with the world because I am recognising that the global issues are just a global manifestation of the same pain as me.
2. my desire to think about global issues, without following it up with protest and activism, is not a disadvantage but my strenght. It is likely that there are a lot of people in the world (the ‘feelers’) who can feel the global issues and act upon them with action. But there are also a second class of people, who are motivated by the actions of the feelers to then undertake intellectual work necessary to make changes in the structure (the ‘organisers’). The protest work done by feelers is necessary to motivate organisers to take a look at difficult issues in a deeper way and create new systems that resolve these issues. Protesting war is one thing but it requires intellectual work as well to consider why war occurs again and again and whether culture can be changed to stop that war. Can humans really accept an abundance of resources? How does the shadow and the ego manifest in global events? Questions like these, and answers to these questions, are just as important as protest work.

So, right now, my main focus is on integrating global issues into my own issues – seeing the similarities in the problems in the micro and the macro and testing the solutions in each. I want to use this energy to come up with frameworks that can help look at global political structures differently.