Hi, ‘Social change’ is a phrase I have as hard of a time defining as the phrase work.  Almost everything I’ve done for the last 10 years, paid or unpaid, for fun or for profit, could be described as social change work.   But that doesn’t mean anything I’ve worked on actually created social change.  In the last decade, the social change work I’ve done that sounded most powerful on paper — queer organizing, media rapid response, —was the work that made me feel thatt felt the most aimless in the day to day. Sometimes I even felt like my job was actually just to be my identity — to be moderately technology competent, young, or trans and just be… around. Especially if me being around could actually prevent other types of change, more disruptive or awkward types of change within the organization.   I know many many POC friends who have had this experience with work far more than I have.  So when social change was my work, my paid work, what I did all day, most of the time I felt miserable, hopeless.   I felt stuck on endless Zoom calls, spending hours a day scrolling, unable to navigate the organizational power structure well enough to change anything.   And that was at the heart of it, why I felt miserable: I didn’t think we were changing anything.  --  I remember applying to jobs immediately after a social change fellowship in DC, scrolling through the Internet thinking “wow, so many of these people do real work, they do something. I can’t wait until I find real work like that.” I encountered the book again five years later, scrolling through the Internet at my nonprofit job, thinking “wow, so many of these people do real work, they do something. I can’t wait until I find real work like that.”   For years I thought that this was just one of the many ways in which social change defies capitalism— that meaningful social change, revolutions, were too strong to be confined to work in the nonprofit industrial complex I was a part of.   But then, even when I switched jobs, I kept feeling that same feeling of aimlessness — as a dog walker, while working at a gas station, as a writing tutor, as a freelance journalist. It was harder to feel the aimlessness, because there was a fine layer of stress and scarcity covering it, but it was still there.  Still, I assumed somewhere out there, real grassroots organizers were making daily meaningful choices towards social change, taking purposeful principled action. I just hadn’t found them yet.  As I started doing more volunteer or political projects, working with co-ops, socialist and communist groups, even leftist Youtube influencers that would sooner spit on a grant than accept one, I started to realize that my feelings of aimlessness, the pointlessness of work, wasn’t confined to the world of nonprofits.   It was just that in other spaces, aimlessness looked like chaos.  --  Technology changes the way that we change the future: in the last decade, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, NoDAPL, prison abolition, trans justice, countless other social change movements -- they were fueled by new technology + the new ways people use it.   They’re powerful movements built on everyone doing what they can, exponentially, to change the future.   But exponential movements built on everyone doing everything they can -- even with specific tools, tactics, and strategies to guide them…include a lot of uncertainty.   There’s no one rulebook: no one in this world has ever successfully organized to stop mass extinction for sure. It might not be possible.   Maybe this is why, in 2020, prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba says that organizers have to try everything.   So part of working to change the future is figuring out what works: driving past uncertainty, feelings of fear, and outright failure to figure out what makes systemic change. Over and over again, on a daily basis.   --  So technically, She Ra is fantasy, not science fiction (...and… I know, you know, we both know -- a children’s cartoon).   But I have tweeted about it 1700 times since I watched the reboot, and I can’t stop thinking about Season 5, when every character is basically doing DBT worksheets (metaphorically).   One scene in particular stands out.  A reformed character, new to the ‘good guy’ team hears a plan + strategy that’s… kind of a mess.  And she’s like ““That’s it? That’s the plan? We’re not going to talk about… literally any of the logistics here”   And everyone on Team She Ra smiles brightly and is like “Yeah, that’s the plan! Let’s do it!”   When I think about aimlessness, about the people doing social change work “trying everything” I keep coming back to that, + my own discontent with so many places where I have tried to do “social change work”. There was always something wrong, something ‘problematic’, something not working, whatever. But ultimately… that aimlessness was happening everywhere I went. It happens anywhere people are trying to change the future.   So… yeah man, that’s the plan. Try everything.      What are you trying right now? How do you deal with aimlessness?  stay strong, h