I want to close here a bit on the note that I was just talking about at the end of the ice video that I just did in front of y'all. Um, I keep coming across this quote and I think it's uh actually quite moving. I've never really been that big on the Lord of the Rings, but there's this quote from it that always makes me smile and that feels extremely important to our time.
Um, I wish it need not happened in my time. Sorry. I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Froto.
So do I, said Gandalf. And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. Okay? I want us in 2026 to wage a war against helplessness.
We've talked about the necessity for hope, but hope is not something that you just kind of lodge away in your brain like you file it into a cabinet. Hope is not something that you can just say. It's not something that you really just feel.
Hope is an action. And hope is an action that is grounded in doing actions that remind you of what you are capable of, what you can control, how you can contribute. This is the kind of thing that I think it's very easy to forget about.
This is the kind of thing that I think it's very easy to brush over as sappy. But I want to ask you guys something. Those of you in the chat um with me during the the recording and also to those of you in the YouTube audience in the comment section, I want to ask you to leave a comment describing what you think your role is.
What do you think your role is? And you know, feel free to go into detail about what experiences you've had to confirm this, about what kind of theory goes into it. Specificity is encouraged because specificity lets me know that you have a very strong handle on how you can actually use tangible actions to fulfill that role.
But let me uh let me explain what I mean. Sorry. But let me explain what I mean by what your role is.
I think everybody really gets a lot out of life by thinking of themselves as having a purpose. Thinking of themselves as having a purpose. thinking of themselves as a human being put into a situation, developing a consciousness, and then with that consciousness putting themselves toward a specific passion, a specific skill set oriented towards a goal of bettering the world.
So, we grow up and we we're taught, you know, in school like to to figure out what we want to do when we grow up. And in our heads, because of all these voices that we're hearing that are trying to keep us safe and successful, we're thinking of that as what kind of job am I going to get because what kind of money is it going to make, right? It's such an open-ended question that asks you to bring your values forward beforehand.
And those values are obviously going to be shaped by a lot of negative things in your environment. With this question, I want to ask you to engage with the values specifically. A lot of people go online and they talk about it and they talk about it.
They quote philosophers and they quote theorists and they quote revolutionaries. They argue with people about their opinions. They talk about how bad certain people are, how dumb certain people are.
And it's just unclear what they really feel like they're doing. It's very understandable to do this because we all do it to a degree. It's part of how social media works.
It's part of why social media has such a grip on us. And at points, it can even be productive, you know, to educate people discursively, etc. But it doesn't teach us about what people are actually thinking they can do, much less what they are actually doing.
And that's something that I try to keep in mind when I do these videos on my channel. Uh, a lot of my videos can feel pretty negative. Um, and I want to start the year kind of on a note where I'm intentionally grounding myself.
um grinding myself in intention so to speak, grinding myself in purpose so to speak, and putting forth an energy from which when I do this work, whatever you can describe this work as, people can pick up something, something that they can materialize, they can use in their own lives to help others, right? So, it's going to be times where on my channel I get negative. It's going to be times where I excoriate people.
It's going to be times where I get kind of mean or, you know, conversely, it's going to be times where I kind of make mistakes and I get kind of weak sauce because I'm a human being just trying to do a pretty weird job. And I think that for some, you know, to some degree that is for a reason, right? Uh I have to do that sometimes.
Criticism is a way through which people learn. I've learned a lot through watching other people criticize other people. It's not always the healthiest way to learn something, but it is functional.
Discursively, it allows people to take up space, right? It allows people who are marginalized. It allows conversations that are marginalized to come to the forefront.
It allows perspectives to come to the forefront that can actually be really altering, you know, really radicalizing. It allows for people to learn more about the world around them so that they can organize to shape it. And so that is kind of what I figured my role has been.
I'm not really an organizer. Um I could do a lot more and I will be, you know, learning to do a little bit more, you know, every day um to help people around me to be more in community with people around me. But at the end of the day, my job is I go on the internet, I do some research, and then I talk in front of an audience and I basically do an opinion journalism thing.
I share my opinion. I share perspectives that I think will help people shift their perspective that I think people will find educating uh find educative, find informative, and sometimes find inspiring. And sometimes that means that I'm going to, you know, yell at a Twitch streamer for having a weak sauce take about Charlie Kirk.
Sometimes that means I'm going to engage with messy Tik Tok discourse about Asian communities. Sometimes that means that I'm going to sit up here and talk to y'all about art because art is one of the central ways through which we can shape the world. It is a material force, right?
So that's what I have tried to consider and and I try to remind myself of when I do this job. You know, I'm not particularly great at being super sassy. Every time I try to do that, it doesn't come off the best.
I'm not the funniest guy in the world, okay? I am not an incredible athlete. As a matter of fact, I got to do a lot of body work this year because I got some hyper mobility and you know, I'm not really that that coordinated.
There's a lot of things that I'm not very good at. But what one thing it seems that I'm good at because I really like to do it is yapping. I've always been a yapper.
I've always enjoyed talking. I've always enjoyed discussion. And I've always enjoyed, you know, the challenge of trying to invigorate people through my words.
um whether it's, you know, to help them realize things that are happening in their own lives or to just be a a safe space for them or just to to educate them. But the the double-edged sword of that is that even though I'm pretty good at yapping, I can also over yap a lot. And I can get a lot better at listening in order to do my job better.
I can get a lot better at the other parts of the job. And I try to think about that and maintain a healthy self-critique because that way it helps me ground myself in my intention more and my purpose more. What is it that I do here?
So to close this little segment and to close this stream, I'm going to just read to you some people's in the chats um some people in the chat and uh what they think in terms of their own role. Bunny MMM says, "Still unsure of my role. I want to help but I'm scared.
But I think providing stuff such as pads, tampons, and other things are a good start for me. I think that's a great start. That's a great start, Bunny.
Um, it's also really important that you acknowledge that you want to help, but you're scared and that you're unsure of your role because the truth is we're always a little bit unsure of our roles, right? And sometimes we're very unsure of our roles. That's something that I struggle with sometimes on this channel is that I'm like, what what is it that I do again?
Am I really doing what I'm supposed to be doing? Am I really at my best? I'm 29 years old.
I expect that there's a lot of life for me to live. Um, there's a lot for me to learn and I'm going to change a lot in terms of how I do this content. God knows I've changed a lot in the past eight years or so since I started putting out public journalism.
That said, a lot of folks I think go online and they they they engage with the news. They engage with discourse and they know that the world has a lot of bad stuff going on. They know about about crises in the world.
They know about, you know, racism and capitalism and imperialism, but they don't necessarily know what they're going to do about it. And in fact, more dangerously, they believe that they probably have nothing that they can do about it. Um, sometimes they cover this up with an assessment of history.
Well, nothing ever happens or there's nothing that we can do anyway or everything's predetermined, etc. But more often than not, people kind of know that, you know, there are people doing things for good because they follow those people. They admire those people.
So they wonder, well, what is it that I can do? Is there something that I can do? And the question, you know, I would respond to that is um the question I would respond to that with I would respond with to that is are you sure that you're not already in the process of doing it?
Through this engagement, you're learning. And through that learning, you're getting a larger perspective and more education about what it is you can do. Of course, it's now time to take the step forward and and and ground yourself in action more.
But don't give yourself too little credit. You're here for a reason. You're hearing these words for a reason.
It's because you put yourself in this position. You're you're learning about the world and all the dark sides of the world because there's a part of you that is empathetic and that cares and that's that's uh your humanity. That's your human energy.
Don't lose that, right? Don't lose that because you think it's some type of, you know, thing holding you back. Um, you name unnamed bird says, "The main thing I've been doing is just educating others on the evils of capitalism.
" Um, ZG ZH Cultivator has said a few things, but in particular, I want to read these. Since I worked at a charity for at least six years and worked at another charity for months as well. I also donate to various charities including the one I did before I went to university.
Though sadly I don't do much outside of that unfortunately. I think working at charity and contributing to charities is good. You know uh I think that that does represent that you have a role and and you're probably at the point given your you know self-critical reflection where you're ready to expand into doing even more with that.
That's a slow process. Give yourself credit though for being at this point. Somebody else chat is full of helpers.
That warns me. Yeah, Diara Wisteria said earlier, "My role is to support people who can frontline by doing communications management, making slashsharing food, and teaching skills. I am disabled in ways that stop me from participating physically.
That's still a lot of participation and there's a lot of physical aspects to that. It's really important to understand what kind of abilities we have uh what's available to us to do and still see within that a spectrum of possibilities based off of the things that we are interested in that we care about that we're passionate about and then thus have you know engaged with and learned about and have gotten good at. Some people are going to be good at cooking and some people aren't right.
Um, Bug Angels, I recently thought about educating fellow Poles and translating resources from English to Polish, as well as focusing more about engaging politically with my art. That's a really good reflection. Translation services are really important.
Some people might be really good at translating or might be really interested in getting good at translating. Those are really important skills. You know, AI likes to convince us that these human skills are not important so that we can focus more on direct profit extraction jobs.
Translation is always going to be really important at every level and especially in the level of organized movements. Imagine, you know, or organizing a mutual aid and you have people that are trying to participate but they don't speak English, right? I'm seeing a lot of really really heartening answers in the chat.
Liz K96 makes a a good observation with which I'll leave. Um I I think I think people underestimate they say how much of organizing requires computer work, word docs, spreadsheets. It's a big need in many orgs.
So many ways to help. If you are somebody who can just sit in front of some spreadsheets and organize them for a couple hours, that's something you can do, right? Remember that this is where we should be focusing our energy, right?
On considering what we can do to contribute, right? And considering like how we can, you know, exist in environments, exist in collectives, exist in community. That's what keeps us alive.
It's what keeps us safe and it's what builds the better world that we're caring about. So, thank you all for inspiring me with your answers. I look forward to hearing more people's comments about what they've reflected on.
I'm sure all this news of the past couple of years, all these increasing intensifying crises from genocide to climate crisis are things that are leading more and more people to reflect on what they're doing with their lives. And I really hope that people can remember that whenever it feels like there's no hope, whenever it feels like everybody's just so dumb, whenever it's easy to hyperfocus on what people do improperly or what people are wrong about. I think you can look at this chat and this comment section and remember to ground yourself in your intention.
My intention is to do what? My intention is to be human and to help other humans and to help other living beings.
