This post builds on a previous post: Praxis Paralysis 📬
So, I’ve been kind of absent from the internet for a little while. I mean, not fully gone. I still scroll and repost. I lose the fight against doomscrolling almost daily. But I’ve been trying to pull back a bit and focus more on theory. Because that’s what people always say, right? Do the reading first. Learn the systems. Understand what you’re actually critiquing. So I read more. I watched more. I learned more. And honestly the more I learned, the harder I found it to actually do anything.
At some point I realised that the issue wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that I cared so much and saw so many problems, that actually putting anything into practice felt like it was never enough, taking any action in the correct direction started to feel impossible.
And that’s kind of what I want to talk about today.
Praxis.
Praxis, to put it simply, is about walking the talk. It’s not just having an ideology, it’s actually implementing it in the world. It’s putting your actions to work woards the goals that you espouse.
For a long time now, I’ve been stuck in what I like to call praxis paralysis. Where you understand the problems. You understand the theories behind action to effect change. You understand why things are broken. But every course of action seems like too little, or your brain immediately goes, “Yeah, but that’s flawed.”
“Yeah, but that won’t be enough.”
“Yeah, but look at all the ways this has gone wrong before.”
I think a big part of this is that we’re living in constant crisis. There’s always a squeeze on our conscience. Climate. Genocide. Rising Fascism. Cost of living. Social fragmentation. These are real, material problems. It’s not imagined overwhelm, we live in unprecedented times. Never before can you have first hand experience of a war being waged on a peoples on the other side of the earth. Never before has the aggressor not controlled the narrative.
But that constant pressure can do something really sneaky to you. It can make any action feel either pointless or morally insufficient. But that little voice in your head is your comfort zone being pushed against. It’s making the perfect become the enemy of the good.
I don’t even remember who said it originally, but it really stuck with me how people are always worried about going back in time. The idea being that if you went back and kicked over a rock, or said the wrong thing, or made some tiny change, you’d completely derail the future. Like one small action could create these massive ripples. And we’re terrified of that power. But what’s strange is that we almost never think about that same power existing right now, in the present. If a tiny action could radically alter the future then, why do we feel like tiny actions now don’t matter?
The truth is, we’re not going to solve every problem facing humanity all at once. There is no silver bullet. There is no single perfect system that fixes everything. And honestly, the idea that there should be one is kind of short sighted and niave. So instead of asking, “How can I fix everything?” I’ve been trying to reframe in my head, “What are the small things I can actually do, consistently, without burning out?”
For me, that’s looked pretty unglamorous. I’ve been trying to do a kind of small digital detox. Not that I’m really winning at putting down the phone more, not pretending things aren’t bad; but time-boxing my doomscrolling. More importantly, deliberately pushing back against my algorithms. Actually searching out the kinds of posts and accounts that are focused on empathy, on community, on tangible actions, trying to limit the purely critique and outrage.
In the real world, I joined a local book club. Which doesn’t sound revolutionary, I know. But this one has a no-work policy putting an emphasis on “You’re more than your job.”
Now I get to be in a room with people I wouldn’t normally meet, talking about a shared interest, with a genuinely diverse range of opinions. That space has been super reassuring and grounding. It’s community, before it becomes capital-C Community.
I think this is the part we sometimes miss. Praxis doesn’t always look like protests or grand gestures or capital A activism. Sometimes it looks like showing up to a room, or having a conversation, or slowly rebuilding the muscle of simply being around other people that don’t think like you. Online spaces can help to find our people, feel connected in a way that is often hard to connect in real life. They can be that bridge. But it’s not a replacement for real-world connection. Sometimes it’s best to move out of our comfort zone and do the hard thing of meeting people where they’re at and starting small. And yeah, sometimes that means using the tools of the current system to find the people who want to build something better.
So if you’re feeling stuck, if you feel overwhelmed, frozen, or like everything you do is somehow “not enough”; you’re not broken. You’re responding to a genuinely overwhelming world. Start small. Start imperfect. Start somewhere you can actually sustain. Because momentum doesn’t come from having the perfect plan. It comes from movement. Those tiny ripples, the ones we’re scared of in the past, they’re still happening. We just have more power over them than we think.