why I do what I so on the margins

"dissonance between my lifelong propensity toward optimism and my growing sense of despair". 

This is how I've spent many of my years, my brain in a headlock over how good the planet could be & how shit it actually was heading. 

Vaclav Havel’s version of hope: “It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Then today I read this & realised that the guilt I feel over not continuing to be extremely green & feeling like I have sold out to the Capitalists, is not justified. I can continue to maintain a green lifeste, chose better options, hang back from shiny new capitalism, in the comfort that what I do .takes sense to me ... and that's all that .matters. I'll keep voting Greens, even though they won't rule in my life's time, simply because it makes sense to me.  

"I don’t know if any of these efforts are going anywhere, and I most certainly won’t live to see the full maturation of the seeds I’m sowing. But I’m planting them anyway, because each action brings me joy and feels like the right thing to do".

Hear hear!

Sections I'm italics are from 

 New York Times.