the struggle between change-making and capitalism

All my life I've been interested in change-making. Other than loving my family, there's nothing in the world more important to me. But that's the issue--change-making costs money, and time that means I can't make money. My partner and I are constantly making choices to deny our kids some of the things their friends consider essential (travel, city-living, new devices, new shoes, a better car, and so many extra-curricular programs), in exchange for working on projects that we hope will better the world or just our own future. And yet, here we are with young adults on the verge of fleeing the nest, walking straight into the same capitalist trap they were raised in. And we're thinking of how to support their new city life while the world falls down around them. 

Cognitive dissidence is the least of it. I'm sitting here in the bizarrely unsurprising October heat and drought, the other side of our yard obscured by smoke, and really just wondering what comes next. 

In my work-life, I'm producing installations intended to bring people into connection with the ecosystems they live in, and with each other. I do commissioned portraits on the side, just to add a little tiny cash-flow to our family, but I've chosen a career that costs more money than it makes. I'm proud of this choice, but the balance is that my partner makes the family-sustaining income by creating software that, among other things, is used by companies logging old-growth forests around us, destroying the ecosystems I'm trying to save. 

At home, we're trying to grow our own food, which has turned out to be a very good thing, now that inflation is hitting us so hard. But we're buying plastic bags to store chickens in, and the climate is so unpredictable we're constantly re-planting, or nurturing struggling plants for months that ultimately fail to produce crops. No learning-curve can keep up with the speed of climate change. So we keep ending up in the stores with everyone else, trying to meet our nutritional needs as cheaply as possible, while wasting endless dollars buying chips and treats made by corporate behemoths that we feel will keep our kids happy. So we can send them smiling into the future.

In our community we're traipsing around making improvements while our friends drop like flies around us. We're afraid to ask for help when we need it because we know everyone else is already beat up by their own struggles, so we isolate and feed our lonely pain with all the subscriptions and addictions we can. And we contemplate the struggle: How can we make enough money to feed our kids without destroying their future? How can we raise them happy in a world where nothing matters more than the capitalist quest, but safeguard them against a capitalist apocalypse? How can we output joy when there's only fear coming in?

I wish this was a post where I have all the answers. Sometimes I try to write posts like that, and at those times it feels like there's a possibility we can plan and manage our way out of this mess. Right now I just sink into a futile wish that we'd all just stay home and forget the dreams we were sold as children, as impossible as that seems. I wish we'd stop selling the same dreams to our own kids at the cost of even the meagrest subsistence in their future. I wish we would all just grow food in peace, love each other and what remains of the world outside our doors.