All of this, the climate change, fascism, llm bullshit, greed and all, is making good people feel hopeless and exhausted. You see social media and blog posts by people who feel all hope is lost and there's nothing to do. The despair understandable, yet something to get over with.

The despair is by design. All the doom and gloom and mixed messages make you exhausted and confused. The more exhausted and confused you are, the more likely you are to comply. This is an age old way to control people, to make you malleable and easy to manipulate.

You will start feeling they have already won. So what's the point even? And there, you have given up before the real battle has even started. You are meant to quit fighting back, organising, protesting and voting for the opposition. You are also meant to give up caring.

Good thing here is, you can choose to not despair and to keep your hope and empathy. It's your choice. I'd also like to give you some simple ways to fight the apathy and make this world better for everyone, little by little.

Rest and recharge

Rest is important. You cannot keep fighting 24/7. Continuous stress is bad for your health. It doesn't mean you should completely give the fight up. It just means you need to take breaks and build your resilience.

You cannot fix things alone and immediately. You can be part of the solution.

Take all the moments you can to recharge and refocus. Find what makes you relax and feel good, something simple and easy to access preferably. Something that's just for you, no need to share it with the world. It could be reading something fun, watching movies and series you like, doodling, doing your hair or make-up, journaling or writing poetry, doing physical exercise, listening music or whatever to charge your batteries.

Feeling FOMO? Remember: You aren't missing out anything. You are living a life.

Build your empathy

Giving up caring is easy. That's why the powerful people attack your empathy. Inhumanasing certain groups of people, making it seem like your rights and livelihood are under attack by the others and

I have written before about how to keep caring in a world full of it, but basically it is all about exercising your empathy. Empathy, just like your muscles, needs to be exercised a bit.

Connect with other people, read and watch and listen fiction, learn about other cultures and other ways of living and being, make and experience art, challenge your preconceptions and question stereotypes.

Participate in something good

You cannot fix everything by yourself. But you can participate in fixing things. Participate in something that makes you feel you are doing something good.

Join a group, movement or political party which works for improving things, donate to a good cause, volunteer, help someone. Participate in community building and improving your immediate surroundings. Pick up the trash on your path and drop it in a trashcan.

Make one small, but a bit more sustainable choice today. Eat less meat, skip using that AI chatbot, or think if you actually need that new t-shirt.

Speak up when you see something bad happening. Stand with someone who is being bullied.

Practise meditation

Meditation is a great way to relax, destress, refocus and remind yourself that you aren't missing out. It can help you to change your relationship with your thoughts and feelings, build your empathy and find peace in this moment as it is.

In meditation you direct your focus on one thing, your breathing, how your body feels, a mantra (or affirmation), a mental or real image, sounds or some other object and just observe. When thoughts and feelings arise, observe them briefly before letting them go. Don't push them away. Just observe and let go.

You can also try adding simple labels to thoughts and feelings, such as "memory", "anticipation" or "frustration", before letting them go. See if observing an emotion without engaging with it makes it less powerful.

It's okay, if you get lost in thought. It happens. No need to be frustrated or judge the thoughts and feelings. Just take a note of the thought or the feeling, observe it briefly and redirect your focus back to your chosen object. Simple as that!

If you need some help and guidance in how to meditate and how to keep meditating regularly, I recommend Medito app. Medito has helped me to build a daily meditation habit.

And remember, you won't be a meditation guru after one session, or even several years of daily meditation. Give it time!

Create joy, enjoyment and contentment

One thing those miserable conrolling despots really really want is everyone else to be miserable too. They hate joy, they hate enjoyment. They hate to see you happy and laughing. The doom, gloom and despair are their way of being and they want you to be like that too. Your choice is to not give into it.

One way to not give into misery is to create joy. Care and actively participate. Make art, create community. Make things fun and cause laughter and enjoyment. Spread joy, drown the hatred and misery in it. Keep being curious and fascinated.

Remind yourself that life is a weird, fascinating and glorious thing. So random, so absolutely ridiculously funny. It is to be celebrated.

You are a very busy person. So am I, and so is the person next to you. Life gets in the way, work gets in the way, you just cannot draw every day. That's how I used to explain myself why I wasn't drawing daily or even weekly or monthly at one point. I had to wait for better time and for that elusive inspiration to strike. I needed better art supplies and less shaky hands. So I drew less and less.

A few years ago I made a decision to draw more. It was a bit of a tool driven decision. I had bought a tablet, stylus and a drawing app. I felt I had to use those, since they weren't exactly cheap and I'm not made of money. Still I kept giving myself excuses why I shouldn't draw every day. Slowly that started to change and I joined some Instagram daily drawing challenges here and there.

Because of my shaky hands I felt ashamed of creating art that didn't use technical advances to make lines smoother. Stabilisation and streamlining. It's still a struggle to me, but I'm slowly getting over it. About two years ago I bought my first hard cover sketchbook and started to fill it. That sketchbook didn't see any daily artwork. I doodled, and drew and painted in it now and then. When I had it almost filled I made another decision.

I would try and draw in a small sketchbook every day. Quick doodles, more detailed stuff, testing different techniques and styles and supplies. I figured I would fill one sketchbook with this little challenge and maybe then forget it.

But I have now been drawing (almost) daily basis since then. It has been over year and a half. I fill a small sketchbook after another with various subjects and various media. Sometimes I sketch, sometimes make a very quick little drawing, and sometimes I take a longer time to fill a spread in the latest little red sketchbook.

During this process I remembered making art is fun. My shaky lines don't matter as long as I'm not too serious about it all. Besides, nobody else has my shaky hands, so my art is always very indistinguishably mine.

Now the title of this post promises to tell you how to make time for art. Well, you might have caught already where this is going.

To make time for art you need to choose to make time for art. It doesn't mean you'll need to lock yourself in a room to paint for hours and hours until you hate everything and especially art. Or to write a full length novel in a week or even a month. It means taking a few minutes of your day to doodle something or write a few lines.

Here's a little video I made last year about how to keep drawing every day without burning out:

Doodle while on phone or while you wait for someone to reply to your inquiry. Take a five minute break from your work to draw a quick drawing of what's on your table or what you see behind the window. Or write a quick, five line poem about how your work stresses you out.

Finding time for art is a matter of choice and practice. If you found time to read this post, you'll find time for art. It's a choice you make, to make time for art.

For me drawing every day isn't even about me making time for art. It's more like needing to do it. Just like I need to eat or I need to take a shower, I also need to draw every day. I get something from it rather than give something to it. It sustains me. This change didn't happen overnight. It happened because I started choosing to make time, even if it was only 5 minutes, for art.

Making time for art is all about choosing to do so. Making the decision that art is important part of your life. Deciding to give it time and energy, until it starts giving something back to you. It's about loosening up and having fun instead of being all serious. And it's also about being sensible about it, and not trying to do too much each time you make time for art. That painting or that story will be finished some day, if it feels like it. Slow down and let it happen.

Make art time and it will give you so much more than you ever thought it would.

Social media has been around for a short life time. Internet much longer. The attempts at control started early on, and they never really worked.

In early 2000s there were attempts to protect children from the scares of Internet by automatically blocking access to certain websites. Some of the results were rather hilarious: I remember rumours of the websites of munincipality of Pornainen here in Finland getting caught in parental controls due to the name of the place. Nasty!

All spam and scam filtering tends to create false positives. They don't really work, since eventually the spammers and scammers always get around them. This same applies to age verifications. The regular people will be blocked from accessing apps and websites, and become exposed to more scams. Meanwhile the actual bad guys will keep doing harm.

This current rise of banning underage people from using social media and applying age verification is another wave of attempt at control. It doesn't really protect anyone and only creates more problems.

Recently Discord announced new teen safety features, including starting to use a face scan based age verification system. Safety researchers then did some checks on Persona, the age verification system in question, and found some great concerns (to put it mildly). Not only the system turned out to be making significant mistakes in age verification it also can check stuff like your financial data. It also exposes more of your data to potential hacking.

These measures aren't applied to really make things better for anyone. Just like taking off your shoes at airports isn't that much about stopping those who really want to cause harm, but to make it seem something is done. All smoke and mirrors.

It's not about your safety, it's about controlling you.

Yesterday my dad passed away. He was very ill for a while, so in that sense it was a relief. No more pain, no more feeling bad. That doesn't stop me from mourning. I would have loved to have my dad here longer, if only he had been well.

Dad enjoyed good oldies music and liked animals of other species. And they liked him back.

If you gave dad some wood and a few tools he could make you a wooden ladle, a table, or even a house. I'm writing this on a desk he made me over 30 years ago.

Sometimes he played his harmonica, sometimes a game of solitaire. He even taught me the basics five card poker. We played for peanuts, if anything. He also loved dancing, to the pace of those oldies.

I'm glad I had a chance to tell dad goodbye and that he was a good dad. And I'm sad dad is not here any longer.

Suomeksi

Eilen isäni kuoli. Hän oli hyvin sairas jo jonkun aikaa, joten siinä mielessä se oli helpotus. Ei enää kipua, ei enää huonoa oloa. Se ei kuitenkaan estä minua suremasta. Olisin mielelläni pitänyt isän vielä pidempään, jos vain hän olisi voinut hyvin.

Isä nautti hyvästä vanhasta musiikista ja tykkäsi muunlajisista eläimistä. Ja muunlajiset tykkäsivät takaisin.

Jos isälle antoi puuta ja muutaman työkalun, hän taikoi puukauhan, pöydän tai vaikkapa talon. Kirjoitan tätä pöydän ääressä, jonka isä teki minulle yli 30 vuotta sitten.

Joskus isä soitteli huuliharppuaan, joskus pelasi pelin pasianssia. Hän jopa opetti minulle viiden kortin pokerin perusteet. Pelasimme maapähkinöistä, jos mistään. Isä oli myös innokas tanssimaan, sen vanhan hyvän musiikin tahtiin.

Olen iloinen, että sain sanoa isälle hyvästit ja että hän oli hyvä isä. Ja surullinen, ettei isä ole täällä enää.

As I was reading an article on rewilding the internet on Noema magazine I started thinking this website as a little wild and unkempt meadow in between all the neatly cut, boring and soulless lawns. The lawns don't sustain anything beyond the grass. But meadows, they bring in the buzz.

I have had concerns about centralisation of the internet for a while. Independent blogs and portfolios still exist, but lots of people have moved their writings and art to other people's platforms. Instead of making your own art site, you might think your Instagram works as the portfolio you need. And some small businesses only have Facebook pages. I don't know if anyone sees those pages, Facebook having been a hostile environment to small businesses for quite a while. Besides that, many artists and handcrafters only have their Etsy or other similar shops. People are just giving the control of their businesses to big tech corporations.

I've written about it before. How throwing all your eggs in these corporate baskets is a loosing concept. I was reminded of it, as an artist over at Bluesky was ruminating over how years of his work in progress stuff, which he used to post to Twitter, was now gone after he took off that mess. I really hope he has the photos still somewhere, but at least they aren't out there in public for people to view and learn from.

Now all those apps and websites are implementing AI and changing their terms to include rights to use your images and texts in training AI. Of course if someone wants to use the contents of this site to train their AI without my permission (let me be clear here, you aren't allowed to train any AI with my any of my content anywhere), I cannot really stop them. Sure, I could always take them to the court if I caught them. But still. Voluntarily giving my data and content to those power hungry asswipes feels icky, the least to say.

Sure I'm using Patreon. And yes, I publish my videos on YouTube. Those at least give me something in return of my work. But since Instagram and Facebook and Twitter have all proved to be pretty useless for me (conversions are crap over them), I can choose to take my data and content elsewhere.

There are no second or third party ads here on my site. Nor there are paywalls. What I promote is either mine or something I have carefully selected. Of course I need to fund all this somehow, which is where Patreon (and hopefully some day YouTube) come in. If you'd like to support my work, you can join as a free or paid member on Patreon. And I would very much appreciate it if you'd subscribe to my channel on YouTube.

If my hosting pulls the plug on my site, I can take it elsewhere. For that I'm currently using Grav, an open source flat file CMS. It's very portable and my content is safe and accessible for me offline too. A static site generator could work too. Considering that Grav uses Markdown for the content, it would allow me to move more easily elsewhere than some other content management systems, hosted website creators or blogging systems would. In case Grav would disappear or something.

I need to, of course, start doing better with this blog. I have been neglecting it way too often and way too much. I have thoughts on meditation and life and work and business and all sorts of things I could share with you. I've been feeling frustration with posting stuff here, feeling like nobody even cares. I'm trying to let go. Let go of expectations. Let go of thinking I need more than a handful of my people to make this worth it. Let go of the pressure to hustle and create with a pace of a robot.

While I cannot fix the whole internet, I can do my part by letting my own site be the wild and unkempt and weird meadow it is. There are things growing here you cannot find growing anywhere else. I hope you enjoy this meadow and keep exploring it. There's a lot to see and smell and hear and feel around here.

Remember all those books about how not to give a fuck or shit or other profanities? Back when those where all the rage I already found them concerning. Now yes, the message of those was not to get too invested in all the small issues in life. Not to be so overly sensitive that you are constantly thinking about what other people think about you. You know, choose your battles and stuffs.

This whole "choose your battles" thinking has rubbed me the wrong way for a long while. You don't necessarily choose your battles, as they choose you. Often this saying is used as an excuse to ignore even the bigger battles. The stuff that really matters.

Of course lots of that advice is given by people of privilege. From that point of view it can be difficult to see how the world really goes around. Not giving a crap is a great way to place yourself above everyone and everything. You become numb, nothing can move you.

Life is a messy mess. There are lots of things you cannot control. It doesn't mean you shouldn't care about those things. If a racist self-indulged government members make bad decisions you cannot control, it doesn't mean you should just lay down and take what comes. It may seem easier at the moment, but in the long run it gets harder and harder. The longer the mess is let to accumulate, the more work there's needed to clean it up.

Okay sure. If you are in a constant alertness, it will get hard on your mind and body. I know how that goes. Burnouts are not a joke. As the world sits witnessing in real time war crimes going on unpunished, it can make you numb and uncaring too.

It's not easy to care. It's not easy in a world were caring is seen as weak and silly. It's not easy in a world were money and power are more important than well-being.

So what's the way? How to keep caring in a world which is full of it?

1. Make art

Of course this is again where I highly recommend making art. Not trying to make perfect art.

Make a mess. Make ugly art. Make mistakes, and then make more mistakes. Draw imperfect lines, mess up the perspective, combine the wrong colours. Learn the "rules" of art and then go against them. Or don't learn the "rules" and just try yourself. Art is great for your mental health and can give you new ways to view things.

Avoid taking shortcuts, such as using generative AI. Shortcuts make you careless, and they make you care less. If you have to actually do the task, such as drawing or painting or writing, it keeps your brain flexible. Flexible brain can give a crap.

Write or draw your feelings. Don't overthink it, don't think you have to make it perfect. Write or draw what you see or experience during a day. The extraordinary, the mundane. Just make art.

In uncaring societies, making art is resistance.

2. Connect with your feelings

There seem to be many reasons and many opportunities to get angry these days. Bad news, sad news, people being assholes for sports, uncaring people, ignorance... Grrr! Pay attention to what makes you angry. I don't mean you should avoid getting angry. But pay attention to it and think about why it makes you angry.

Actually pay attention to your feelings in general and examine them. Why did you like something? Why did you dislike another thing? Why were you indifferent?

It seems that people are busy with trying to feel less, because there's so much to feel. But that's not the way to go. Numbing yourself up isn't helpful, it only makes it all worse. Rather than trying to feel less, try to understand your feelings. Learn from them. Connect with them.

Understand your own feelings and you might start understanding others too.

3. Get into fiction

As I keep bringing it up, reading fiction has been studied to build empathy. For me other forms of fiction work too. Comics, series, movies. I'm personally not good at listening fiction, but if that works for you, go for it.

During the past two decades I've heard it too many times. People bragging how they don't read (or watch) fiction, but only develop themselves with non-fiction. That's just sad. Fiction is as important for your learning as non-fiction. Yes, fiction can get some facts wrong, but hey I've read non-fiction with many factual errors too.

Often reading or seeing or hearing something in fiction has made me curious, and to make some research on the subject. No matter if the fiction had it wrong, it still directed me to learn about the real thing. So develop your brain with fiction.

4. Connect with other people

With all the technology you can get connected with other people from different cultures and different lives. You can have conversations with people on the other side of the earth. You can learn about different lifestyles, cultures, ways of thinking. You might even learn something about yourself on the way.

I'd like to note here, I don't subscribe to the echo chamber and filter bubble myths. It seems to be an excuse for abuse and douchebaggery. Usually people moaning the loudest about echo chambers are the people who seem the least sensitive to other people's feelings. When connecting with different kinds of people you don't have to connect with those who (wish to) hurt you, or who you notice hurting others.

So if you use socials, unfollow and block when you feel like it. It actually helps to to give a crap when you aren't flooded with some pointless crap that makes you feel like crap. Just like offline, you don't have to keep up with a conversation that doesn't feel right to you. Respect your boundaries, and respect other people's boundaries. If someone shows you the door, walk out of it. Also don't force other people to teach you about themselves if they don't want to.

Keep your mind open and stay curious, without being invasive. Befriend people. Build community rather than following.

5. Question power

Power appears to be a problem. The more power, the less caring. Or more caring about keeping power than anything else. So if you are or get to be in power, try to keep yourself grounded. Keep reading and watching fiction. Do stuff you don't feel you are good at. But do those things without feeling shame about them. It's okay to be bad at stuff. Laugh at yourself, but with kindness.

Ask yourself how you got in power. If your answer is with hard work, ask again. Who helped you? How did the society help you? Who gave you the seed money or the support and why did they do so?

Whether or not you are in power, keep questioning power. Keep asking hard questions from those who are in power. Fact check them. You don't need to be rude or threatening doing this, just ask. You know what, just keep asking questions. I think too many people are too afraid to ask questions and too many are way too confident with giving answers.

6. Pay attention to the little things

There are wonderful things in the world. You may not notice them, cause you are too concerned about paying your rent and feeding your family. But there are wonderful things, which deserve your attention as much as everything bad and sad.

The yellow leaf that just fell down from the tree. It looked almost like a butterfly, fluttering and floating. How it is part of the natural cycle, turning into more nutritious soil. And then, next spring the tree will grow new leaves and the cycle goes on and on.

Stay naive and curious. Childlike curiosity keeps you learning and unlearning. It keeps you brain flexible. It keeps you making art, asking questions, connecting with other people and enjoying things. It's a natural cycle too, just a one in your head.

Keep on wondering, keep on dreaming, keep on caring!