To value interdependence over independence
I value interdependence over independence; because I don't want to be isolated and individualistic. Feeling connected to others is what reduces burnout.[1] Loving is a skill, but to feel loved is a skill too; to see what people do for you and to recognise the sentiment of their actions as love can take practice to develop. Remember we are more than the problems we have relating to others.[2] All we have each is other, and whatever it is, it takes a village. The land we live on is a living being and we have an international generational responsibility for it,[3] that my purpose here and your purpose here is to cultivate and protect and nourish and care for a planet where everything on it is interconnected.[4] It is not our responsibility to finish the work, but neither are we free to abandon it.[5]
What this value means to me:
- Learning to be self-reliant is more important for running; it is community that is essential for long-term survival. In a community of care, the fight is against precarity and the front line is the labour of care work. Safety comes from the care networks people form as capitalist systems lose the ability to provide for them. In any scenario, more and more of us have to learn to take care of each other, our neighbours, ourselves, and learn to organise in heterogeneous group who do not agree on everything.[6]
- Significant social change is not spontaneous, sudden or miraculous, but the consequence of millions of choices made not to look away.[7] Every time we perceive a shift in social attitudes or systems, what we are witnessing is the effect of many, many deliberate choices that make up the collective action of millions and millions of people who are doing everything they can not to look away.
- Valuing interdependence is to make systems of separation too expensive and impractical to sustain.[8] What comes to mind most strongly for me now is 1) dismantling Zionist architecture and 2) not abandoning people for taking mass-disabling pandemics seriously.
Dean Spade says "burnout is prevented or lessened when we feel connected to others, when there is transparency in how we work together, when we can rest as needed, when we feel appreciated by the group, and have the skills for giving/receiving feedback." Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And the Next) (2020) ↩︎
Specifically, our attachment styles are not static and fixed identities. An insecure attachment style is not how you relate all of the time and is not all you are. When we reduce our partners to being "a fearful-avoidant" or "an anxious-preoccupied", we essentialise one part of their experience as the total of who they are. After Jessica Fern, Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy (2022) ↩︎
Humankind was tasked with the generational authority of being responsible to serve and care for Earth. See the Qur'an (2:30, 6:165, 7:69, 7:74 10:14, 10:73, 27:62, 35:39, 38:26). ↩︎
Palestinian storyteller Jenan Matari on Indigenous thinking and bearing witness, 5 March 2024 https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4IjQg3LhOF. ↩︎
Rabbi Tarfon in Pirkei Avot (2:16), 2nd century CE. The Jewish ethics text Pirkei Avot is the only Mishnah text of 63 that does not deal with laws. https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.16 ↩︎
"It's not that I'm describing an inevitable tipping point, [...] if a state fails and the structures that come in to take its place aren’t oriented around meeting everyone’s needs, those new structures will immediately be on a rapid path to collapse. And again and again until structures are formed around care. It’s all about how quickly people withdraw their dependence on capitalist states and form those care structures instead." See this incredible video essay from Sophie From Mars, The World Is Not Ending, 18 August 2023 https://liyyusof.com/doomer-mushroom ↩︎
After Hala Alyan, Palestinian professor, writer, psychologist, 8 January 2024 https://www.instagram.com/p/C114MUjOTRQ ↩︎
Apartheid in South Africa ended mostly because it wasn't financially worth it. Between 1972 and 1979, the South African government spent around $100 million on public reputation, buying journalists, publications, influencers around the world. Hannah Claire Smith recommends the book Selling Apartheid by Ron Nixon to learn more about Apartheid South Africa's disinformation campaign. See Hannah Claire Smith, 16 November 2023 https://www.instagram.com/reel/CztjJJEuI9u ↩︎
