Seeking Out Positive Stories & Understanding Personal Struggle:

In our quest for understanding hope within positive social change, our class read Naomi Klein’s “Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors”.  What makes this reading so powerful is that it presents itself as an alternative narrative to the declensionist, doom-and-gloom model that we have all become accustomed to.   It is no secret that most of us often read and learn about things that seem to chisel away bit by bit our feeling of power and agency affecting our attempts to tackle these larger issues.  However, Klein reminds us that change is happening all around us, we just have to go looking for it.  We must seek positive stories to remind us that we do have power and a say in what is happening.  Nevertheless, change often happens as a slow and gradual process that came become disheartening and our second reading by Mark Manson helps us understand this.

In Manson’s piece he puts forward the argument that when  asking oneself  how they wish to be successful we should ask “What are you willing to struggle for?”  It reminds us that in our quest for change we will have to endure things that we possibly had not anticipated.  We often glorify the result, but ignore the difficult, possibly menial, tasks that are required to earn this success.  It reminds us that this journey may not alway feel “worth it” and sometimes we have to engage in things we don’t like to do, but that is a part of the process itself.  In order to choose how you want to contribute to this positive social change, first we must understand what we are willing to do to get there.

I will say however, that I do not fully agree with the argument that by not succeeding it means that you must not “have wanted it enough”, as posed by Manson.  He cites his struggle of becoming a rock star and only focusing on the fame aspect and not the hard work it would take as a result of him not wanting to endure the struggle enough.  However, this implies that success is merely a choice, and by default struggle is a choice.  This negates circumstances in which struggle was not a choice.  For instance, mental health can become a large aspect of one’s life and presents itself as a type of “struggle”.  This does not mean that the person didn’t “want it enough”, rather that there were other forces at play.  We can’t use this term struggle as a blanket statement that doesn’t take into account how different people experience life.  The term feels too broad here.  I think it would be additionally unwise to blindly discuss struggle without understanding how power/privilege might play into it.  

Overall, these readings remind us that we do have agency and power in this world, and when we feel as if that is not so, then seek out stories of hope for inspiration.  Additionally, we must understand how struggle may play a part in us each attempting to enact social change.  But we cannot negate the fact the struggle will feel different to each one of us.