lonelypanda said:
I'm not quite sure what you mean, when I notice things having a negative impact on my mentality or otherwise I remove it. Something as little as drinking coke everyday I replaced it with water. Sure I could have replaced it with booze and been in a worse situation but why would I? I recognized something as unhealthy and it wouldn't be very smart to replace it with another unhealthy thing.
I'm just saying that sometimes you really just don't have any options. So the only option then is eliminating that thing entirely, which can easily lead to bigger issues in many situations.
Take driving for example. Driving is actually quite dangerous. How other people drive is not in any way in your control and, not to be morbid here, but anyone could run into you at any moment for any number of ridiculous or stupid reasons completely out of your control.
But if we stop driving, what sort of things might happen? If you need to get to work, you'll probably lose your job. And depending on where you live you may not have any access to food or help if you ever need those things.
Sure, someone who lives close enough to their job and the grocery might be able to sell their car for a bike or to just walk, but most people probably don't have those options.
Our current society just isn't built for understanding these sort of issues. Your employer probably doesn't care even slightly about the relatively high chance of dying in a vehicular accident. And they do it, too, because they believe it's necessary. We all take this sort of stuff for granted and so our society functions on these sort of presumptions, even though in truth and reality many of them are factually negative. Not even just for us personally, either. Think of all the CO2 emissions contributing to global warming that all that driving creates. It's simply just expected that so many of us endanger ourselves, others, and our entire world and future generations... but for what, exactly? Why do we do this? I mean really. Not just 'so we can get to work' kind of answer, I mean legitimately why is society set up like this in the first place? Cars are a relatively new invention and humanity survived without them for millions of years. We obviously do not "need" them.
And that's just one example I threw out there. I could list plenty of others, but I'd rather not go into it too much. I'm sure you get the point.
I just feel sort of trapped sometimes with my own options, to be honest.
And as much as I'd love to try replacing things with something better, the issues that bother me most simply just aren't in my control. And no amount of determination will change that.
I don't mean to sound pessimistic. There's lots of stuff we can do to make bad situations as good as possible, like having your own 'safe-driving' techniques for example. But I do feel I need to be realistic here. And reality isn't so pretty sometimes. It does come across as a bit pessimistic because it just is. That's just how life is sometimes, I guess.