There’s a lot of people on here who are part of what I’d call losing causes, causes that run counter to the consumerist capitalist mono-culture, I.e. socialism, veganism, FOSS, anti-car urbanism, even lemmy and the fediverse.

I want to know what made you switch from being a sympathizer to an active participant. I believe it’s important for us to understand what methods work in getting people involved in a movement that may not have any immediate wins to motivate people to join.

EDIT: A lot of people objecting to my use of losing so I’ll explain more, all of these causes benefit from popularity and are weakened by there lack of adoption and are thus in direct competition with the capitalist consumerist mono-culture, a competition which they are currently losing.

  • Socialism on a small scale cannot solve the inherent issues of a capitalism that surrounds it.

  • Veganism benefits from more people becoming vegan and restaurants and grocery stores providing vegan options.

  • FOSS, or more specifically desktop Linux, benefits from more people being on it and software developers designing for and maintaining applications for it.

  • The more people that use transit, the more funding it gets and the better it gets.

  • the fediverse benefits from more people veing on it and more diverse communities so those with niche interests besides the above causes can find community here.

On the flip side the capitalist consumerist alternatives to all of these benefit from there popularity and thus offer a better value to most people. The question is about what made you defer that better immediate material value in favor of something else.

  • Four_mile_circus@lemmy.ml
    2·
    9 hours ago

    I was looking for people who were at that point of being educated about a cause, but weighed it it less then those benefits of popularity and continued on in the capitalist consumerist system. Then maybe something else pushed those scales to the other side and they chose to join the cause. What was that experience? Was it having a child? Was it an experience with death, spiritual experience, revelation, drug trip, etc. I guess that’s the question.

    I think education about a cause is a continuum, not a binary. When I changed from popular lifeways to less popular ones, it wasn’t because of a road to Damascus moment that made me suddenly change my mind. It was because, as I gradually learned more about a particular topic, I ultimately reached tipping point and decided the perceived benefits of switching to the less popular option outweighed the benefits of sticking with the popular option.

    (And I’m using benefits in the broadest sense - being able to feel good about myself for doing the right thing is a benefit that outweighs mere physical or financial gain in a lot of cases.)

    The other major factor in my switching, when I think back on it, was the capitalist alternative getting worse. I quit using Google’s search engine, for example, both because I learned more about online privacy and because Google’s searches were providing increasingly shitty results.