We can't fix it and we probably shouldn't bother trying because it's not really broken anyway.

Ruminations on the immensity of global capitalist fascism and meditations on communal small scale action.

The goal isn’t to fix everything. We can’t fix what isn’t broken. The Buddhists will tell you that control is an illusion, and they’re right. That doesn’t mean we stop imagining or stop caring. It just means we stop pretending we can bend the world to our will. Visioning can still be useful, but not as a roadmap to some distant future. It works better as a mirror we hold up to the present, reminding us what is actually within reach and what that first step might be.

And when we strip things back, the first steps are small. We can choose to slow down. We can breathe. (Go ahead and take one now.)

From there, the control we do have shows up in daily decisions: the food we buy, how we travel, what we wear, how fast we move, how deeply we buy into cultural stories that tell us our worth depends on being productive. None of these choices on their own will topple a system, but each one is a thread we can pull on, a reminder that we aren’t powerless. Fifteen minutes of doomscrolling can just as easily be fifteen minutes of meditation. A patch of lawn can become a garden. An evening in front of the TV can be a couple of hours volunteering. Even inside a system designed to drain us, these small refusals matter.

Of course, there are limits. Most of us still have to sell our labour to make rent, to eat, to exist in a capitalist system that keeps us struggling. That part is non-negotiable. But what we do in the cracks of that system is where possibility lives. We can choose to put our energy into work that restores instead of work that burns us out. We can move slower, resist the rush, and give our attention to what nourishes instead of what hollows us out. We might not be able to change the machine, but we can decide how much of ourselves we’ll let it take.

So the real question is this: what can we do, here and now, to make life better for ourselves, our neighbours, our loved ones, and especially for those already pushed to the margins, where survival is hardest?

The answer keeps coming back to community. And community is never the easy option, because capitalism works hard to keep us too tired, too busy, and too disconnected to show up. But it’s necessary. Humans don’t just like community. We need it to survive. The myth of individualism tells us that we should stand on our own, but in reality, none of us can meet our basic needs without each other.

Community isn’t just your friend group. It’s not only the people you like spending time with. It’s broader and messier than that. It’s the farmer who grows your food, the bus driver who gets you across town, the teacher who spends their day with your kid. Those people are part of the web that keeps you alive, whether you’re close to them or not. Affinity groups, your chosen circle, the ones you trust and rely on, are just as essential. But they aren’t enough on their own. We need both. And the work is in weaving them together, letting the intimacy of the close circle spill into the wider network, and letting the broader community hold the circle in return.

When we can do that, it becomes possible to lean less on harmful institutions. That doesn’t mean rejecting everything or pretending we can go without causing any harm. It means committing to alternatives so those destructive systems lose their grip. If everyone on a block helps shovel sidewalks, we don’t need diesel-burning city vehicles to clear snow. If we choose to walk or bike, we shift our neighbourhoods into ones where cars have to slow down and pay attention to pedestrians instead of dominating every street. If we buy food from local producers, we loosen the stranglehold of global supply chains that only work by underpaying the global majority for their labour. These aren’t abstract dreams and don’t require an all-or-nothing approach. They are decisions we can make right now, wherever we already are that impact our own lives in meaningful ways.

And we also need to be honest. These systems we live under aren’t broken. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do: concentrate wealth, exploit labour, keep power in the hands of a few. Waiting for a revolution to topple them and instantly replace them with something just is naive at best. One reason capitalist realism is so suffocating is because it blocks our imagination. We don’t know what comes next, so we start to believe nothing else is possible.

But facing that truth doesn’t mean giving up, it just shifts the purpose of our action. Instead of waiting for collapse or chasing visions of utopia, we turn our attention to right now. To the fractures, to the cracks, to carving out lives worth living inside them.

For years I’ve been drawn to Joanna Macy’s idea of “building new systems out of the old.” I’ve spent plenty of time dreaming about them: co-ops, grassroots nonprofits, municipal democracy, communes. I believe firmly in these approaches, but they also all seem to crash against the same walls: access property and money, power struggles. Trying to actually bring them to life inside the very system we’re trying to escape is really fucking hard—every step gets tangled in the same structures we’re working against.

So maybe the point isn’t to keep pretending we can fix it. Maybe the more honest move is to accept that this system is doing exactly what it was built to do—grinding most of us down while a few at the top grasp tighter at what they think is good for them. It’s not broken, it’s functioning as expected. And the people with their hands on the levers of this capitalist-fascist machine have no intention of stepping aside. If anything, they’re doubling down, tightening their grip while the rest of us are told to be patient, to vote harder, to keep believing change will seep through the cracks of their institutions.

If that’s the case, then what remains isn’t a grand solution but the daily work of not letting go of each other. This work is undoubtedly imperfect and that’s okay. We need to decide to keep doing it every day anyway.