All Work and No Play Makes the Revolution Dull and Grey

For some, activism is a full-time job. It’s getting up at 6am to make flyers at 7am, to hand out at 8am, before taking a quick ‘break’ at 9am to read every single piece of news about which you then post several lengthy threads on X. By midday, you’re making posters for the multi-hour protest you’ve organised — lunch now a casualty. By 6pm, you’re at your desk drafting emails to local and national representatives, ready to be sent at 8pm leaving just enough time for a spot of dinner, before fending off all the online critics — often from your own ‘side’ — harshly correcting some minor misinterpretation of Marxist theory in one of your posts from earlier. It’s spending every living and breathing moment ‘for the cause’ financed by your actual full-time job — something remote in ‘sustainable’ finance. You’ve calculated this to be the most high-paying and high-impact for the least effort, a job which gets you just enough money to donate to every charity you deem worthy and keeps yourself barely afloat while you cheer yourself up with in-depth metrics — to the exact cubic metre of CO2 offset per hour — on how much better this actual job has made the world.

Now, this all has its merits, don’t get me wrong; the utilitarian drive to maximise good even at great personal cost seems admirable. Indeed, this hypothetical reads like an exaggerated caricature of the ideal selfless and morally-upstanding activist which many of us wish we could be if only our personal circumstances allowed. But this caricature is not one that we should replicate. Not only does it set an impossible standard which is individually harmful to those who try to follow it, but it also harms society at large by obscuring the reason why we should want to make the world more just in the first place — that is, so that everyone can actually enjoy it. After all, we can take no great pleasure in merely ‘saving’ the world, if the world we have saved contains no pleasure for us to take. 

Regarding personal harm: there is hardly anyone for whom this lifestyle is actually suited. 24/7 activism is unforgiving and will likely lead to burnout, which will, anyway, reduce the net benefit you provide society — if you really are inclined to look at things in this horribly depressing and robotic way. Furthermore, any esteem you would gain by being a ‘good person’ would be offset by how unsociable and combative you’d likely become. No one likes a 24/7 activist, but even the 24/7 activist needs friends, or — to adopt characteristically soulless wording — potential ‘allies’. All work and no play makes the activist dull and grey. 

What’s worse is that this way of thinking promotes a dangerous narrative: any effort not channelled directly into the most salutary ends is considered effort wasted. My sister, an accomplished video game narrative designer, often hears: “you’re so bright, why waste your talent on video games when you could do X” — X being whatever the speaker thinks will save the most lives, feed the most mouths, or rescue the most children. While the sentiment is nice, and even includes a (pseudo-)compliment, it’s shockingly out of touch. It ignores the fact that my sister, alongside her full-time job, is already a committed activist who protests, boycotts, works on refugee cases — you name it. And, crucially, it ignores the fact that, frankly, we need video games. We need art and entertainment, and if her skillset is well-suited to providing those goods (and they are undoubtedly goods), then why bemoan the fact that she is directing her efforts accordingly? Just imagine the absurdity of criticising Yeats for writing poetry when he could have spent more time at soup kitchens, or shouting down Scorsese for dedicating his life to film instead of finding a cure for cancer. Of course, the very same people who make these criticisms spend far more energy on criticising than on doing any ‘good’ themselves. 

Nevertheless, most of us — myself and likely, you, the reader — should ‘do more good’. We probably are too lazy, do not go to enough protests, and so on. But, in our quest to become better people, we should not lose sight of why we need better people in the first place: so that we actually end up with a better world, a world which is not only just but also enjoyable, entertaining, and beautiful — a world which we can truly say was worth saving. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons