If you feel that what I have to say here is making your life better, you’re already involved. A lot of other people feel the same way. They’re the people you’re looking for.
Once you meet them, here are a few things you can do:
Discussion Groups with Friends
The underlying theme to everything people ever think, feel, say, and do is that it’s the best decision they could think of in the situation they were in, for themselves and the people and things they cared about. If you all understand that much, you can help each other learn what it means by talking about what it means to you personally.
It’s easiest to see how this underlying theme plays out all the time in moment by moment decisions people make, like body language, tones of voice, and everyday decisions, with people you already know and have a lot in common with. If you already know a lot about someone else’s personality and their life, it’s fairly easy to see how those things affect the day to day decisions they make.
I call this a discussion group, but it doesn’t have to be formal. A discussion group can be anywhere you talk to people who want to talk about something. You talk about stuff with your friends informally all the time.
Discussion Groups with Strangers
People you don’t know make some decisions you don’t understand right away. But it’s always the same underlying theme, that it’s the best decision they could think of in the situations they were in, for themselves and the people and things they care about.
Listen to anyone tell a story about what they did at some point in their life, and it’s always a story about this. If you get together with people you don’t know well, or at all, and share personal stories, you can hear how the underlying theme plays out in bigger ways. The more different the other person’s life is from yours, the more those differences will affect the decisions they make in ways you couldn’t guess. But beneath all those differences, it’s still the same theme that runs through all of our lives.
Just remember not to be judgmental of people when they share personal stories. The story of your life is a story of how facts fit together and led you to feel that the decisions you made felt to you like the best decisions you could make in the situations you were in. It’s not a story about other people’s opinions of your life. When you’re judgmental of someone, you’re assuming that you would’ve made better decisions than they did, in a situation you might never have been in before.
And again, this doesn’t have to be a formal discussion group. This can be anywhere people share personal stories.
Join Activist Movements
Every social and environmental justice movement has people in it somewhere who are working for better public education. Long term success at any of those goals depends on better public education.
The environmental movement is a movement for people to make better environmental decisions based on a better understanding of the environment and our interaction with it.
Social justice movements are movements for people to use more information in making their decisions about how to interact with other people. It’s a movement for people to talk to each other, listen to each other, and use more facts in their decision making, instead of making their decisions based on their assumptions about other people.
Organize Your Own Activist Movement
If you want to bring people together to start making things happen, other people have already devoted entire websites to that. Find a movement you like the idea of, and see how they organize. Remember, your goals are always to learn more, to draw people’s attention to your ideas, and to help them learn more.
* * *
Your own life story is Chapter 1 in your version of the story of Being Human on Planet Earth. Everyone else’s life story is Chapter 1 in their version of the story.
The rest of the chapters are up to you to write. You need other people’s help for that. Because they’re all part of the story of Being Human on Planet Earth too.