Solarpunk

For you my friend, I recommend the book “climate, psychology, and change” I hold this one close to my heart.

Your coworker is reaching out to you in his own way, and you are making his life more bearable than you may know. What seems a little bump in the road may be a mountain to him. But life's a marathon, and he might come around yet.

I want you to know that I feel incredibly seen and validated by this post.

I've never had the chance to meet people like you in real life, so I've had to hold on to the few instances in which I've seen my feelings reflected in media. The one instance I keep coming back to is How To Be Hopeless by Carlos Maza. It's an absolute masterpiece of a video essay, written from the depths of the personal and existential despair of a man who dedicated his adult life to fighting far-right extremism, and was rewarded with the end of his professional career and the victory of his serial harasser. Its message has become a core part of who I am now, and when I experience the kind of despair you're describing, I return to it. It's saved my life before. I cannot recommend it to you strongly enough.

I have been going through a very similar experience to you. The more coworkers I have over the years, the more people I realize are extremely jaded and having a tough time caring at all about the world at large.

This is a pretty complicated issue. I think that means you need a sort of patchwork of paradigms to apply to the issue at the right moment.

Sometimes you need to give yourself a break and let yourself live your life - you only get one, and joy is an essential part of a functioning human, and you must continue to function if you are to continue impacting your world.

Other times you must keep in mind that it is literally completely illogical to say that your actions have no impact, obviously each individual action on it's own is small but the actions humanity makes are made up of individuals. Change happens one person at a time, and individuals are difference-makers.

Consider professional sports teams where the stars elevate the team to the next level - they cannot do their work by themselves, every member of the team is needed and makes an impact, but the impacts are not all the same. You will see the same dynamic play out in the typical workplace - a relatively small portion of people really make things happen at most workplaces in my experience, but they still need the team to help them get it done. So you should continue to think of your actions as being important/having meaning in my opinion, and you should keep striving to make the world a better place.

Sometimes when there is a situation that frustrates me but that I know I cannot change (or cannot change immediately or in full), it helps to quiet that thing in my head that worries by practicing mindfulness techniques. Personally I find "box breathing" (a style of controlling breathing to regulate heart rate and perhaps lower cortisol) to be most effective. Maybe this or some other method could help to quel your feelings when you know that it is a situation to let go of.

have come to a state of learned helplessness

I think it's the reverse. The problems you talk about are too large and abstract for most people, they've never entered their minds. The same way most people never worry about the riemann hypothesis.

They worry about more important things such as the new Taylor Swift album.

You're not more empathetic than other people, you have an ideology built around what you perceive as your class interest, just like them

If you want to improve things you can’t wait around for a good moment or depend on the involvement of the depoliticized and hopeless to join in. You can just do things. There are other people doing things, too and you can find them. The change you make can inspire some others too, but the disaffected will always be frustrating to see and deal with. There will always be more to do but the thing is to keep trying to move toward the ideal even if it’s just by inches and there’s miles to go, it’s the long haul

When I was a kid I really thought the leisure society will happen. Now I'm simply counting down the years to death.

I think most ppl do want to make the world a better place, but most ppl give up very easily, because they have urgent personal matters to deal with as well. Most think often about how they can help fixing the world, but they can only do so much every day, so they are like "It's a shame I can only use rechargable batteries and plant wild flowers for the bees, but my taxes aren't gonna file themselves."

People are simply shutting down their head. If you can't see it, it doesn't exist.

Just do what you can do to make things better for people. It'll drive you crazy if you're worrying about what other people are doing. Even crazier than that if you want a reward for doing things right. Do the right thing (even if no one else is) simply because it's the right thing to do.

Serenity is to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.