Solarpunk

Disagree.

Most people want to make the world a better place, we just can't agree on what a better world would look like, and how to get there.

There's a lot of people out there, for example, who think that the "right to self determination" is a bad thing because they believe humanity has an intrinsic self-destructive aspect. I disagree, but they firmly believe that a dictatorship is the solution and I'm being unhelpful because I don't want that.

One of the hardest things I've been through in therapy was realizing that my parents really did think they were doing the right thing. They listened to the "experts" at church who told them that in order to protect their kids, they needed to hurt their kids. My mother dropped out of college when she got pregnant, and my stepdad is mentally ill, so neither of them were particularly well educated, and they landed in a cult.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all. People can be horrible and think they're doing it for the greater good.

This is a remarkable amount of main character syndrome, frankly. It doesn't read like excess empathy to me, it reads like privilege.

You're not saving the world. You'll never be saving the world. Your contribution either way is irrelevant. The big problems that you are frustrated about are about mass incentives, big numbers and geopolitics, not about people coming together for the common good because they care so much. It's not naïveté, it's arrogance. You get to vote on the big overall direction and, if you have the time, resources and disposition, to collaborate in activism with millions of others, assuming enough of them agree with you.

The small stuff? The "I could do this marginally better for mine or someone else's sake"? That's worth it. That you can do yourself. It still works on the same set of incentives and dynamics, but if it's something you personally can do to make something marginally better for someone, then... you know... go ahead? It's just much more valuable to do it in your own life than to get frustrated by someone else who you think should do it. Because, again, you aren't that important. Nobody is waiting for your command or judgement unless you're supposed to be giving it for some reason.

And let me be clear, I'm not mad about this. I'm not outraged at your worldview or anything. It's just that, honestly, in good faith, I think this sense of despair at everybody else refusing to fix things by acting as a hive mind with your same set of values and priorities is not a problem of ethics as much as a problem of narcissism and an inflated sense of one's own impact, and both that individual and their surroundings are better served by understanding the actual scale of their agency. Because... you know, that way you don't get discouraged when it comes to doing the small things you can do on the large scale, like voting or protesting, and you don't get angry about doing the big things you can do in the small scale, like not being an asshole or being too deflated to actually act in the spaces you control.

So no hard feelings but this is a get over yourself moment. In a constructive, positive, agency-filled, collaborative, collective action-driven way.

Your definition of better is not the only definition of better. Lots of people have different beliefs about what would make the world better, getting angry or depressed because people don't agree with your specific view is childish. Dismissing everyone else as wrong is also childish.

You really need to reevaluate the impact you can actually have and make peace with it's limits. You aren't going to change great societal problems by yourself.