I am not active enough or “left” enough for a lot of people.

People I admire.

I am not vocal enough. Or hard-line enough.

I work with brands who might not completely align with all of my values.

I don’t post about Gaza or ICE or PIP reforms every day.

I have turned the breaking news notifications off on my phone.

And I haven’t shared enough GoFundMe’s.

I cannot watch videos or look at photos of dead, dying, starving, grieving humans. Because then my hyper-empathy (which I’ve generously passed down to my son) means I literally can’t function for the rest of the day.

But who am I (I can hear the pushback from people I love and respect) to opt out of their suffering? How privileged must I be to be able to ignore it? How can I ignore it?

For 2 reasons:

My business keeps us afloat.

I am the main breadwinner in our household. For quite a while I was the only one. So many of the people I know in the online space have a partner with a steady income, or savings they can fall back on when they make decisions about who to work with. It’s not true of all of us, and I wish this was talked about more.

The money my business makes feeds and clothes and educates and houses my family.

I’ve weathered Silicon Valley funding crises, AI, recessions, tariffs, global wars, and insecurity. Countless days when my pipeline has dried up as clients pull back due to uncertainty or having to pay 160% to import their goods before they sell them.

I don’t have the luxury of being able to switch my Stories to 24/7 condemnation of any government. I HAVE to find work. Or we don’t eat either.

Nuance is underused

I firmly believe something. Rarely (if ever) is something as cut and dried/black and white/no-brainer as it appears.

Labour is not evil. Nor is it our Saviour. Governments are cowardly, but they’re also responsible for navigating global circumstances 1000x more complicated and interconnected than they’ve ever been.

Republicans have some views I don’t agree with, and some of them need a pretty comprehensive education on a lot of stuff (and to spend some time in deep conversation with the poor and vulnerable). But they’re also not evil people.

Trump…well, Trump is the exception to my nuance rule. The only nuance I’ll allow with him is the same one I did with all the troubled young people I worked with when I was a youth worker – no behaviour happens in a vacuum, he is the result of the things done to him, and the things he did because of the things done to him.

Maybe the Christian tenet of “every human was made in the image of God and is redeemable” never really left me…

I’m a hypocrite

Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about how I struggle to do all the things I encourage you all to do. That I help my clients to do – to weave your values and social conscience into your messaging.

Because the fiscal reality within our current capitalist system weights heavy on me every day.

Because there are simply too many things I care about that are being torn apart right now. I can’t talk about all the things I’m against, or worried about, or want to shine a light on, because there is not enough time in my day. Or in my brain. I can’t do it.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up.

I don’t have to pick between being “all in” 24/7 and doing nothing at all.

And neither do you.

It’s tempting to see the discourse online and think that you only have a say, or can be considered a “good little activist”, if you hit all the whack a moles all the time. And that you can’t post about the offer you need to sell – that will really help someone’s life/business/family – because “how can you be talking about money at a time like this?!”

I heard Ray Dodd, a money coach, say earlier this year: “Every time you sold something, there was a war going on.”

Honestly, that stopped me in my tracks. Because it’s true. We pick and choose what is considered to be “serious” enough to make selling insensitive. There is always pain and suffering and trauma. And we should consider it in our words and our actions.

But, and I know this will piss some people off, your mortgage company still wants payment when there’s a war in Sudan.

You do not owe some random, well-meaning person on the internet your potential revenue from that week’s sales.

Change is made on the ground

So, how do you balance your social conscience with the realities of being a human with responsibilities?

There is no one right answer (sorry). But I have some thoughts. (And I also have a bunch of things to help you, whichever route you decide to take – I’ll list them all at the end).

Change is made on the ground, not in the algorithm.

Change is made through the conversations you have in the school playground, the connections you make in the doctor’s waiting room, and the communication lines you open with people who disagree with you (and yes, this can happen online as well as in real life. I’m not a fan of algorithms, but I’m also not willing to throw out the biggest communication channel the world has ever seen).

If you feel helpless, and guilty, and that visceral need to just DO something, then start here. Build your community.

You can do this purely by talking to those around you, finding out about your neighbours and offering support (whether that’s a listening ear as they moan about an unhelpful mother in law, or sharing school pickups).

You can do this by tapping into community groups, or starting your own. Is there a food bank you can help at? Is your Town Council looking for new blood (probably not as sinister as it sounds!)? If you’re in the US and there are mutual aid opportunities, or Signal groups giving people heads up about ICE raids, can you join those?

And, if you’re at the stage of life where there is no time after childcare and other caring responsibilities and work and everything else, then concentrate on having conversations with the people you meet every day, about things that matter.

Build links, because those links are how real community happens. The kind of community that comes together when the shit hits the fan. The kind of community that makes everyone’s lives better.

Make time to dream

A Milton Friedman quote popped up on a podcast I listened to the other week: “At times of crisis, the solutions will be chosen from the ideas lying around at the time.” I’m not a Friedman fan, but he was a smart guy. And this struck me. When crises happen, societies can’t take years to come up with new ideas of how to fix them or rebuild. They need ideas that are almost ready to go, that have been incubated and are ready to be born.

This is a task that lots of us are neglecting in favour of running on the reactive media treadmill.

And it’s a task that, in its undertaking, builds joy, hope, and community.

So, yes – use your platform to speak up for the things that matter to you. To showcase and shine a light on issues you think deserve more attention. Protest and campaign and fundraise and volunteer. All this is vital – especially as the collateral damage of our economic and social policies piles up further.

AND.

Join groups where you can talk about ideas. Where you can share stories and read books and explore different ways of building communities and societies. Learn about poltics and civics and advertising and propaganda. Debate and dream.

So that these ideas are ready when we need them.

It all matters. So find the things that work for you. And continue building your business. Rather than feeling guilty because you can’t perform the social media activism that ideological purists demand of you.

Some resources to help you reach out

I’ve been talking about this kind of thing for a while, so I have some great resources to help you, whichever road you go down:

There are now over 50 episodes of the Soap Box Podcast out in the world, all of them inspiring chats with business owners about their own personal soap boxes and how they talk about them in their business and life. Worth a dive!

Here’s a blog post on how to have better conversations, especially with people who disagree with you. As we approach holiday season (with its inevitable awkward family conversations), this might be a big help.

If you’re looking for a simple framework for talking about this kind of stuff in your business without sounding like you’ve turned into a charity, then read this post on how to talk about politics without pissing people off.

Particularly relevant to this topic of how we build movements and communicate in the social media age is this podcast episode with Evante Daniels and his book “Power, Beats, and Rhymes”.

And, if this has inspired you, then please check out The Portal Collective, a platform for course creation, community building, and conversation away from the broligarchy and algorithms, where movements and new ideas are already being born.

Carry on reading