Stay calm and install solar panels.
Stay calm and install heat pumps.
Stay calm and build a Homelab.
Stay calm and help your neighbours.
Stay calm and read the news but understand your anger on things you cannot change is wasted energy.
Stay calm and care about your direct environment where you can change things.
You are not alone. Many people around you are doing this already.
@jwildeboer
In principle a good advice.
And it's good i am not alone.
I really try to stay calm.
But i see the news - and i am not a soulless machine. ๐ญ ๐คฌ
@jwildeboer it's a lot of effort... it took me 3 years and loads of experiments with #batteries to get to a system that won't burn down anything :D
@wordmark Thatโs why I didnโt mention batteries. In a few years we will have safer and far cheaper salt/solid state batteries. And it will be a welcome upgrade to solar which you can install already now.
@jwildeboer What a nice list for rich people. Who can afford heat pumps, home lab and solar panels?
Your stoic life is bourgeois life.
@jwildeboer
Ahem. Your backups should include at least one off-site location.
@tofugolem Sure. Creating a backup is however much simpler when you have the data you want to backup as close as possible :)
Comedy is the only way to consume news today. Try Stephen Colbert, Trae Crowder, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers and the Daily Show. Also, Belle of the Ranch has calm, concise level headed news.
@Savvyhomestead I don't live in the US, so I really don't care that much about how your late night shows deal with US news, TBH (To Be Honest).
@jwildeboer Try not to panic because you can't afford solar panels; try not to panic because you can't afford a heat pump; try not to panic because you don't even know what a Homelab is and nor do most of your friends; try just to stay sane, go outdoors more and see friends.
@Judeet99 I have added "Pick one or more" to make everyone feel comfortable.
@jwildeboer
I choose
Stay calm and use up the food you have before it goes to waste.
@jwildeboer @wordmark saw this Arte documentary a few days ago, which gives a good overview over the current and potential future power storage technologies. It's from 2022, but does not feel outdated. It's available in German and French, but should also be watchable with auto-translated English captions on YouTube.
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/104830-000-A/superspeicher-power-auf-dauer/
@jwildeboer In our 60's, the wife and I took the plunge. Sold our home in the NC mountains (just in time to avoid the Helene flooding that destroyed the little town we lived in) and moved to Upstate NY to be near the border to visit the wife's relatives often. (Don't do that at all now.) Built our own super-energy-efficient home, all solar powered, grow a nice large garden, build our own furniture, and don't use any public utilities other than internet. 3 years & going strong!
@jwildeboer I will use this comment as a stand-in for mastodon's non-existent Megaboost feature
@plutocrash First: note "The pick one or more" in my post. Second: I recently posted about actions in five cities here in Bavaria where used panels from big solar plants were handed out for free, you even got the micro inverter. So a completely free 800W solar plant. They handed out around a 1000 sets. Third: there are quiet some entries in my list that you can do for absolutely free.
Addendum: And feel free to ignore the demotivators in the replies :) Take from my list what you like. Or nothing at all. But if you feel the urge to sealion a "yes, but" โ ask yourself to what effect you think that's helpful. Call me out on my privileges, name me whatever you want, I can deal with all of that. Because I am stoic enough to focus on progress, not on negativity from strangers from the internet ;)
Home lab! Single-room heat pumps at some point in the future maybe. Housing situation doesn't allow for more at this point.
@jwildeboer great hints. If you follow the one about a homelab please stay calm and inform yourself about data security. And (staying calm) regularly install security updates for your home lab. If your data is in the internet, the meanest persons on the planet will try to steal them. So you have to take care.
@jwildeboer I have been thinking of setting up an Owncloud and immich servers for myself and my family to use together. Also just for automatic data backup for the whole family. That's be neat.
@jwildeboer Well, I made it to 5 out of 7...
For sanity, not going to say which five!
@jwildeboer agreed, lets break the chains of dependency on these powers and platforms. Stop funding these monsters putting profits before people, racing to destroy the environment and rights to privacy.
@jwildeboer
Stay calm and follow Jan, and people like him, on the Fediverse.
@jwildeboer
and learn to grow food. The rest is good advice too.
@jwildeboer to this excellent rundown, I would add: keep calm and create art to share.
@jwildeboer The caring about your direct environment and the things you can impact is key, IMO. So much of the control the spectacle has around us is over-simplifying the world and our relations to those around us.
Trump, Koch Network, Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman are forming a fossil fuel axis alliance against any democracies acting on climate change.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-us-saudi-arctic-energy-rdif-ukraine-russia-capital/
Ending our dependency on oil means ending billionaire despots.
@Npars01 Not sure why you think that is relevant to my list of positive things to do?
@jwildeboer
Yes.๐ฏ Doing even the small things can make you feel less helpless in the face of the crisis we are is.
@jwildeboer
For the rest of us...
Keep calm and plant cherry tomatoes in a pot.
They grow almost anywhere, and are simple and cheap to maintain.
This is why you don't elect old fucks who are on deaths door to office, they don't give a damn about the future.
@contrasocial Can you please take my handle out of this subthread? I tried to share something positive and now you want to turn it in a very different direction. That's your freedom, but please don't include me in that. Thanks! @Npars01
@darwinwoodka Can you please take my handle out of this subthread? I tried to share something positive and now you want to turn it in a very different direction. That's your freedom, but please don't include me in that. Thanks! @Npars01
@collette Feel free to read my blog entry at https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/05/Cute-Homelab/ as an introduction :)
Positive things to do means also coping with the things the fossil fuel industry does to keep its preeminence.
They fund malign narratives about solar & wind energy and heat pumps.
They promote politicians who remove subsidies for green energy while ramping up fossil fuel subsidies.
They impose tariffs on inexpensive Chinese EV's and affordable solar panels.
Billionaires promote wasteful energy usage like cryptocurrency & AI data centers.
@jwildeboer
Thanks Jan, I've been meaning to sort out my owner server for a while now, I've read your blog
https://jan.wildeboer.net/2025/05/Cute-Homelab/ some good food for thought.
Do you know of any other good guides on this topic? I kind of interested in if I can (securely) run this a cloud server, and wake up remotely (WoL ?)
I wouldn't really need to access it that regularly
@Doomstrike If you have something in your LAN that you can reach from outside, sending WoLs works nicely with the little machines I use. See https://codeberg.org/jwildeboer/gists/src/branch/main/2025/20250723PowerStuff.md
Now my home router (fritz box) can be configured to send a WoL whenever someone tries to access a forwarded port from the internet side, so that could be an approach. I don't use it, though. I prefer to keep my homelab away from the internet :)
@highvoltage "Help your neighbours" isn't regionally limited in our digital age, IMHO.
@jwildeboer
Agreed. Feel "catched" with my reply ๐ which can be read as demotivating.๐ค
Still might help someone to know not being alone in feeling overwhelmed by the flood of shit + everything. I hope.
My general approach:
Just don't be an asshole.
It means, showing respect to someone, like spend a smile to the stressed cashier at the supermarket... , waving back at a toddler..
Keep doing those little, friendly things which cost oneself nothing... (but empathy).
That's what i still (can) do.๐
@jwildeboer
Thanks, yeah, I'm still a bit undecided on having it on the Internet, I guess as keeping it secure then becomes a hassle. I'll have to think about that
@Doomstrike I rent a few cheap VPSs (Virtual Private Server) for public services and make sure there's only public stuff on there, so in case of a hack/breach nothing is lost. My homelab is for private stuff. That separation has worked well for me since many years
@jwildeboer My neighbors are all trumpy assholes...I avoid them like the fucking plague... (though in this day and age you can't really say that, because we found out in 2020 that we don't even avoid The Plague like the plague..")
@ShredderFeeder Showing them consistently that they are wrong with their support for Trump is also part of the "helping your neighbour" in my list :)
I think calm doesnโt mean unfeeling. In parenting, we talk a lot about growing our capacity to hold feelings. So the feeling comes, you feel it fully, you respect it, but you are big enough to contain it without it overflowing and overwhelming.
This is obviously really hard and not always possible. But I really like the image. The feelings come as they must. But you practice staying calm through it. So that you can act and make decisions that align with your values.
@minmi @jwildeboer
Yeah. Got that.
(Don't know about the parenting situation though.)
Learned to contain/stay calm quite early.
It's all just to much (for me) to be able to cope with. #JohnCoffey And tbh, i am tired, *really* tired, to "contain" what i feel. #news #clichรฉInteractions
Picture me like a Powder keg containing lifelong retention.
My values mean, disadvantages for me in the daily live of nowadays society.
No patience for BS anymore.
So social distance is the best option.
@grootinside @minmi @jwildeboer
Just try to be uplifting, as you would like others to be. We can't give up.
@66gardeners @minmi @jwildeboer
After so many decades of being "uplifting" there seems nothing left in me to do so.
Some friendly gestures and trying not to be an asshole is all i can still do.
So i chose social distance.
Like George Carlin once said "i gave up on my species" but unlike him i feel no joy watching everything going down the drain.
#notjustsad
I am #JohnCoffey tired.
@grootinside No need to force positivity. Find your place that works for you, regardless of that being considered "social" enough by others. There's nothing wrong with that. I do hope you find peace that way and maybe at some point it will lead to more open doors. Who knows? @66gardeners @minmi
@jwildeboer good approach
- solar panels: got infected by micro inverters during the pandemic, next Iteration in the doing, would change a lot
- heat pump: installed one fรผr warm water first, next step not planned
- home lab: home assistant is a great piece of work
- surounded by others, likeminded and we spread the disease
change in small steps possible, we can be mad and angry but never give up
@jwildeboer I love this, and it can excellently inspire more and similar ideas.
@jwildeboer
Stay calm and make your own flow battery:
https://fbrc.dev/
Hopefully.
I'm trying to be positive. โ
It's batteries that are half negative.โ
We were hosting even our mailserver, but the cost of a "business" internet account went way up, so we moved that and all other public-facing stuff to a vps.
We are moving our cloud services from dropbox/google/microsoft/apple to nextcloud, using a provider in the EU (because the GDPR is your friend).
It would be easier to "stay calm" if our country that had not been taken over by fascists.๐ฒ๐ญ
@jwildeboer I used to pride myself on this until I had a therapist tell me it means Iโm out of touch with my emotions. Now Iโm supposed to check in with myself several times a day.
@jwildeboer Or .... don't be particularly calm -- be focused and angry... but in control.
@jwildeboer ik@bewaar de lastigste voor het laatst: de persoonlijke sever is nog een ambitie. Gaat volgens mij veel tijd inzitten die nu aan andere zaken opgaat. Veel tijd omdat ik niet voldoende kennis paraat heb vrees ik. Zoโn warmtepomp doen anderen voor je.
@jwildeboer I am finally allowed to install aircon (a2a heat pump) in the UK so I am moving forward with that. I volunteer at the local repair cafรฉ. I hope to have the money for solar someday. ๐ค
I donโt expect to have safe cycling infrastructure for decades unfortunately.
@jwildeboer it is hard to build community locally when people refuse to mask during an ongoing airborne pandemic. Disabled people are being left behind in a big way. We cannot leave the most vulnerable behind. And we cannot continue to catch covid which is mass disabling people with LC occurring from a single infection, or many infections in. People must protect themselves as part of their efforts to stay safe and have the ability to care for themselves.
Parts of that are The Serenity Prayer.
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Was an embroidery on the wall in our house when I was a kid.
There's more that touches on further points mentioned. This is not new. People have always dealt with this.
@hairylarry The #stoiclife in my original toot might hint at this not being new ;) Stoicism predates Christianity, BTW ...
@minmi @grootinside @jwildeboer This is an excellent strategy to respond to our current predicament and to grow as a person. It's as effective in adults and in children, especially if it comes early enough in development to last an entire lifespan. On our current horror, I find I can absorb more of what's happening in the news without turning away completely.
@Jude_theone479001 You just sit with it? I think some of these ideas are talked about a lot in an abstract way, but rarely in practical terms of what someone should specifically do, and also what they should do when they find they can't do that thing.
@minmi @grootinside @jwildeboer
@tokyo_0 @minmi @grootinside @jwildeboer Practically speaking, it's a learned skill often with a coach or teacher. Meditation is what I use and find it helps, but there are other methods.
@Jude_theone479001 Thank you - appreciate you taking the time to share, and I'm glad the meditation works for you. I've been trying some different meditations for years and some of them have helped, so it's particularly encouraging to hear you've had some success with that approach ๐งก
@minmi @grootinside @jwildeboer
@tokyo_0 @minmi @grootinside @jwildeboer There are so many ways to meditate you do have to find what suits you personally. I wish you the very best!
@Jude_theone479001 Thank you ๐ฉท
@minmi @grootinside @jwildeboer
I think itโs such a valid criticism. So much of the advice is like:
1. Donโt flee from the feeling
2. ๐คทโโ๏ธ๐ช๐ช
3. Enlightenment
I think meditation is probably the best advice, but I donโt do it, though I should. So if youโre like me, I can give some pointers as to what seems to work for me and my kids.
- remind yourself this feeling is just right now. Itโs just a guest. It can come in, and at some point it will leave.
- remind yourself the feeling is trying to tell you something and spend serious time trying to understand what that is
- make a plan of action and then do the action. I donโt think all people need this but I do.
- be around people who will hold you up when youโre stumbling through tough things
@minmi This is really immensely helpful โ thank you so much for taking the time to write all these pointers and share them. They're more practical and concise than anything else I've seen in literal years of looking โบ๏ธ I'm going to save this post and come back to it often โ thank you ๐
@Jude_theone479001 @grootinside @jwildeboer
Oh good! Iโm so glad to hear it. I hope itโs helpful. I do think itโs helped me. Hopefully itโs helping my kidsโฆ
I will say, one of the things about trying to teach a 3yo is you really have to learn to be incredibly clear and succinct in your advice ๐. Just really distill it way way down.
@minmi I'm sure it must be helping them a great deal, and giving them an excellent start in life. Managing emotions is probably the most important skill for succeeding in life, in my view, and having a solid grounding and awareness of the ideas around it, as well as the language to describe it, at that early age is going to be a tremendous asset for them, as well as them benefitting from the ways it's helped you, too.
Thatโs really just so kind of you to say. It means a lot to hear it, truly.
@minmi And I don't have kids but I can relate a bit to trying to teach things to three year olds. I used to teach English here and my youngest Japanese students were three ๐ซฃ It's a really lovely age, but communicating an abstract idea was practically impossible!
Thank you again for taking the time to share. Tips tailored for three year olds are exactly what I need ๐
@tokyo_0 @minmi @Jude_theone479001 @jwildeboer If you go on with this conversation. Can you please take me out of the mentions? Thank you.
Same for me, please @tokyo_0 @minmi @Jude_theone479001
Thank you for this list of "suggestions", it bears repeating over and over until the ideas take root in more heads.
A calm mind is strong, resilient, and focused. No matter what one can actually do in their individual situation; a rational, objective, and calm analysis can help one find their way to effective action.
I'd like to highlight the idea of premeditatio malorum and practising misfortune in #stoicism. Especially, maybe counter-intuitively, to anyone who reacts with anxiety and/or anger to Jan's post, or "the state of the world in general".
Stoicism isn't a one-size-fits-all pseudo-religuous solution to all problems for everyone, far from it, but I can whole-heartedly recommend reading up on its ideas, and see how it fits into one's mental model.
Anger turned into spite is a powerful motivator. Anxiety tempered by focus and objectivity is unstoppable.
Resist accepting defeat prematurely, while you still can.
@Gyroplast I prefer to think that patience and consistency will lead to the realisation of goals.
@jwildeboer
I agree. Turning all that anger and anxiety one feels eventually into calm is key.
Running on spite isn't what I wanted to propose, but I believe it's a way for some to rediscover one's strength and agency in matters of your own life and perception. Build up trajectory, so to speak, towards calmness.
It is difficult for me to properly differentiate from the abhorrent "just don't feel anxious/angry/depressed" in a few choice words here, so I rather won't try "defending" that unintended misconception, if anyone should have interpreted what I wrote as such.
Rather I'll just leave it here, with express intent not to be understood as "strict advice to just become stoic", and I'll get out of this thread again. The OP is great as it is, I don't want to derail it further.
Thanks again for sharing your perspective!
@jwildeboer @hairylarry It's a pretty widespread (dare I say "universal"?) approach to life.
It's front and centre with the Stoics, but also central to Buddhist and (philosophical) Daoist thought. You can find it in folk wisdom throughout the ages in bewildering varieties of cultures expressed in sometimes really neatly idiosyncratic ways.
It's probably one of the best rules of life ever turned into a pithy epigram.