There’s a culture that exists, especially in a place like Canada, that you need to be consistently active in social justice. You must be working constantly to try and make the world a better place, or you’ll be labeled as a “bad person”. Whether that to yourself, peers, or colleagues. The biggest issue I find with this is the amount at which you’re supposed to be helping. There’s a very simple saying I learnt in my 9th grade science class.
Nothing is harmful to you in small quantities.
By itself, this sounds incorrect, the first instinct I had was to question my teacher, with something like “won’t a little bit of cyanide or rat poison kill you”. All she had to respond was that there’s a quantity of those things that also won’t kill you. She then went on a tangent about being careful with what we consume. The lesson does stand true though, but I find it applies more to the humanities aspect of things, instead of science.
The more and more we try to advocate and change the world, the more of a toll it takes on our mental health.
To prove this, we can look at someone like Greta Thunberg, who is a solid activist, being bullied by people over and over about her beliefs, her policies, even the way she looks or dresses. She can’t escape this because she’s a public figure. But even she takes mental health days, to step back from activism and lives her life as a teenager.
Sometimes, we try to save the world, but we destroy ourselves in the process.
I’m pleading with you here, even if you’re not that involved in things like advocating, an overdose of anything hurts your system, take mental health days, take time off, and live your life in the balance that’s best for you. Society will always have very high expectations, but there is absolutely no requirement for you to fulfill them.
