What is LDSFG?
Let’s Do Some Effing Good is a quiet rebellion, a personal quest, an individual journey toward self-worth and fulfillment. It is not an attempt to save the world, because the world can no longer be saved. It’s a movement for like-minded people to embrace the chance to give up the idea that we’re heroes, that someday we’ll be president, that the effects of our footfalls on the earth are anything but a single lost moment destined to be forgotten by the inevitable heat death of the universe. And in the face of it all, we’ll still do what we feel like we have to. LDSFG is about listening to ourselves.
LDSFG is a channel that uncovers the most horrible and sordid episodes in human history, and every ongoing catastrophe that’s slow-rolling us into extinction. And it shows you what you, specifically, can do about all or any of it, should you so choose. The philosophy behind LDSFG is about choice -- voluntarily taking up arms (your own two arms and nobody else’s, of your own free will and accord) and doing what little you can to affect change in your direct sphere of influence.
How I Decided to do Some Effing Good
The collection of essays called Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, written by Paul Kingsnorth, started me along the path to discovering LDSFG. The idea that Kingsnorth put forth might be summed up by the stance that global change against established harmful systems is near impossible to achieve, and that one’s worth is better judged by one’s self, off on a more solitary journey, doing whatever good can be done alone.
Where Kingsnorth established his own private environmentalist kingdom as a family homestead, I’ll establish my own fact-based infotainment eutopia. LDSFG is my homestead. I’m hoping that others will arrive with their own tools and even moderate spirits, ready to weed away the harms of a world that has left reason in the wake of a growing madness. The goal is not to do this for any lofty aims, like saving the world--it’s specifically because I believe the world can no longer be saved that I do it. Selfishly, it’s more for me, and my own fulfillment. So that I can say that I’ve done whatever good I can alone, and judge my own worth by the quiet effort I take toiling away at this new remote digital homestead. My journey to YouTube host was not a straight line. In fact, I did everything I could to live a straight-laced life with a “safe” backup plan career and to relegate my passions for art and social critique to the boundaries of my mind and the periphery of my nights and weekends. Despite all signs from the universe (in which I don’t really believe, but for the sake of this intro blurb, we’ll pretend), I dug in my heels and listened to conventional wisdom in order to inhabit the person I thought I was supposed to be. But life had always had other plans for me. Or maybe I simply had other plans for myself, fighting against the authenticity of which propelled me ever deeper into what Kierkegaard’s brand of Existentialism would call despair. When my own mutated cellular assassins tried to disrupt my life by killing me dead at 25, my adulthood was forcibly interrupted before it ever had a chance to truly begin. Cancer gave me a new perspective, sure, but not in the romantic Hollywood sense that every day is a gift. My takeaway was more Buddhist-leaning, that the fundamental building block of life is trauma, existence is anguish, and no one can help you. I had lots of fun with that information. I started a semi-popular blog in the community and became a voice for young adult cancer and an advocate for patients pushed to the fringes of the medical community. I created a name for myself by helping to take down those who prayed on cancer patients at their lowest points, and through working collaboratively with major institutions for funding research and advocacy like the Cancer Research Insitute and the American Academy of Dermatology. After treatment, I fought my way back to NYC where I’d moved after college, met my wife, and tried very hard to be a real solid human even though I felt like a shadow person borne from the hidden evil corners of the void. I pursued my conventional life, my conventional career, my conventional thoughts and perceived failings, which I would never quite shake, and would make me feel less than at most waking moments of my life. In a bewildering spark of clearheadedness (though more likely it had been slowly pressurizing for over half my life), I decided to completely give up. The seed of positive nihilism had been planted in me and grew until I could no longer ignore its hold. And that’s what Let’s Do Some Effing Good represents to me. We are smack in the middle of the great garbled misinformation bottleneck of the Internet age. It’s an incredibly delicate moment for the human race. Maybe we’ll survive, maybe we won’t. I don’t know. I don’t have to care. I only have to do one thing, and that’s listen to my real authentic self. I think it would be kind of cool if you came along and tried that with me, too.
Episodes and Transcripts
