Udhay Shankar N wrote on 1/8/20 8:02 PM January 8, 2020:
Like it says. What have you started or stopped believing in in 2019, and why?
I realized that my local Quaker Meeting and I are no longer headed in the same direction. Many of the people I admired and respected in the Meeting, the ones who were deeply engaged in the business of trying to live good lives and make the world a better place, have died, and the ones who remain seem to regard Meeting more as a social club than a place to do deep spiritual work.
In a similar vein, I realized that I deeply value quirky businesses where people come together to try to fill a need in the world. Many of these businesses provide mundane things at reasonable costs, and the people who work there are uniformly pleasant to work with.
Some examples are Dharma Trading company, Plantronics (which I only learned after interviewing there), Soak, freedrinkingwater.com, and many local shops and service businesses.
I have an increasing awareness of the tendency of scared people to turn to demagogues for leadership. All my life, I've paid attention to the silver linings in human social interaction, the ways we can share and cooperate and tend one another in tough times. I used to believe that we can grow beyond the wholesale slaughter of other human beings as a "solution" to our problems.
Over the past few years, I have come to view the US Constitution less as a vehicle for greater freedom for all, and more as a device to protect the institution of slavery. This has radically changed my perspective on things like the 2nd amendment.
I have come to worry that we're going to lose most or all of the forests all over the world due to climate change.
