The Work Is Never Wasted

Writing and Resistance When It Feels Like No One Is Listening

Some days I sit back after writing something tender or furious or half-ragged with hope, and I wonder if it made a single ripple. Maybe you’ve felt it too. The soft thud of posting into the void. The ghost ache of giving something sacred away to the scroll, only to have it disappear in a puff of algorithms and apathy.

We say the truth. We say it with our chests. We talk about repair and ritual and reclaiming the world from the corporations that would chew it to ash for a quarterly return. We offer it in good faith, but sometimes it feels like building sandcastles while the tide is already up around our ankles.

It’s exhausting. Of course it is. Especially when the needle never seems to move, or it moves the wrong way. Especially when cruelty is rewarded, and empathy is treated like a branding exercise. Especially when the fire you built to keep everyone warm is mistaken for a spotlight and you’re left shivering, unsure if anyone else still remembers why you lit it in the first place.

But I don’t believe in despair as a stopping point. And I don’t believe that just because something isn’t seen right away, it isn’t working.

Because that’s not how seeds grow.

The Myth of Momentum

Everything about this world tells us that if we’re not being seen, we’re not being useful. That unless something goes viral or turns into a policy or earns a payout, it didn’t count.

But those are empire metrics. That’s the logic of a dying machine.

If your only measure of impact is visibility, you’re going to miss all the quiet revolutions already underway. You’re going to miss the teenager who read your words and decided not to give up. The single mum who finally asked for help. The elder who felt understood. The burnt-out activist who kept going because your story reminded them why they started.

This is not performative work. This is pressure-cooked magic. This is compost and kindling and conversation in back rooms between people who remember how to keep each other alive when the lights go out.

It may not feel like momentum. But it is.

Real change rarely arrives on a red carpet. It shows up in soil. In systems that outlive spectacle. In small choices made again and again, even when they’re boring, even when they’re quiet. We are told that the point of everything is to scale, to grow, to conquer. But some things are sacred because they resist those terms.

There is power in care that cannot be bought or branded. There is defiance in teaching someone how to tincture their own medicine, how to plant kale between council flats, how to grieve out loud when the world expects you to get over it.

The work that actually shifts culture doesn’t look like a podium. It looks like practice. It looks like community fridges and aunties on WhatsApp and people crying together in someone’s lounge after a death no one else marked. You don’t need permission for that kind of work. And you don’t need a viral moment to know it matters.

The Gods Don’t Count Clicks

I mean that both figuratively and literally. Whatever your cosmology, whatever divine forces you commune with, whether through psalms or plants or physics, they aren’t measuring your worth in shares and stats.

They are watching how you show up. How you keep showing up. How you hold the line when it would be easier to look away.

Every poem. Every meal. Every community noticeboard or herb bundle or hand-sewn blanket. Every post that made someone feel less alone. It all counts. And not just metaphorically. You’re building continuity in a world that wants us dismembered. You’re reminding people that we belong to each other. You’re making memory.

And that matters more than any algorithm ever will.

What We Make Will Outlive Them

Sometimes the world pretends not to care. But the world is made of people. And people remember.

Not always right away. Not always the loudest ones. But the ones who matter, the ones who are listening beneath the noise, they remember the truth when they hear it. Even if they can’t name it. Even if they don’t say thank you.

We don’t plant because we expect applause. We plant because someone else planted for us.

So we keep doing it.

Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Because every empire falls eventually. And what matters is what we’re tending underneath the rubble. The mycelial webs. The oral histories. The friendships that outlast funding cycles.

What we’re building isn’t fragile. It’s just early. So yes, it feels bleak. And yes, we are tired. And yes, the odds are stacked like sandbags against a flood.

But we are not here to be hopeful only when it’s easy. We are here to remember what lives beneath the fear. We are here to name the sacred even when no one is clapping. To cook for each other even when the government cuts food aid. To make something beautiful even if it only lasts a week.

That’s the kind of power they will never understand. And that’s why it scares them.

We don’t need to wait for proof that what we’re doing matters. We are the proof.

And one day, someone will look back and say: That’s where it started. That was the kindling. That was the warmth. That was the thing that made me believe it could be different.

And they won’t care how many likes you got. They’ll just be grateful that you never stopped lighting the fire.