So you want to change the world. How about starting with some kindness at the day-to day-level? There’s nothing more obnoxious than seeing people’s pretentious social media posts concerning some form of activism, and then witness them being utterly crappy people in real life, and not following through.

Wokeness (awareness concerning political and social issues), the unironic use of the word, is on its way out, a victim of its own success. MTV warned people to not use it back in 2016. SNL lampooned it. In a recent talk, Obama snuffed it. But the dangers of wokeness deserve to be understood. At its fundamentals, this kind of desperate urge to be seen as one with the times fosters frustrating hypocrisy. It consists of people who attend all sorts of activist rallies or boycotts, and then proceed to gossip or badmouth their classmates. It’s the people who pretend to be completely liberal or genuine, but make fun of you behind your back and have no amount of sincere kindness in them, which ultimately takes away from their so-called activism. 

It is worthwhile pointing out that the underlying problems of fake wokeness and hypocrisy remain the same across time. Whenever there is a powerful emotion felt by a sincere few, there is a massive attempt by the uninspired to mimic the real thing, often with comic results. Instead of feeling for the movement, people go through the motions, pretending to be involved without actually caring, and cast judgment on others who did not. 

Wokeness and fake wokeness can sometimes lead to a good outcome. A generation of young people, with varying degrees of actual knowledge about issues, may indeed have a positive impact and bring some amount of awareness to the issue. But as long as people don’t actually care about the subject and support it just to be trendy, any meaningful result will fail to occur. 

You can go to all the rallies or use as many hashtags as you want, but at the end of the day, your simple daily actions can be powerful enough to create a change. And if the way you act in school or towards your parents at home doesn’t align with your petitions or social media awareness posts, then you have no business pretending like you have any authority to preach. Make your thoughts, words and actions come together as one.

This isn’t to say that we should step away from all things political or heated. On the contrary, we should aim to broaden our views on the world and take a firm stance on issues. However, we need to make sure we have thoroughly acknowledged all possible perspectives and understood the movement for more than its face value. It’s much more important to consistently act upon your values, not just flaunt them to the world to prove yourself knowledgeable on any random issue. 

To quote Obama in a recent talk about political wokeness: “This idea [that] you’re always politically woke … you should get over that quickly. That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change”. So before you jump to post something on social media to prove your “wokeness”, maybe you should figure out what is actually happening. Read the news, learn, be genuine in your attempts to support an issue. Most importantly, follow up with them in the moments when you don’t think anyone is watching.