How can I cleanup, if Ii can't even eat! - "Sanitizer Solder" to be a legit JOB pt.2

For me, cleaning up isn't cheap. I could spend at least around Rp.20.000 per solo-mission. Which is roughly $1.99 I guess. (Don't even ask about the team missions, I can spend up to Rp,100.000 ($7 approx.) of my personal funds just to ensure that my teammates don't starve post-cleanup). These expenses aren't just the expendables like trash-bags or rubber-bands, but assets such as the scale, the ARP, and my entire sanitizer gear. Maintaining the ARP on a regular basis isn't that much of a wuss, but when damage occurs, which it inevitably will, I'd need to use the jigsaw, grinder, and drill, added with screws and stuff that I bought exclusively for ARP making and ARP maintenance for quite a price. To this day, I still haven't gotten that money back at all.  Its not that I mind. For years, since I was 13 years old back in 2010, I have been doing this from the heart, I never expected any pay. But adolescence struck me with the realization that if I don't make any money, I wouldn't be able to sustain the sanitizer's pollution slaying activities. Further worsened by my parents economic condition, we're struggling just to pay for taxes, and my expenses away in Lampung. Things are getting quite rough for my family.

However, I don't really fancy the idea of going down different roads just to make a buck, I don't want to be a sell-out. I want to be true to myself. Some other kids might advice joining an MLM business, online re-seller business, forex, bitcoin and whatnot. I don't want to invest too much time learning about money, because I don't want my life to be about collecting money--I want it to be about me serving society and the environment, and make a living out of it, so I can serve even more. I want to focus into developing and perfecting my craft, my product, or my idea, instead of focusing on the cash-grab aspect. However, as times are getting tighter and tougher, my room for creativity is getting squished and further squished by financial shortcomings. 

In the long term, I imagine sanitizing being a stable occupation. One can be a sanitizer, receive mission or assignment contracts, and choose which one to go and do, like you would when taking a quest in an RPG game. In your free time, you can supervise a recycling depot, incineration station, or a sanitizer training ground--and get paid for that through investments etc, pretty much like playing Assassins Creed 2 - revelations. But long until we've established a system in such sanitizers would live with extreme financial convenience, I'm going to have to figure out how the heck I am supposed to continue sanitizing from day to day at the present moment--just enough for me to promote/popularize the BRAND of cleanup that ASF sanitizers are bringing to the table.

At the moment, I'm thinking about starting a video series on my Youtube channel chronicling my journey, solo-cleaning throughout the nation. I will narrate the videos with my thoughts and experiences, stories, feelings, data from the field, to serve as some sort of video essay to accompany the video of me repetitively cleaning up probably from various camera angles in time-lapse, or probably also include a first person POV view once in a while. However, before I reach an audience of 1,000 subscribers, I will not be able to monetize the videos--according to Youtube's 2018 policy about video monetization. So I would need your best help to share the content I serve on Youtube to all of your friends and family on all media platforms. Also, to accompany that, I will be trying out Patreon, hopefully the income could help me better fund me and our cleanup operations and promote awareness of environmental conservation and the brand of "cool cleanup" that I am proposing through the sanitizer knights movement.

Of course, to be holistic, after we become considerably established as a community, ASF becomes established as a trusted institution for creating trash-killing warrior individuals, we will expand our entrepreneurial endeavors to creating a retail store for trash-picking gear, ARP factory, recycling plants, merchandises, and many more. We will socially invest those resources into further building institutions such as a santizer knights academy, where students educate themselves about environmental awareness and the warrior ethic, to become fully fledged warriors that have a full capacity to bring an entire city to cleanup plastic pollution, also to create regular environmental community meetups, etc. 

"Sanitizer Soldier" to become a legit JOB, pt.1 : introduction - my dreams

I’ve spent my youth training, educating, and conditioning myself for a job that doesn’t even exist yet.

I want to become a sanitizer, a professional cleanup practitioner. I expected to grow up in a world where cleanup is an advanced and complex occupation the way the military, doctors, and rocket scientists are. But the current reality in our society doesn’t seem to have any indication that we are headed towards that direction, unless I make it so we do.

Why cleanup? The age old question, I will answer briefly. Because, misplaced pollutants wont by themselves dissipate or evacuate from the polluted areas—the ocean won’t clean itself from plastic, you can’t wait away the trash piled up in the forest, what we put out there, will stay out there unless we put conscious effort into recovering them—to restore ecosystem balance.

Boyan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup project sparks some optimism in favor of us cleaning up the ocean whilst sitting our asses down as the plastic gets cleaned up. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. But when the tech gives us convenience, some space to chill, its cause feels disconnected to us. The ocean cleanup array is designed and manufactured by a few smart-heads, a small percentage of the population. They work they’re assess off 24/7 to get their device to work, to clean up the trash irresponsibly discarded by the rest of the population. Simply donating, doesn’t feel like a fair investment—or, fine actually—to pay for the damage done to the planet (because the meaning of money weighs differently for everyone, rich people see an a hundred dollar bill as change, whereas poorer people see it as a months-worth of food).

Human beings are emotionally driven animals, like many other animals, actually. We are not robots that can do things based off of logical command prompts. Our subconscious mind, stuff like intuition, etc. has played a large role in our survival. That’s why we simply don’t flinch when bombarded by stats, numbers, and raw data of the amount of plastic in the ocean. But once you see a turtle strangled by plastic, even though it might be imagery that is way out of plastic pollution’s context, you feel that aww sensation. Pity, anguish, and guilt, probably.

Regardless of the stats, and regardless of logic, our hearts push us towards stuff that historically, in small groups would’ve made sense to do (but not as an 8 billion people tribe).

We are driven by dramatic, personal, erratic, and mentally stimulating problems. That’s why we react so quickly to war, or a terrorist attack, we instinctively know what to do or where to run for the sake of our survival (or at least we’d be clever enough to know we’re in danger, regardless on our abilities to save ourselves). But when it comes to slow, unfelt, and painless problems that can only be described with graphs, numbers, and abstract calculations, such as the rise of plastic pollution, our brains don’t have the same reaction, although the scale of the danger is the same. It takes time for us to comprehend the massive threat of plastic pollution. Sure, the attack on Pearl Harbor was just the tip of the iceberg, but it takes less than a gunshot to tell people that they are threatened. However, people don’t feel threatened when they see a piece of garbage in the river, nor do they feel threatened when they see a whole pile of trash sitting by a river-bank. You know what? I do, I feel threatened by that. That why I want to become a sanitizer. I see the Great War ahead of us, and I’m terrified that most people don’t.

My dedication and commitment, is based off of my ability to dramatize the situation in my head. To communicate to the subconscious mind, using a language it understands. My prefrontal cortex can count how many B-29s are above me and ready to drop bombs on me, and calculate how far I should be to avoid the blast, thus, I can determine how far I should run. All that wont motivate me to initiate an escape—I’ll just end up debating myself on whether I should run to the left or to the right. "Wait, what? Ain’t nobody got time for that! Run!", Says my emotional mind, thinking about my family and that I want to reunite with them.

Same, no matter how much you know about the data, stats, and whatnot about plastic pollution, you aren’t going to initiate action if there isn’t any emotional stimuli. The subconscious mind, which is the center for processing habits, feelings, mood, etc. Doesn’t really understand upper-brain-stuff such as numbers and facts, so your prefrontal cortex has to find a way to “whip the bull by its ass to get it going” (the bull being your subconscious).

I have come up with a system design in which cleanup can be sustained long enough to rid the ecosystem from scattered leakage. But also go through a healthy retirement trajectory the way ex-sumo-wrestlers can get slim, and lean as if they never fought the war they did in their youth, letting them to function properly as elderly seniors in society (by that logic, since cleanup will only be done up to a certain period of time in human history, the well-committed sanitizer veterans will go on to do other stuff with the same spirit and similar skill-set—unlike military veterans whose role in the peaceful world render their years of violent conditioning useless). Which I will explain in this series of articles, "Sanitizer Soldier" to become a legit JOB.
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Cleanup is good, but like a Japanese bullet train being good, it’s no good on the moon. A train needs lots of supporting factors for the whole transportation mode to be holistic. It needs a station, a refueling depot, a garage, all of which need different maintenance performed by different people of different specialties. If you time-travelled back into the medieval era to slay dragons and stuff, and brought with you an Abrams Tank, sure you’d be able to blow off a few shots, but then, you’ll need to refuel, fuel didn’t even exist yet, you’d also need to repair it once in a while, it’s not like you can park the tank in the stable along with the rest of the cavalry.

To say that the ocean cleanup is not holistic, or that sanitizers are not holistic, is just a remark saying that the concept is way ahead of its time. Not in a good way though, but in a “we haven’t yet developed a system in which this thing would be effective” kind of way.

So, way before I can enjoy the piercing stench of half-rotten organic trash as I slay plastic litter in a DSTO-cleanup operation with my troops, I’m going to have to make sure that the region has a fully functioning TPST or MRF, a well-maintained armada of transporting-garbage trucks, a well-managed sanitary landfill or incinerator or eco-brick manufacturer, or whatever kind of final trash processing facility (people are still debating on what’s the best), and I’m going to have to make sure that the teachers are doing a good job educating, the government making good progress regulating, and making sanitizers look cool to the public, so that more and more kids wanna grow up to be like me, and join the force; making it stronger, so we can get this shit done way sooner. By sooner I mean like 200 years. Be patient, cleaning shit up is gonna take longer than making the mess in the first place.