Before deciding a romantic partner make sure these 5 things are aligned

After a few weeks of reflection, I summarized a quick practical guideline to evaluate whether or not someone is fit to pursue a deeper, romantic relationship with. However, these elements apply for platonic relationships as well as professional relationships.

When choosing a romantic partner to spend the rest of our short life with, its paramount that all of these 5 (there is a 6th one that matters especially for romantic relationships) are deemed as aligned. In platonic or professional relationships not all elements need to align, but the more do, the more long lasting they might become. Slight exception for the 6th element, I don't have data or experience that shows platonic & professional relationships can function with that involved. 

Ranked from most important to least important, but still if one of these factors are misaligned, it will criple the relationship and eventually misalign others. 

1. Spiritual (agreement on the point of life itself)

There is an unspoken and fundamental truth that everyone believes in as being the point of existing and will determine the decisions made throughout ones life. Whether its a certain version of an afterlife, arbitrary rituals, or conception of the divine or lack thereof. As impossible as it is to see the divine exactly the same, both sides need to be able to operate within a similar spiritual framework. As a friend of mine once said, "you want to be with someone who has a similar level of halal & haram as you." Said jokingly. Arguing about theology may be a fun intellectual exercise between colleagues; but for a life-partner, different views on this topic may lead to misalignment on the most fundamental structure that governs the course of our life, the belief of what ought to be. 

2. Emotional (acknowledging the invisible pain)

You can't tell everyone everything. Emotional alignment is when you can tell someone everything and they can tell you everything, and by tell, it doesn't always mean verbally. It can also be in the way both of you get how each other are feeling without having to actively express the emotion. Alignment in this area can indicate relatively equal frequency of each other asking "are you okay?" and when they are not, for them to explain & for us to listen doesn't feel like a chore, but something we'd naturally want to do. 

3. Intellectual (no need to dumb down or to pretend to understand)\

Sometimes, we need to explain complicated concepts without having to explain the meaning of every word we say, because if we do, we'll waste so much time in the explanating definitions we often lose the energy to get to our actual point. On the other side, the other person feels like they need to pretend to understand just so you can get to your point, knowing how frustrated you get when they ask too many questions. You want to be with someone with whom your brain is adequately stimulated, not too smart that you're slowing them down, not too stupid that you'd have to simplify too much. 

4. Physical (its just, right)

There are two parts of physical alignment, there is the absolute and the arbitrary. The absolute includes matters such as health, fitness, habits, that have a direct influence on quality of life, schedules, and capacity. Arbitrary however, are elements such as height, race, skin tone, eye size, and other non-performance related physical attributes, mostly aesthetics--what people are often refering to when talking about types. You can always be athletic, but you can't become African American if you're Asian. However, being aligned in both kinds of types is crucial for long term relationships so that resentment and insecurity don't build up. 

5. Financial (the ability to logistically facilitate life together.

Out of the 5, this is the cruelest in my opinion, because it involves a lot of external factors. The other 4+1 can be absolutely perfect, but if this aspect is misaligned, it can slowly bring down the entire relationship. Financial alignment doesn't necessarily mean both sides have to be equally rich/poor, it comes in the form of having similar money philosophy, spending habits, and access to resource. Money philosophy and therefore spending habits are internal, but access to resource is often dictated by external forces; the job market, gas prices, war, famine, civil unrest, can all lead to the loss of access to resource. Without access to resource, there's simply nothing to build all the other aspects on--the reason I put this last however, is because relationships without the other 4+1 may seem to work on the surface, but is in reality two people trapped in not a romantic relationship but a business arrangement. 

There is one more element that was brought up by a friend of mine and i realized is very important:

6. Sexual (similar level of libido)

Once established as a romantic relationship, its crucial that both sides have similar sexual expectations. Because in a monogamous relationship, the romantic partner is the ONLY person that sex will ever be had with. Any form of disatisfaction will lead to frustrations that strike at the existential level -- this needs to be communicated clearly so that the other side may accomodate; or decide, they can't and not continue before too much emotional investment has been made.

Anyways, I am aware these aspects are very low-res. But its good to lay out just as a rough guideline for anyone who intends on going to the next step with anyone. 

External Impact-oriented vs Internal Self-oriented environmental action

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening"

Is a quote we hear a lot when discussing political positioning among environmental activists. This sentence is often use to throw shade at environmental figures or institutions that seem to lack a spine in taking a stance the face of tough conflicts of interest involving the environment. This sentence has many implications, but what pronounces itself most loud to me is the base assumption that gardening is inferior--perhaps morally--to the broader meaning of Environmentalism 

The poor gardener unfortunately took a stray. But if we remove the implicit inferiorization of gardening, 

"Environmentalism is like gardening with class-struggle."

We can understand the relationship between the ideas as stages of progression, gardening being the baseline condition for environmentalism to develop, not something entirely different. 

Understanding the relationship between impact oriented cleanups and self oriented cleanups.

I've been recieving comments such as:

"Why do you believe cleaning up alone is better than building a collective initiative to clean up the river faster?"

"If the world is free from trash, would that stress you out?"

These questions fundamentally fail to see the big picture, for one, I never said what I'm doing is better (whatever "better" means). Also, enjoying cleanup is not a deliberate surrending to a sissiphean reality, its a mental reframing to psychologically sustain ourselves in our efforts towards a cleaner world. The journey towards a cleaner world, is like a marathon, and enjoying cleanup is like the small things we encounter along the way that motivate us along the path, not the path itself. 

But what about the collective initiative to clean up the river faster? Lets talk about that.

1. External impact-oriented cleanups. Efforts whose success is measured by the quantifiable impact on the environment that seek to scale need to pay close attention to logistics. When impact becomes an expectation, those who are tasked with delivering that impact need to be paid (and this money has to come from somewhere). This results in a work environment where the people involved are filtered very broadly due to the commonality of economic interest, i.e., no one gives a rat ass how much your soul connects with the environment so long as you displace a certain tonnage of trash per week, you're going to recieve pay. It doesn't matter if you hate yourself doing so, vibe poorly with your co-workers, or want to quit as soon as you recieve enough money to move on to the next thing. Its a very transactional dynamic that although shallow, gets the job done. Or does it? Here are some of the ways professional cleanups can backfire, leading to the perpetuation of the initial mismanagement that caused the pollution:
• Enabling littering
• When people become aware that its someones job to cleanup after their mess, the consequence of littering feels elusive. Outsourcing collective responsibility to a single institution can put a lot of strain on that institution especially since the workload is practically infinite/unbounded.
• Job inertia
•  More dangerously, people will continue to litter believing they are helping workers stay in their job. The people working as cleaners will also encourage & allow people to keep littering because that behavior is what keeps putting food on their table. 
• Greenwashing
• Scaling up operations requires huge capital and this money needs to come from somewhere. We can't expect to reach operational surplus from trading recovered materials alone without spending some time operating at a deficit -- during which we'll need capital injection. The government rarely gives a damn, but corporations, especially the bad guys are usually the most generous; since they would benefit the most from having their brand be known to support environmental action. This is great for short term strategic action, but given the two things I listed before, it can end up being a cycle, in which, the organizations carrying out the cleanups can be seen as profiteering the issue.
• My recommendation: Professional work needs to be excusively applied towards system-based operations. Waste collection, waste sorting, and waste management are all in-system processes that have clear physical boundaries between work and not work (the LTCR, Legal Trash Collection Route). You know when you've entered the MRF, its go time. But outside of the MRF, its not your job to deal with litter. As a garbage collector for example, you should only pick up trash deposited to the designated bins instead of scraping clutter in random areas. By adhering to this, you will force society to take its part instead of continuing to allow society to preserve their messy ways that lead you to more and more unexpected work
2. Internal/Self oriented cleanups. From a systems POV, the responsibility to declutter the environment from litter has to be handed back to the ones who caused it, not oursourced to a professional entity to take care of stuff. This is because to the system, littering is a random occurance in place and time, therefore difficult to build a system around. WE need to be the ones to take initiative, not professionally but as an act of responsibility towards the environment. In terms of logistics, collective efforts need way less capital if the load is distributed throughout the population. It costs way less for 100 people to make a conscious decision not to litter, compared to if you had to pay 5 people cleanup the litter from 95 people. You will still need to pay people to run the LTCR, but not to clean-up. By realizing how the system needs pro-bono community efforts, the challenge then is to create internal motivation to act; as opposed to external motivation (money & instantly apparent impact). The emphasis on internal motivation aims to awaken the realization in people that the positive transformation generated from cleaning up goes both ways. Like pushing an object many times your mass, it will effect you more than it effects the object. 

Going back to the quote, 

 "Environmentalism is like gardening with class-struggle."

Instead of framing it:

"Cleaning up without being paid delivering impact, is just hobby cleaning"

We can frame it:

"Impact oriented cleanups are like hobby cleaning with an added layer of incentive and expectations"

Conclusion

Hobby cleaning is a collective bare minimum that everyone should be doing, professional cleanups should be done strategically as to not create perpetuation/mission creep, and in-system waste management should be professionally carried out with clear set boundaries.

The 3 Joys of Pro-bono Cleanup

"Pro bono" is short for the Latin phrase pro bono publico, meaning "for the public good." It describes professional work done voluntarily and without charge. 

The fact that I do cleanup this way surprises a lot of people, they assume I'm doing this as a paying job. Being an activity most avoid due to the repulsive nature of handling waste or social stigma that associates practicing the activity as being a failure or of lower social stature, its uncommon to hear someone not only do it out of free will, but to extract maximum joy from it to the point of addiction.

The most basic joy comes from the morally affirmative nature of the act. By doing so, you confirm to yourself that you are a good person doing good. But moral affirmation is not enough for sustained motivation since absolute good is the absolute riddance of the issue. After doing it for awhile realizing the insignificance of your individual contribution, you'll quickly build resentment; be that towards industry, society, the government, I've even seen people blame the rain for bringing in trash, allthough all those factors play a partial role in the issue (some bigger, some smaller, some occasionally, some not at all but seemingly so) those are all large external factors that are beyond individual control.

Losing sense of control can feel maddening, it can lead to anxiety, depression, helplessness, which might feel justified, but my friend, you are but a tiny speck that is not going to live forever, you musn't waste your life carrying the sins and burdens of our entire civilization on your shoulders. You should set boundaries as to how big of the problem you can solve, and focus on just that. 

Start by scrapping the idea of cleaning up because its "good." Not only does it create a near unattainable expectation of net positive impact, but this attitude creates a false sense of moral superiority. This can negatively bloat the ego and make it less open to accepting the fact that sometimes good intentions don't end up in net positive outcomes. Don't use cleanup as a way to feel like you're a good person. 

Instead, what has worked for me for over 13 years of cleaning up alone has been these 3 things:

1. Have fun in the field: enhancing cleanup experience. The activity itself has to be carried out in a stimulating way. Not boring, not overwhelming. Too little trash and you're understimulated, too much trash and you're overwhelmed. Focus not on what the environment ends up being, but rather on your personal capacity to remove the pollutants from nature. Goof around a little, dance, do flips, run around, sing, let your inner child express itself. For me, cleanup has been a safe-space where I can heal from the cruel world that judges and mocks. Because all the people who mock and judge, you don't see them picking up trash - its all the humble and encouraging ones here :)

2. Write down your progress: documentation of tracable and quantifiable data. From 2013-2026 I've personally removed 2,987.91 kg of plastic trash from natural ecosystems (avg 213 kg/year). Its not a lot compared to the amount of waste we all collectively litter to the environment. But based on the OECD's estimate of global plastic littering, my average annual cleanup of 213 kg/year is equivalent to the estimated annual plastic litter generated by roughly 1,500 people. I know these are rough estimates that might not be entirely correct, but simply knowing that what I did was real and quantifiable, is enough to keep be hooked without overwhelming me. 

3. Create content: the immortalization of your efforts into digital media. I've been uploading my cleanups to YouTube since 2013. At the time, TikTok and IG reels where random people can just get picked up by the algorithm was not a thing yet, so I didn't upload with the hopes of gaining traction at all. Just seeing myself doing the cleanups from a computer screen was enough to give me a sense of fulfillment. There was pleasure in documenting, rewatching, being nostalgic about the missions I did. Little could I have predicted that 10 years after I started, I would go super viral and have my videos reach millions of viewes, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers to my page - I've even got to the point where while travelling to Jakarta, I'd get recognized quite often. See, you shouldn't upload for the sake of approval, because its an external factor that comes and goes. Even as you go viral, you should upload for the sake of yourself. So that your future self can rewatch it and be reminded of his purpose if someday he goes astray, so your children can see the meaningful life you lived in your youth, to share to people who matter and to whom you matter aswell. 

Those are the 3 joys of cleanup - to me. Yours truly, Marhara the Sanitizer. 

You don't see "getting paid" as being one of them, or "going to heaven" as being one of them. What you deserve to recieve from the act is somewhat difficult to gauge so my mindset has been: "its better not to expect, and just enjoy what you can." Because the cost of preventing a small part of the problem is difficult to justify making an invoice to bill someone, and if you do find a way to valuate your work to whom do you send the bill? Cleaning the environment is our common responsiblity that would be much lighter were we to distribute the load widely across the population. Although it's true that industry plays a huge role, we aren't passive items that are subject to the "greater powers" out there, collectively, our collective choice, will become our collective reality. 

Manual vs Automatic Cleanup Efforts - Groundwork to End the Debate

 I've gotten a lot of shit from people for picking up plastic one by one. They say I should "use my brain" to develop technologies for more scalable approaches that require less manual involvement instead of "muscling-through" the problem which they percieve as performative.

They talk so confidently as if they are so sure that I haven't gone through the exact same thought process for the past 10 years of doing what I do - like I haven't considered automation myself and I'm just purely close-minded or stupid for not implementing it.

My social media account, filled with footage of me picking up trash, the same exact thing every video, is an archive of my personal contributions that I compiled for my own enjoyment. I am aware of my miniscule contribution in the face of the quantity of plastic that is out there; and I do it not to claim that I am solving it on behalf of other people, but just taking out my share of it.

By the people for the people

Fast moving consumer goods manufacturers (FMCGs) are to blame for the quantity of stuff that exists, but for it to be out and about in the ecosystem, is our collective fault for not handling it properly. Even though tonnes of plastics are produced each second, they were sold to individuals who act as a railroad switch derailing it out of the anthtroposphere (the sphere of human activity). Every single snack wrapping, plastic bottle, has come in contact with somebody's hands, somebody's lips, we were very intimate with those things we throw away. To say that we have no fault in its presence in the open environment when we at some point had absolute control of its fate is a shameless relinquishment of accountability.

If you zoom in and focus on the trash itself, automated cleanup efforts seem like they solve the problem, but if you zoom out and see the trash in the context of society, you see how automated cleanup efforts only enable improper disposal behavior; by softening the blow to the perpetrators - people get to keep littering. Allthough this can also be the case with manual cleanup, if done by a community, it creates a value shift in society. Because when people are involved, they feel it, and feelings propagate faster and further in society than technology implementation. Thoughts and feelings are what values are, values influence behavior, and behavior influences the physical world.

Machine Boneyard or problem profiteering

there will come a time in the future when cleanup is no longer needed, when people dispose of waste properly and municipalities perfect their collection systems. The machines built during the times of plastic being all over the place will all be retired to sit somewhere in a museum or for the most part recycled for their parts. Putting an end to the "great plastic war" of the 21st century. But if we've learned anything from industrailization and wars; once the big one stops, small ones will "be made up" to serve the already-existing industry. Developing an industry to procure machines at scale will involve creating jobs, developing networks of trade, and lobbying to secure government contracts to sustain the company. Once established, the industry carries with it huge momentum - you can't just tell people, "Okay we don't need professionals anymore, the world is free from plastics, you can all just do something else." The momentum has to go somewhere, and if the company fails to evolve by shifting its mecahanisms to solve the relevant problems of its time, it will drag the only problem it knows how to solve into the future just so it can keep being seen as solving it. 

You might say, "Wait a minute, isn't that exactly what you're doing? You're just cleaning up slowly so you can always be seen as solving it, basically dragging out the hours!" Not if its done by more people because they finally see how its so fun. Picking up trash isn't rocket science, even a dog can be trained to do it. To scale the activity is to instill this action into habit, and instill the habit into culture. Once it's solved communally, we have nothing left lying around but the memory and pride of having been a part of it. Trust me, this problem could be solved in one generation if we invest in education more than machine procurement; both are important, but if education is done perfectly there will be no need for the field fixes, meanwhile field fixes can be done perfectly and it will barely make up for the lack of education. I can change what I'm doing in a heartbeat because its an independent activity, I'm not worried about defunking equipment or having to restructure an entire company. I can just move to waste management and composting once cleanup is no longer a need.

--this blog is still being worked on--