You can make a difference—no really, you can! Turn off the water while brushing your teeth, two gallons of water saved in a day! Get that shower down from ten minutes to five, ten gallons saved in a day! You don’t need to relax, after all, certainly not in one of the few ways affordable for you to do so. Who cares if you love the feel of hot water on your skin after a grueling day? You have to sacrifice! Bonus points if you can get that shower down to three or four minutes, because someone has to make up for the water so-called AI guzzles every time someone thinks they’re going to change the world by asking a language learning model an introspective question.
Really, think of how much you, personally, are staunching the gushing wound of water loss when you dutifully carry your half-drunk glass of stale water outside to bestow it upon the nearest grateful wild plant. You gave back to the Earth! Didn’t pour it down the drain! Of course, that data center a half-mile from your city’s water plant gulps down four-million gallons a day to cool its equipment, all of it burned off into the atmosphere so the socials can serve you that properly-targeted ad because, yes, a twelve-dollar single package of fitness protein ramen was exactly what you wanted to buy this morning.
What’s that? It wasn’t? Ah, well, they can’t get it right all the time, can they?
And they don’t need to, do they? Because you are here. You and the others like you, the ones who care. The ones who feel deeply, the ones always taught to do the right thing, the ones susceptible to the message. Yes, Good Girls, Good Boys, Good Kids, they’re talking to you—the dangerous ones, whose attention needs diverting.
Because if you aren’t constantly scrutinizing every daily aspect of your water usage, or carefully washing and sorting the plastic recyclables that are never going to be recycled, and dutifully taking your reusable cup to the coffee shop each day, and wondering if you broke even, environmentally speaking, on the number of uses you got out of your reusable plastic shopping bag before it fell apart, or calculating whether it’s better to buy the laundry detergent in the plastic jug versus ordering the detergent sheets that come in the cardboard box, because does the plastic get negated by the fuel costs of shipping the latter and—
AND. There is no end to the AND, no end to the plethora of ways you can be made to scrutinize your own life, your own choices, your own actions. And the kicker is that it would never work if you didn’t care.
That guy you get so angry with at work because he gleefully throws his trash into the recycling bin, and you sort it all out later, even though you know it doesn’t matter because that plastic’s not really getting recycled? Yeah, that guy gives zero fucks. He’s not taking short showers and crunching budget numbers to see if he can afford a more fuel-efficient car. He’s getting excited about tax deductions for work trucks and seeing if he can start an LLC before the end of the year to get a “free” business truck. At least, he was, until you methodically and—yes, more than a little gleefully—explained how tax deductions work. Namely, that a business has to make money for you to deduct from. It was a great moment.
Anyway, he’s not feeling shit about the environment and you might, on your very best, most dutiful Good Girl/Boy/Kid day, where you do everything right, maybe make up for his wasteful ass. So think about that for five seconds. Stop buying the lie that you’re better than him for your excellent choices. Stop basking in the righteousness of your superiority and realize that you’re chained to him, like a positive to a negative. You’re the whipping boy in this scenario, except no one forced you here. They seduced you, with promises of a world made better by your personal responsibility, of a consciousness free of guilt.
But look around you, babe. Is anything better? Do you feel better about your choices, or are you simply hyper-aware of each one you make, each choice a building anxiety in your chest because you know, you know, that you cannot fix this, and yet somehow you are willing to carry all the guilt of failure. Deep down, you are fully cognizant of the fact that you are chasing after an unattainable goal, one designed to keep you perfectly distracted for the rest of your life.
Oh, hi. Why, yes, this is the Dystopian Hell the books warned you about. Things just aren’t nicely labeled and there’s no obvious, clear path to revolution. Because the un-sexy answer is forcing responsibility onto corporations with pockets so deep they can buy the death of this planet—those who have waged decades of clever ad campaigns to indoctrinate the people most dangerous to them into the Cult of Personal Responsibility. It’s a welcoming cult, filled with much back-patting and positive reinforcement and it is very, very time consuming. So much so that you’ll never have time to place the blame where it belongs.
So sign your name in the ledger, make your vow of abstinence and repentance and minimalism. Rejoice when you succeed. Take pleasure in all the things you deny yourself. And hurt, when you fail.
Because you will fail. It’s all in the design.