Life, as you are irritatingly aware, is super-complicated. Heck, The Good Place explicitly made the point that even doing something good is complicated by the unintended consequences of your actions.
For example: you’re reading this wonderful piece of writing on your phone right now, which is unambiguously a great thing, and yet you and I and everyone else hold phones whose components are mined and refined by at best people in less than great circumstances and often literal slaves.
It’s enough to make a person ask “what can I, as an individual in a massive global society beset with structural inequalities, do to make the world better?”
And the good news first: all that fiddly stuff with low-wattage lightbulbs and recycled paper and green laundry liquid and stuff? Not really helping so much. Sorry.
But there are two big things that we, as consumers, can do. And you’re not going to like either of them.
The UK journalist, writer and activist George Monbiot was on the British panel show Frankie Boyle’s New World Order earlier this month and made the point that all the things traditionally hailed as being eco-friendly are anything but and that small personal changes – or as he rather pointedly calls them “microconsumerist bollocks” have barely any effect.
So what do you need to do to make a difference? Stop eating meat, and stop flying.
Well, there is a third option: change the way that the system values profits over the wellbeing of the planet and the survival prospects of our species. Hell, if we could get to zero-emission power generation (and we totally could, by the way) then we’d be able to fly all over the goddamn place!
“There’s time [to stop climate change and ecological breakdown] but we need to stop pissing around at the margins of the problem,” he says in the above video. “But we need to go straight to the heart of capitalism, and overthrow it.”
So maybe understanding this bargain is the inspiration we need. It’s either stop travelling, or smash the system. Let’s get the pickaxes ready, team – ideally before the December break. We’ve got a non-refundable booking.