CW: Depressive thoughts of an asshole
Do you think that you are a good person? I don’t. I’ve tried to be one for a long time, act like one to those close to me. But I just don’t think it will ever happen.
Some context: I’m a young person living in the Western world. My family are upper-middle class, and loving and supportive of me. I was raised with a strong moral compass, particularly about social issues. As I’ve grown, I’ve become more and more aware of the way that I live. My socio-economic circumstances mean that I’m probably in the top 10% of the world’s population, where the biggest polluters are.
To explain my problem with this, I’ll put it in simple words: the climate crisis kills people. And so, by contributing to it, I am a murderer. You can argue this point all you like. That its a bigger issue than me, that my own emissions are only a fraction of those of the top 1%. But just because someone else has hurt people more doesn’t mean that I haven’t hurt people. One of the scariest parts of this is that it means, wherever I go, the people around me are most likely murders by my own definition. My peers, mentors, neighbors. But they don’t know. They don’t think about the fact that they have contributed to people’s deaths. Ignorance is bliss.
All I want to do is help people. That’s what I want to do with my life: reduce pain and suffering. I’m thinking of going into medicine. But I wake up every morning and go to bed every night with the knowledge that I am doing the opposite. I try to do a little bit: eat less meat, don’t fly, buy less clothes. While I drive places and eat food shipped from far away, watch other’s do things without objection. And the little I also isn’t quite genuine, sometimes more motivated by the fear of the guilt I’ll feel if I do not do it.
I’m going to be real: I’m so scared. I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this. There’s a line from some song “You’ve got to live with the pain or start feeling nothing at all”. What happens on the day that I start feeling nothing? I’ve had them before. I think the scariest thought of them all is that I become a mindless consumer, working 9-to-5 in an office job. And when the headlines show the deaths from the latest storm or heatwave, I can point and say: “I helped with that”. Yours faithfully, A fellow stranger
P. S. Thanks so much for reading my deranged rant of self pity, and I hope you have a wonderful day P. P. S. If you have any interesting thoughts, it would be much appreciated it you would share them
Are you contributing to the climate crisis because you want poor people in developing nations to suffer from it? Then, yes, you’re a bad person.
However, if your contribution is simply a side effect of trying to live a normal life, then you’re not. Intentions matter. The idea of living in a cave, eating sticks and leaves, would be a disproportionate sacrifice compared to the actual harm your actions are causing. A small donation to an effective organization fighting the climate crisis is likely to have a greater positive impact than going out of your way to eliminate all behavior that contributes to carbon emissions and pollution. What feels like making an impact and what actually does can often be entirely different things.
Last time I checked, donating to an organization that buys bed nets and sends them to Africa is the most effective way to use your money to help others. That way, your actions will have a tangible impact on the world. On the other hand, selling your car and stopping consumption altogether makes no difference, no matter how righteous it might feel.
I find replying to this comment difficult due to the harsh challenge it poses to my ideas.
Maybe I can give money to help others, and maybe it is a more effective way to help people (and this comment has motivated me to do so at the next available opportunity). However, I do not agree that “stopping consumption altogether make no difference”. Consumption is an act that requires things to be produced, almost always with the emission of greenhouse gases. While I do wish to help people, I would consider giving money while continuing to contribute to climate change to be a cop-out, helping while hurting. Just because you do a right thing after a wrong thing, it doesn’t mean you do nothing wrong.