Lately I have been feeling more and more grim about life in general. I think this is a culmination of facts: things I learned, things that happened, things I noticed. It has reached a point where I have very little faith in mankind, and I think that if any stupid leader decides to detonate a nuclear bomb and kill us all, the universe will end up a better place.
This might have started with me learning more about global warming and our environmental footprint. We produce *a lot* of garbage, that needs to go somewhere. It typically ends up in the oceans or landfills around the world, contaminating animals, water, plants, and, eventually, us again (but we kind of caused it, so we deserve). Even with recycling, most of the world’s garbage still ends up in one of those places. And recycling is treating the symptom, not the cause. In practice, we can produce less than half of the garbage we produce if we are just conscious about it. It does not hurt to use our own bags for shopping, use both sides of paper sheets, get a glass water bottle instead of buying the plastic ones, close the tap when washing the teeth or the hands, use less disposable items… among other things.
Then I learned about animal cruelty, which involves killing animals for food, but also for fashion items (of quite questionable taste, really). Turns out that farming for animal production is also a big factor on global warming, and turns out we don’t really need all that meat. Nutritionally speaking, we would still be ok if we ate half of the meat we eat on average. With all these different options of food around, it wouldn’t hurt to go vegetarian three times a week. Concerning fashion items, I don’t see the appeal on leather and furs, so regarding such things as luxury items is complete nonsense as it is. Put on top animal killings, it is an easy “no, thank you”. Animals are also used for testing cosmetics, so reducing the amount of those is not only healthier (for the body *and* mind), but better for the animals.
The fashion industry alone has many other problems. Many brands have sweat shops in less developed countries, where they can get things done cheaper, and don’t need to respond about labor abuse. This practice takes advantage of people that desperately need a job, and are willing to work crazy hours for little pay. Companies need profit and this is achieved in two ways: decreasing the cost for producing clothes and increasing the consumption. On this second front, they bombard us with advertisement every week, creating “trends” to be followed, forcing people to recycle their wardrobe every season unnecessarily and to have a million pieces of clothes. We simply need to realize how manipulated we are being, and start to care less about how we look, and care more about what we do.
By the way, the thing with the profit, exploitation and fake trends is not an exclusivity of fashion, but of many other industries as well. We are manipulated every day by advertisements promising more productive, beautiful, modern, meaningful lives, only so that we will buy the latest release, generate more trash, more environmental impact, and more profit. And we are not happier.
As time passed I became more and more aware of life’s randomness, and how not realizing this can lead to social injustice. If we think that all our success is attributed to our hard work (the myth of meritocracy), then we are willing to bet that anyone could have done what we did. The thing is that, not everyone is at the same starting point. Life is unfair and people are born in all kinds of situations. This can be alleviated by some policies that give the less privileged some benefits.
All of these things alone are not really distressing for me. They are problems, and I like to solve problems. I enjoy thinking about each and every one of them, learning their effects and, mostly, their causes. Many times the underlying cause is rooted on greed, on the need to have profit, and on assigning importance to unimportant measures. Many of the effects have to do with increasing the social gap and manipulation. I think that, if we put our heads together, we could take steps in the direction of improving the situation.
The distressing part, the really really distressing part, is to see how little people seem to care. They care a lot about themselves, the “market”, the “economy”. As long as money is moving, as long as they have the best deal, as long as they can satisfy their immediate needs, who cares about something that happens thousands of kilometers or years away? Out of sight, out of mind. And so we walk towards the abyss.
Some sources: