Tag: ethics

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On clothing and consumerism

This tweet resonated pretty hard with me today.

https://twitter.com/sesmith/status/1622296174777729026?s=20&t=Qg-VB8q-Qoj–W1k8G-H0w

I hadn’t ever thought of it in these exact words, but this is basically how I frame my decisions about what to buy.

The phrasing I’ve used in the past is: Yes, I can afford this; but I shouldn’t afford it. (I think I may have heard my parents say that once but I’m not positive.) This attitude has served me well as I transition to a lower household income than what I had before: I’m putting off a lot of household furniture purchases and so forth, because I don’t want to find myself in a position where I am spending money on credit card interest. (That does not spark joy.) Some interest is unavoidable; emergencies happen, mistakes happen, etc. But anything I can do to minimize that helps me feel more comfortable and secure in my life now.

And the positive ethical implications of lower overall consumption are just the icing on the cake.

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Ethical Clothes

A few recent threads on Twitter have caught my eye, about fast fashion and the ethics thereof.

It makes me think about how I went through a phase where I wanted to slowly transition to only wearing clothes made in America. That never happened, but it was instructive. I bought a couple pairs of $90 sweatpants from American Giant. I still wear them.

That last is part of what Cora Harrington has been saying for a while now: keep wearing your existing clothes. That’s it. Just…wear your clothes. The way you avoid paying slave labor wages is to buy less stuff. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s the most immediately effective and impactful thing you can do.

I know it’s easy for me to say this. I’ve never cared too much for fashion, and my body size has stayed more or less consistent over the years. I can’t wear my jeans from middle school anymore, but I can wear my jeans from age 29 if I’m doing housework and don’t care if I need to undo the button because I ate too much fiber or something. I’m a straight sized person and yeah that’s one form of privilege. But at the same time, there are no easy answers. Sometimes the best answer is “you can’t have cute ethical cheap clothing because it doesn’t exist.” You can pick two.

But if you rewear clothes, the dollar cost averaging (or whatever you want to call it) of the Not Cheap things actually comes out pretty good.

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Do more proactive good in the world

1: LeGuin, “We all do harm by being.” 2: Marissa thread.

We all do harm by being.

Ursula K. LeGuin

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and how we have cultural and subcultural constructions of what is harmful, which often bear no resemblance to the truest harms we do every day. I don’t think the vast majority of us — myself included — are equipped to grapple with the very real harm we do by just, say, getting on a plane or heating a house. We prefer to crow loudly about things like not using Spotify anymore due to the J*e R*gan contract. (I specifically chose there a platform I’ve never used and have no opinion about others using. I’m not trying to get too personal in this thread.)

All too often, whatever subculture one is a part of will have very rigid ideas of what is harmful and what its members should refrain from in order to stop them from doing harm. I don’t think these things are pretty much ever meaningful. But the more rigid and meaningless the rules, the more rabidly they’re policed on social media. (I’m truly not subtweeting one group; this is damn near universal.) All under guise of preventing harm. Which is impossible, as Ursula reminds us.

I would like to try to move myself to a different lens, where I’m less invested in stopping whichever of my harms I’ve imagined to be the greatest ones (definitionally subjective anyway) and more invested in choosing to do positive acts that I believe are beneficial to the world. Which in a nutshell would be: much less time worrying about my sins, much more time worried whether I’ve actually done anything purposefully good in a given week. We all do harm by being! But we can choose to also do good. /🧵

@ MarissaRae on Twitter

A friend posted this tweet, and I want to write more about it: about how I’ve started trying to document the companies and products that seem genuinely good to their people (even if it’s not all perfect), and so forth.

But for now, I’ll just link to this. The next time you’re anxious about a given shibboleth, instead try to think about one small change you can do to have a positive impact on the world.

Related concept: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the “adequate and you get to sleep”

Another related concept: don’t let The Discourse fool you into thinking that you, personally, are responsible for doing Zero Harm to the humans and the world around you. You cannot fix a systemic problem with individual solutions. (I know this is not something everyone agrees with. That’s okay. I am stating my opinion on it.)

Nothing you do is enough. Nothing you do will ever be Enough. But that is OKAY. It means you get to decide what is enough, for you. And I just realized that this all clicks into my general philosophy of Cheerful Nihilism, so, there we go!