It is difficult to swallow one’s pride and admit that you are part of the problem, even if it was never intentional or a conscious entry. It is difficult to include yourself in the metric of those responsible for perpetuating said problem. I am no better than anyone else I am potentially about to cast stones toward, save that I am aware of the problem and am trying, in my admittedly meager and small scale ways, to stop being part of the problem.

As someone born in the 1980s America, I have been in a position to have seen what the world was like just before the mass adoption of the Internet, to then witnessing the most incredible and substantial exponential leap in technology in our known history. Even in the 80s, it could have been argued that technological progress had already exceeded humanity’s societal evolution and ability to keep up, as well as responsibly integrate new technology into civilization. The invention of powered flight? Almost immediately weaponized. Radar? That tech was created during war. Nuclear fission? Rushed into existence in order to kill humans en masse as fast as possible. The automobile? Pushed into mass market production with no thought or foresight into what effect that would have on our culture, or the environment. Then we run into planned obsolescence, and the sick, twisted, frankly evil notion of disposability, the idea that it’s okay to make something out of convenience that you can just throw away and forget.

This is the legacy of capitalism, particularly the variant that is technologically empowered and scarcely restrained by any meaningful regulation or ethical consideration. The plastic and garbage filling our oceans, the exploitation of less privileged nations for profit and resources, the landfills stuffed with trash, the nuclear waste seeping from the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads created by world leaders with tiny brains and even smaller cocks, this and more is the price the world is forced to pay in the name of our privilege and convenience.

The United States alone produces a staggering amount of food waste (133 million pounds, if the USDA estimates are still holding up), and while one can argue that at least some of that is compostable, that’s not factoring in the incredible wastes of fuel, energy, and labor to produce that much food, and the environmental damage from factory farming and excessive meat production. All of that, so people in states like mine, which are nowhere near tropical, can have bananas and avocadoes year round, and have access to fast food on demand at any given time, sometimes even 24/7. Do you even remotely comprehend the amount of energy and material that needs to be expended, just to keep your local Burger Monarch stocked with beef patties at any given time, all so one of us lazy slobs can go through the drive thru any time we want and be served food in two minutes or less? Do any of you realize how much waste just ONE fast food restaurant creates in a given day? Now multiply that by thousands upon thousands, and compound it with fine dining, grocery, buffets, pizza joints, cafes, and you have millions of pounds of plastic, paper, styrofoam, grease, and food getting shoved into dumpsters every single day, all so we can be spared the inconvenience of cooking our own food or doing what our ancestors did, and acquire our food directly from farmers, hunters, and fishermen, only consuming as much as we need.

No one ever died because they didn’t get next day shipping with Amazonian Primus. Modern corporate entities have become filthy rich by “meeting customer demands” that they themselves created. They are the salesmen selling the cure after dosing you with the poison to begin with. China and many other Asian countries are where the overwhelming majority of goods that us Americans and Westerners use are made, and it’s no coincidence at all that a substantial portion of our ocean trash comes from places like China, Thailand, et cetera. Western companies were unwilling to accede to restrictions potentially imposed on them by entities such as the EPA, and they certainly were unwilling to pay their fellow countrymen and women the fair wage the workers knew the work deserved, so over the last few decades the mega corps have been allowed to outsource their operations to Asia, to exploit cheap labor with limited human rights oversights, and with no consideration given to what their excessive mass production would do to the environment. Go to any store, flip over almost any product, and you’ll see that it was made in China. Think about how much crap gets produced, every single day, to fill every store in America at any given time, to have Amazonian’s product listings always a click away, all so you don’t have to wait long on whatever your latest impulse purchase is. Consider how much gets destroyed or wasted along the way. Consider how much crap ends up in a landfill just because you decided you didn’t like it and initiated a return, because Amazonian makes it way too easy and shields you from any repercussions of being too impulsive or frivolous.

Not even my favorite arts and hobbies have been spared from this privilege paid for at dear cost. Video games and movies have certainly been gears in the mass production machine, but the push to make everything all digital is not so clean and friendly an alternative as the digital apologists propose. Consider that America alone has been burning around one hundred quadrillion btus of energy per year, and you might catch on that we waste a lot of power, on keeping lights on all night every night, on all of the gadgets and not-so-smart phones we’re supposed to have to stay socially relevant. This is particularly acute when pondering on the servers that need to stay running around the clock all of the time in case, you know, Chad decides he wants to buy and download a copy of Call of Madden at two in the morning, so he can play with his coworkers in deathmatch every night on demand. Those servers need to stay running so Suzie can ask ChatGPsomething a question at any given time. Those servers gotta be on so Jimbob can watch Survivor on demand. The servers have to be on because you have to be able to shop on Amazonian or Feebay at all hours of the day and night, at any conceivable time and from any place that can possibly field any sort of Internet connection. How dare any of us not be able to watch Vectrextube or look for Tweets to trigger us from a decade ago, at any time that our boredom and impulse insists? That’s before I even mention the sheer amount of effort, labor, waste, and impact on real human beings that takes place just to make your next day shipping possible, because believe me, someone, somewhere is paying a dear cost for the sake of your convenience. That’s before I even mention light pollution, which is hugely detrimental to us and life on this planet, and cuts us off from being able to see our very place in the universe.

So what do we do about this? How do we as a civilization put a dent into this terrible, wasteful machine that powers the lifestyle we take for granted? I don’t have a one size fits all answer to that question, and I don’t think there can be one. We can each of us take what actions are within our means to reduce the damage. We can be more mindful of our power use. We can cut back on impulse buying and be more deliberate with how we shop. We can recycle and reuse everything that we reasonably can. We can buy food from farmers’ markets or plant our own food if the space is available. We can put the phones away and entertain ourselves without the Internet. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. Enough people, over enough time, with enough voices being expressed and enough wallets voting intelligently, might be able to crack the corporate machine, and might get the people who had the power to stop this to begin with, to listen.

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