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
I think your moral system is wrong.
It doesn’t describe a person, it describes an ideal. There’s no room for a person in there - no one can ever meet that standard. Can you describe a good person in that system?
Morality has to be relative, at least to some degree. Humans must destroy living things to exist - we can only survive from eating life. We also require shelter, community, even entertainment - there’re more and less harmful options for this, but there are no consequence free options. A system that says survival is immoral isn’t a useful system - it leads to supervillain level conclusions if you play it all out
You have to put humans in context.
I share similar values - the base of my moral code is “if everyone lived like me, the world would quickly approach perfection”. Take what you need, give what you can. I don’t travel much, but I do when it’s important. I try to limit my consumption, but I ask if it is worth what it would bring me
I think you’re still developing your moral code, which I think is a sign of a good person - you’ve just gotten stuck midway. There’s two paths I think you should look down
First, you can put everything on a scale - do my actions add more than I take from the world? If you devoted your life to improving the system or helping people, you’ll have to contribute more to the mechanisms killing the world to empower yourself to do more. That includes entertainment and pleasure required to keep yourself in your best condition - but not more.
Second, you can make it all relative. You can’t live a zero carbon life, but you can reduce your impact. You can continuously improve as you learn and gain experience, and stay on the side of progress
These aren’t answers - neither of those approaches are absolutely valid, and I don’t have a perfect moral code. You have to continue to question and strive to be better, but you can’t beat yourself up over what you haven’t learned yet or the consequences of picking the least bad option
In my mind, humans are just animals. Humans do what we’re conditioned to do almost all the time. Most humans never awaken beyond that. Even then, most have moments of being more before dropping back into a talking animal. And even they generally get to a certain point and stop. It’s not fair to judge them from your perspective, you have to judge them from theirs
Keep striving to be better, keep questioning yourself, and even when you slow down never stop growing - that’s what makes for a truly good person in my book