Opinion editors are not responsible for agreeing or disagreeing with their writers but rather elevate each individual’s specific voice. 

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism!” says someone with their arms full of disintegrating polyester from Shein and green-stained fingers from Temu jewelry. 

I’m starting to wonder if anything will survive all this. 

What began as a critique of “This is what a feminist looks like” shirts produced in unsafe and inhumane conditions in Bangladesh became an excuse for consumers to abandon all critical thinking about their shopping habits. Any critique about unethical shopping practices or overconsumption is met with the same surface-level discourse that accomplishes next to nothing. 

“What about people who can only afford Shein clothes? What about people who can only find their sizes on Fashion Nova? Don’t they deserve to have cute clothes?” 

Of course, shopping in the Whole Foods organic bulk section when you make minimum wage is unrealistic. Yes, it’s easier to find larger sizes for more affordable prices from the most notoriously unethical producers. What this black-and-white approach ignores, however, is that it is still possible to improve your consumption choices. 

Like all things, ethical consumption requires nuance. It requires understanding. Nobody can be the perfect consumer, especially under capitalism. This is precisely the original intention of the motto. It’s about bringing awareness to the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism and putting in whatever effort we can to circumvent its consequences

Corporations want neo-liberals to keep the discourse limited to exceptions to the rule. We choose to unproductively echo back-and-forth who is allowed to shop unethically and who isn’t, but we leave out our anger at the mass exploitation of women and people of color necessary to maintain our economy. Instead, we are angry at being asked to limit our consumption, and possibly, shop more ethically. 

I am nowhere near wealthy. Until very recently, I wasn’t near the straight, non-plus sizes on clothing racks. Trying to find sizes of clothes that I could afford was difficult. Often, I found myself wanting to participate in retail therapy but having to refrain because I didn’t want to unnecessarily buy clothes I wouldn’t feel good about wearing. I choose, instead, to play the long game. I have a list of dream clothes to hunt for when I thrift. And of course, if I need something urgently, I order it on Amazon. It’s not about perfection, it’s about reducing overall harm.  

I’ve never stepped foot in a Whole Foods. When I’m home, I have to shop at Walmart because that’s all there really is, and God knows I can’t afford organic.

What the hell is a rutabaga?

Even though I’d prefer to gallantly shop from local farms and have my own chicken coop to lay eggs, that reality is idealistic at best. As an alternative, much to the annoyance of my mother, I freeze fruit and keep eggshells to dry on the counter. I use them to fertilize the green onions from Walmart I chopped up and planted in some dirt. When we carved a pumpkin at Halloween, I saved the innards and made pumpkin puree to feed my dogs. I know most people aren’t Farmer Fran (my high school nickname for my frequent wearing of overalls) and don’t get excited about gardening and dirt, but small efforts to reduce waste make me feel better about taking up space. 

Being away from home, I lack dirt underneath my nails, but our school does make sustainability pretty easy. In every room and hall, you’ll find a recycling bin to put any item with the little triangle on the bottom and a number (the number is for the recyclers to figure out). Our only job is to take the extra half-second to flip the carton over or flatten a cardboard box. And still, that’s too much for some. 

How many people do you know that refuse to recycle because there’s already so much trash out there—what’s the point of recycling?

Our dining centers across campus feature infographic after infographic showing what goes in recycling, compost, and the landfill bins. And yet every damn day I see a plastic cup in the compost bin. Did you know that if even one item is wrongly sorted, it makes the entire bag unusable? Our individual actions actually do have consequences. 

When we engage in unproductive discourse that allows us to refuse accountability, we end up nowhere. We aren’t any closer to examining our habits and ultimately land on an extreme: rich people and corporations are the main destroyers of our planet, and the other 99 percent won’t be able to change anything anyway so we all might as well completely give up! By acknowledging the large contributions corporations make to destroying cultures and climates, we end up falling in a trap. We don’t actually hold them accountable, we accept their lack of ethics as fact.

It’s the same reason why so many folks refuse to vote: apathy. Apathy is the killer of humanity. We tell ourselves that as Americans all we can be is individuals (wonder who the individualist mindset really benefits, huh?), and one single individual won’t sway the vote. One single individual cutting down beef won’t save the world. 

Mitski wrote in a Tweet from 2016, “I used to rebel by destroying myself, but realized that’s awfully convenient to the world. For some of us, our best revolt is self-preservation.” 

Apathy isn’t revolutionary—hope is. 

What corporations and people in power have over us is only one thing: organization. Our culture can’t even agree to try and be better because we are so saturated in convenience, we have begun to mistake convenience as moral. We associate two-day shipping with goodness because it makes us feel nice.  

We can’t even begin to ask ourselves why we are so angry about our “right” to own as many cute bathing suits as we want. What is it about Americans that makes us demand our “God-given right” to consume aimlessly? Why is it so hard to try? Why is it so difficult for us to be better? 

Because we are rewarded for staying the same. We are rewarded with 30 percent coupons and a dopamine rush from clicking “proceed to checkout.” We get cute knick-knacks straight to our unblemished hands and don’t have to think twice about where it came from. 

We have the unimaginable privilege of watching an entirely different world through a screen that we can turn off at any time. When the death and carnage get too sad, when the petitions seem fruitless in our inboxes, we can walk away. No one is forcing us to look at the consequences of our buying habits except ourselves. And who wants to make themselves suffer? 

Dirt-cheap online retailer Temu paid out millions for Superbowl commercials this February. The company can afford the estimated $7 million per commercial because “there is an extremely high risk that Temu’s supply chain are contaminated with forced labor,” wrote the House Select Committee in their report on Fast Fashion and the Uyghur Genocide. The report found many of Temu’s underpaid workers to be Uyghur Chinese Muslims, a group actively being genocided in China. 

And this is how forests burn, how bombs are paid for, how people lose their lands, and how humanity dies. 

Our consuming habits are undeniably more important to us than all else. We can still make jokes about how those kids are making some really cute clothes. We can like an infographic about Congolese genocide, then order a new iPhone straight from Apple. 

(If you’re interested in helping the Congo, try reducing your consumption of new technology. Buying used or refurbished is how we lower the demand for cobalt, the metal at the core of Congolese genocide. BackMarket is my tried and true for refurbished technology.)

It’s not that we’re ignorant—we’re certainly aware of all the atrocities in the world—it’s that we don’t care. 

We don’t think our monstrous consumption is a problem because we are at the top of the food chain. We stuff our faces full of content and goods that we can’t see past our bellies to mind the underpaid workers in factories built on top of landfills we outsourced. 

Writer Daphne Chouliaraki Milner discussed the interpersonal effects of fast fashion in her article, “A Day in the Life of a Fast Fashion Worker,” saying: “In a fashion system driven by overconsumption across the Global North and built on the backs of underpaid workers in the Global South, these conditions are unlikely to change anytime soon.”

American politics can only survive with our apathy. Comradery is the death to apathy, the death to politicians with dirty money who can click a big red button from the comfort of their office that nukes an entire city in Syria. And our police officers are trained and equipped well to break up protests. To break up the community. 

They want us to believe that boycotts don’t work, but how do you get America to pay attention? You hurt their wallet. Why do you think “looters and rioters” are the biggest threats to America, as stated by our media conglomerates? 

Western economics has mastered the art of suppressing developing countries into submission, forcing them to rely on our abusive employment for mediocre survival. 

The cheap cost of your outfit was supplemented by a starving worker being manipulated out of their earnings. Milner’s article included an interview with Robin, a fast-fashion employee who said there’s never time to cook food during his busy schedule, and the factory canteen is too expensive to afford anything substantial. 

“They don’t give us a water break,” he said. “I’ve been sewing bra cups for three hours, and I’m thinking about how much I wish I could drop everything and go back to my country … the factory managers keep our passports…”

Robin shared that the medical costs and other fees that come from working his job often cancel out whatever he makes, leaving him with between $254-$300 for himself, every month. 

The profit from your caramel macchiato union busted the branch of tired high schoolers. The Lululemon leggings dupe from Amazon that makes your legs look amazing was packaged by an Amazon warehouse employee who is waiting on workers’ compensation for overwork. 

Not everything we do is going to be perfectly ethical, but this should not make us abandon all hope. Yes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so we must organize. We must support unions, shop used when we can, and lower our consumption of goods we don’t need! We must do better in the ways we can, putting in effort even if it’s excruciating to flatten a box and put it in the blue bin. 

Perhaps instead of saying “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” we can live by author Theodor Adorno’s quote: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

Yes, we live in a broken world where seemingly everything we do has ties to evil, but Adorno’s quote gives us hope. That the wrong life can be righted somehow. It can be fixed.