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I 100% agree with you and also despise this frame of mind. Funny how that works! What I mean is, I do all the things (personally) that I can do - I don't eat meat or dairy, I hardly drive, I don't travel much, I work from home so I don't commute, etc. But, unless every single person does this (or heck, is even aware they _should_ be doing more themselves), I can't see it changing much. The reason I don't like this "I'm just one person, it's insignificant" excuse reminds me of a few years ago, during the Final Fantasy XIV Online beta. Yeah, this is a silly comparison, but there were major issues with logging in, because the beta servers had reached their max capacity. You used to stare at the login screen hammering the Login button forever, and maybe you would _finally_ make it online. What you ended up with, was that when players would finally be able to login, they would just idle instead of logging back out, so they wouldn't have to go through the login hell again (as there was no automatic idle-kick), thus continuing and even worsening the cycle of others not being able to login. If everyone had just logged out when they were not playing, far more people would have been able to play. But since "everyone else was doing it, my insignificant acts don't matter", no one got to login, and the world was filled with idle players who were AFK. This went fairly off-topic but the core concepts at play are vaguely similar. People should generally act in a way that, if everyone were to do it, the world wouldn't descend into chaos. |
Maybe your example would inspire your neighbors to reach into their own kitchen drawers for a spoon, and maybe in some happy version of the universe all the spoons would add up to enough and your neighborhood would be saved.
I don’t think this metaphor is as poor as it sounds — if anything a spoonful of water against a neighborhood flood is probably orders of magnitude more significant than your personal contribution to slowing global warming.
So I’ve come to the opposite conclusion as you: this focus on personal efficiency is misguided, and we should spend the vast majority of our efforts on advocating for policy shifts like increased carbon taxes and technological solutions.