Difficulties

I’m starting to feel back in the swing of things, but for a while I was feeling pretty tired of the whole ‘trying to be good’ thing. There were a few catalysts for my funk, but when it came down to it, none of them were actual reasons for giving up on trying to live rightly. When Ultimately, the life choices that I’ve done my best to turn into habits are geared toward doing right by others, and my lack of motivation—for the reasons I’m about to talk about—don’t change the fact that acting differently would be acting in a way that I don’t think is for the best.

The first is money. Since I’m taking a break from teaching to focus on finishing my degree, I find myself with no income and not very much savings to get by on. This forces me to reevaluate some of the choices that I make that used to have bearable financial consequences. When I talk to my students about ethics in everyday life, and I tell them that I do my grocery shopping in a natural food store and buy organic, and that I only buy my clothes from places that are sweatshop free, one of the first things they say is always, ‘but isn’t that really expensive?’ Yes and no. Yes, because if two companies produce basically the same product, but one avoids harming others in the process while the other externalizes whatever costs they can, the socially conscious product will generally be more expensive. But I also tell my students that my grocery bill stays pretty low. This past week, for example, I spent about $30 at farmers markets and $20 in my grocery store. This is a typical weekly amount for me, so this comes out to between $200 and $250 per month. I’m sure I could eat more cheaply if I bought the least expensive version of everything at a supermarket, but these products would be worse for the environment (being non-organic, less local, etc.) and worse for me. Part of the reason that my bill doesn’t skyrocket just because I don’t always buy the cheapest option available is that I didn’t simply switch from cheap to organic, but also made other changes: I stopped eating meat, stopped buying things with so much packaging, and stopped buying ready-to-eat frozen meals. These changes (and others that I’m surely forgetting) are good for the world as well as the checkbook.

I went grocery shopping with my roommate the other day, however, and it made me reconsider where I shop, and what I pay for things. I’ve been shopping at the same, small natural grocery store for about 4 years. Things there are expensive. This is partly a factor of the reasons mentioned above, but also partly because there’s a pretty high mark-up at this store. I’m not sure why exactly this is, but I’ve always brushed it aside as a price worth paying for the community feel (the owner is usually the one at the cash register, and we chat every week), and I think of the markup as a cost I’m willing to pay to support a local business instead of a chain. When I’m feeling the pinch, however, I have to reconsider whether this is really where I should be shopping (could I live rightly and be better off individually by finding the nearest Whole Foods or Trader Joes?). For now my plan is to keep shopping at True Nature for most things, but find a better place to buy some of my staples in bulk.

The other difficulties are more social in origin: In the past six months my living situation has gone from ‘living with someone who tries to live in the same way that I do’, to ‘living alone’, to ‘living with someone who doesn’t care about this stuff’. Although it’s good to now be forced to reevaluate some of my choices (for example, by seeing how cheaply I could be buying my groceries), I now find myself questioning all of my choices and asking, ‘why bother?’ Why do I bother to take my canvas bags to the grocery store and farmers market when the landfills are overflowing with cheap plastic bags anyway? Why do I bother to avoid meat when the environment is going to be inundated with antibiotics and hormones, and the cropland is going to be used for feed regardless? Despite their demotivating effects, I know the answers to these questions: I make the choices I do because I don’t want to be a part of the problem. I won’t give in just because I’d be doing what everybody else already does. The common question is ‘if everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?’, but a more poignant question might be ‘if everyone else jumped off a bridge, does that mean you should too?’ There’s no immediate logical connection between how other people act and what it’s right or acceptable for others to do. Just because all of your neighbors enjoy shooting school kids with bb guns, it doesn’t mean that it’s ok to do. I can’t bring myself to ignore how my actions impact the rest of the world, even though it’s how most people go about their daily lives.

What’s my conclusion? For one, I do need to constantly reevaluate the choices that I’ve made regarding the way I live. When I see other people doing things differently, it should always be a challenge to my own choices: do I have good reasons for doing what I do? Secondly, I need to take my experiences with others as reminders of perspective: just as there are choices that I have made that others have never considered, there are surely choices that I could make that have never crossed my mind. Trying to be good doesn’t just mean making up a set of rules and sticking to it, it means always reevaluating and improving. Finally, I need to constantly remind myself that ‘not being a part of the problem’ isn’t the same as being part of the solution. As uncomfortable as it makes me, sometimes I need to be more vocal about the impact that all of our actions have on one another.