On Existing Ethically

Individualism and Idealism

Right-wing ideologues in the United States, whether identifying as liberal or conservative, direct focus to "individual responsibility." Western European societies and their descendants have historically been Individualist under Capitalism. Individualism posts that change, at the level of an individual's life, or at the scale of society, is driven by the individual. Thomas Carlyle's "Great Man Theory" has dominated how Western cultures view history: Great heroes such as Napoleon or Washington change the world, by the power of their individual strength and force of will. Historical narratives would be lacking if we never discussed notable individuals such as Nikola Tesla or Vladimir Lenin, but we should not take for granted that it had to be Tesla who invented Alternating Current electricity, or Vladimir Lenin who lead the Bolshevik Revolution. Despite a core tenet of Marxism being that it is not individuals but class conflict that drives history, many on the left continue to revere the individual as the driver of change.

In the 19th century, Idealism was in vogue in Europe. Hegelians and friends focused their analyses on the layer of ideas and the mental experience; a component of what Marxists call the superstructure. While the superstructure is indeed important and influential upon human behavior, what Marxist philosophers contributed was a focus on historical materialism: to inspect how the economic base drives history and human behavior. The economic base influences the superstructure, and the superstructure influences the base, but that material economic base also influences who lives and who dies, and that will always hold a strong weight in decision making.

Economics drives human behavior. People will not always make the most rational choice in their own best interest, but they will make choices driven by their economic circumstances, whether or not that is how they perceive it. People want to survive, and large-scale trends in human behavior will always follow what people must do due to socioeconomic factors. When the economy is doing worse, people will become desperate, and they will commit crimes if that is what it takes to survive in the short-term, even despite the risks of long-term incarceration.

Now, if large social classes acted together to do the "right thing" all together, such as everyone deciding to stop eating beef, there could be large-scale long-term positive effects for everyone unachievable through one individual's actions. In the language of internet memes, this could be phrased as an "if everyone Just" scenario. If everyone just stopped eating beef. If everyone just stopped buying fast fashion. If everyone just stopped following orders. In no scenario will "everyone just" do anything. You must organize them to do it, or arrange the environment such that these decisions are now the better option. Large-scale human behavior is driven by systems and environments, not by individual will and responsibility.

There is this idea that pervades the Western superstructure that an idea is a powerful thing. The word is mightier than the sword. Great Men will proliferate Great Ideas and these Great Ideas will change the world. While not the focus of Idealist philosophy, this is a focus on the superstructure, on the supremacy of the Idea shaping human behavior. If we can just create enough media that promotes the right ideas, people will choose to behave differently. This can be one half of change, but without the economic base, it would have to be a pretty incredible idea to change the world. Some point to Communism as such a Great Idea that changed the world, but it was the economic circumstances following World War I that drove people to revolt under the banner of Communism. Had there not been class conflict and contradictions, Communism would not have taken hold as a Great Idea. I assure you, many who fought for Communism did not particularly care about the details of Marxist philosophy, they just saw it as the path to their economic betterment.

Despite organizing under the banners of ideologies which oppose individualism and pure idealism, Westerners on the Left (including Progressives or other well-meaning but not-quite-radical people), still frequently view the world through the lenses of individualism and pure idealism. We believe that sufficiently good posting of propaganda online will inspire revolution, without a sufficient base for organizing. We believe that gentrification is caused by individual white people deciding to move to cities after watching Urbanist Youtube channels, and not driven by socioeconomic factors, the contradictions in the housing market, or landlords, flippers, and real estate companies doing whatever they can to earn the greatest profit. We believe that shaming people for making these decisions will somehow stop the large-scale pattern of behavior necessary for gentrification. It is objectively true that white people moving into cities contributes to gentrification and has unethical and harmful ramifications for the people (typically people of color) who already live there. It is also true that "if every white person would just stop moving into the city" is as effective an idea as "if everyone would just stop eating beef."

Organic GMO-Free Fair Trade Ethical Consumption

It is the nature of being alive to consume. All living things must consume to survive, from carnivorous sharks to photosynthesizing kelp to deep sea giant tube worms feeding on chemicals from thermal vents. Humans have evolved to require more materials to survive than the typical animal, and in return can achieve much higher quality of life than the typical animal. We evolved to shed our thick hairy coats, and in exchange must consume natural resources to construct clothing to keep us warm. We evolved to depend upon this clothing, which now requires human labor to construct. We invented advanced agriculture and hydrology, freeing the majority of the human population from needing to spend every waking moment hunting for food and water. In an ideal world, the farmer can enjoy art as much as the artist can enjoy food. But even if the farmer cannot consume the art, the artist must consume food. This inequity may be unethical, but the artist has no choice but to participate. Could the artist become a farmer? When all land is controlled by the bourgeoisie, then upon what land shall the artist farm? And will farming provide a quality of life equal to being an artist? The artist will choose to remain whatever profession they can access to achieve the highest quality of living. A select few may be overcome by a sense of ethics and justice, and choose another profession, but the vast majority will not. And, while the inequity of consuming food from farmers who cannot consume art maybe be unethical, seldom few would argue that to be an artist is inherently unethical.

Returning to our globalized present-day world, everything we touch is touched by thousands of hands across the globe at some stage of production. Even a hand-crafted bowl by a local ceramicist uses clay and glaze manufactured by someone, somewhere, using tools made from raw materials extracted by someone somewhere, transported by someone to somewhere, in buildings using materials, using public infrastructure, and so forth. Everything is totally interconnected in impossible to avoid ways unless you intend to live as a wild animal in the woods. Feral humans in the overgrowth off I-90 do not reflect our natural way of being any more than urban humans.

You cannot exist and be alive without interfacing with the global economy. You may be reading this on a computer device containing rare earth minerals mined by child slaves in some colonized country you don't even know how to find on a map. You probably already know this, but still use the device you do because you feel you need to and it was the best choice of device given your means. You could have bought the Fairphone instead, but you probably did not.

We cannot totally control everything we interface with, and so we all accept that there are stains on our consumer behavior, such that we get the slogan "there is no ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism." Some use this as an excuse to not think about the ethics of their consumer behavior at all—and so others overcorrect and dismiss entirely the notion that pure ethical consumption is impossible.

The cheapness of our clothes and other commodities is made possible via unethical labor conditions in the global south, and when we improve the conditions of those workers—albeit never to the point that they are actually paid the full value of their labor—then that will necessarily increase the cost of those commodities. Ethically produced products and services will be more expensive.

This has resulted in ethical choice consumerism becoming the new luxury status symbol of the wealthy alongside health consciousness. Erewhon, Whole Foods, and Goop have become the most well-know brands trading in this form of marketing. All food at Whole Foods will claim to be ethically sourced, fair trade, organic, free of dangerous unethical pesticides, friendly for the environment—while the workers at Whole Foods work under unethical and arduous conditions. To make only ethical choices is a luxury of the rich, whose wealth is extracted unethically. Today's wealthy seek the status of an ethical enlightened guru—pure of mind, body, and soul. Perhaps this is because they feel the guilt of how their wealth is extracted, and this focus on making ethical consumer choices alleviates this guilt. Or perhaps it's just a fad they use to brag to each other, and in ten years they'll bring back real fur coats.

The flip-side of this is that those at the bottom of society cannot afford to make ethical decisions. The ethical cage-free eggs are more expensive than the extra animal cruelty eggs—and the vegan egg substitutes are the most expensive of all. However, for those with the fewest means, the choice is not which eggs to buy, but whether to beg strangers for food at the entrance to the grocery store, or to follow them down the street to mug them. The poorer you are, the fewer choices you have, and the choices remaining become less ethical. Outside the imperial core, we know that many people have no choice but to do unethical things every single day to survive. Hungry people can't be concerned with ethics. A few individuals may have the willpower to overcome, but at the large scale, we cannot expect every hungry person to just choose hunger over eating at the cost of another person.

Poverty and marginalization constrain choice and agency, including ethical decisions. Wealth and privilege provide power over others and oneself, including the power to decide whether to do right or wrong. There is no ethical accumulation of wealth under global capitalism, it was all extracted directly or indirectly from someone else's labor at some point, especially if you live in the imperial core. The decision to spend your blood money on ethically sourced coffee does not make you a better person than your employees who drink the GMO-laden inorganic instant coffee they stock in the break room through pooling their wages.

The idea of a personal Carbon Footprint was created and promoted by oil giant BP to shift responsibility for climate change from corporations to individuals. Many of us on the left know this, and yet we still impose a sense of obligation towards ethical consumerism unto ourselves in many of our economic decisions—and when we can't afford to make the ethical choice, we feel guilt and shame for the choices that we made. We move from a conservative, rural area to a big city where we have the economic opportunities needed to survive and thrive, continuing the same global demographic trend all humans have participated in for centuries, and then feel guilt and shame because this increases demand upon the housing market, leading to rising rents. We individualize the impact of large-scale economic trends, as if we as individuals can control inflation or wage stagnation.

The Complicit Bloody Middle, Burdened to Live

The majority of humans fall between at least one human and another. Seldom few can identify nobody in the world worse off than they are, and seldom few can identify nobody in the world better off than they are. Even the working-class of America, who struggle every day on the brink of poverty to survive, are considerably wealthy and fortunate in comparison to the workers of poor colonized countries. Americans sometimes travel abroad and are shocked at "how cheap food is" not realizing that it only feels cheap for those who are paid in American currency, and that to the locals, their substantially lower wages do not make the food look cheap. The impoverished of America are the middle class of the world, and yet the poverty of an American stings no less, their stomach growls no quieter, their suffering is no more acceptable.

Nobody ever chose to be born to their social position, in the country they were born it. We all have no choice but to live with our lot in life, always below someone, always above someone else. We do not have the means to make only ethical choices; while those above maintain their position by way of unethical actions, and those below resort to unethical actions to survive.

Burnt-out communist organizer Sophia Burns, in her essay "Why Are Progressives So Afraid of Being Complicit in Harm?" (if you make a new dummy Medium account, it will let you read this article once for free as your "complementary article") identifies an unhealthy trend in left-leaning communities. Doctors swear by the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm"—but this only applies to when they are working. Wiccans have the Wiccan Rede "An ye harm none, do what ye will" or "If you do no harm, do what you will." While this sounds like "do no harm at all," it is commonly understood that would be unreasonable, and it is instead interpreted as "think through and accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions."

Burns states that the progressive (the term she uses as an umbrella to include both radical leftists and liberal progressives), holds by a stricter creed: Be not complicit in harm. It is not enough to do no harm directly, but also indirectly through inaction. It is closer to Asimov's first law for robots: "A robot may not injure a human being or allow a human to come to harm" except since it includes complicity in large-scale gloal systemic harm, it is even stricter.

Due to the complex interconnected nature of our world, it is impossible to not be complicit in some harm somewhere, and so by this creed, all people are eternally ethically compelled to act to pursue righting these wrongs in order to redeem themselves of their complicity in harm. Burns identifies the end result of this logic as akin to the Christian concept of Original Sin, but with no Jesus or confession box available to provide atonement. It is a stain that you cannot escape through your own choices, yet you must never cease feeling guilt and obligation for bearing. This presents an impossible situation that will always result in feeling like shit about things you have no power over.

One manifestation of this is "toxic white guilt" where some progressive white people, often neurodivergent white settler-descended people with some form of OCD, will feel such guilt at having been born white that they view themselves as undeserving of living, only existing for the purpose of atoning for the sins of their ancestors. Yet this white guilt is then externalized and placed onto the shoulders of random people of color, whose forgiveness is desired and demanded, who are in turn dehumanized and burdened with the suicidal feelings of white people perpetuating harm in the name of atoning for harm. The fear of racism leads to even more racism. For lack of a priest or Jesus to forgive the original sin, white people turn to whatever person of color they see talking about race, and make them into that priest, whether or not they have any interest in providing pastoral care for guilty white people.

Whether you are white or not, the feelings of guilt and obligation from "be not complicit in harm" are not conducive to sustainably working towards changing anything in the world without burning yourself out. You will not change the entire world in your lifetime, fixing all harms, and you only have one life to live. Reasonably, as one individual, you could devote your entire career and waking life towards working to fix one systemic issue, and maybe by the time you die you will have made a very small dent. On your death bed, you will think "Surely, I could have done more than I did."

Will you allow yourself moments to be happy in this world? Do you believe that you deserve to have moments of joy despite the villainous circumstances of your birth, just like anyone else who you fight for? Do you believe that if "everyone just" felt constant guilt and shame for being born in North America, then this country would stop being an evil empire built on blood and bones?

Moral OCD has become a social media contagion. It's not uncommon to see online people asking "is it normal to always constantly be worrying about if you're a good person?" and getting a resounding yes in response. Dear reader, no, it is not healthy or normal to always be worrying about if you're a good person every moment of every day. You are an animal, whose entire purpose on this earth is to survive, experience pleasure, and help your people survive long enough to see the next generation grow old enough to fend for themselves.

Judaism does not have the concept of Original Sin, we are forgiven annually so if such a thing did exist we only had it as tiny little babies. What we do have is Pirkei Avot 2:16.

Rabbi Tarfon used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it; If you have studied much Torah, you shall be given much reward. Faithful is your employer to pay you the reward of your labor; And know that the grant of reward unto the righteous is in the age to come.

In progressive Jewish circles, this is often translated differently, and truncated. You often see instead:

It is not your duty to complete the work [of Tikkun Olam], but nor may you desist from it.

The interpretation that this quote is about Tikkun Olam—repairing the world—is something I was always used to seeing. It is how I have written it whenever I have shared this quote. Pirkei Avot 2:16 is used to motivate progressive activists, and I have done so myself many times. We interpret it to mean that even if we cannot win against capitalism/racism/etc. in our own lifetimes, we are still obligated to fight tirelessly. If we die before we see the fruit of our labor, we must know it will be born out in future generations. Our job was not to win the fight, only to continue it. We are not allowed to give up or quit the fight. Some even view all forms of rest as forbidden "desistence" from the work.

In context, that is simply not what Pirkei Avot 2:16 is about. Reading it in context of the entirety of Pirkei Avot 2, and with the remainder of the paragraph, it is clearly about studying the Torah. The quotes leading up to Pirkei Avot 2:16 are about studying torah. The Torah holds teachings of how we should act in our lives. The path to righteousness. The quote is saying that while doing the right thing may not be immediately rewarded in life, we should still always try to do the right thing anyway. While we may never learn every lesson, we must always keep learning. We should always try our best to be good, even if we cannot be so perfect as to "complete goodness." You can't do a 100% ethics speedrun in your lifetime, let alone your 20s.

In Judaism, we have the concept of Yetzer Hara and Yetzer Hatov, the inclination to do evil and the inclination to do good. We all have both, and we have the choice to listen to the inclination to do evil, or to the inclination to do good. We are not obligated to perfectly, always, do everything that the Yetzer Hatov tells us to do, but nor may we stop listening to it entirely.

We are also told "By these words you shall live" and in Ezekiel 16:6, we have:

When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you: “Live despite your blood.” Yea, I said to you: “Live despite your blood."

Even when wallowing soaked in blood, we are commanded to live. In Jewish ethics, this is the most important obligation. You have to live. In our global interconnected world, you do not have the privilege of avoiding complicity in harm, but nor may you give up on living—even with that mark upon your moral record.

Maybe you are not Jewish, and do not feel convinced by Jewish ethics. Or you are Jewish, but talmud and torah alone do not convince you. I still posit to you: Why else would you ever be alive, except to live? Why do you have pleasure receptors, if not to feel pleasure? Did you decide to be born to your parents, on your continent, with the sociopolitical history it has? Would it have been more ethical to choose to be born into poverty? Would it be more ethical for you to relinquish all that you have and choose to become street homeless, disempowered and forced to resort to unpleasant things to survive, but knowing that you are justified in your desperation and cannot be expected to do anything given your lack of power?

Does choosing to be miserable make you a better person? Do you think that impoverished multiply marginalized minorities living in the global south are ethically pure beings of light, exempt from the profoundly human experience of having to decide every day what actions to take that are good and righteous, balanced against the actions to take that keep one alive? Do they never act out of malice, embarassment, jealousy, or greed? Do you think that the mugger never feels guilt or shame? Can you accept that they are as human as you are, and therefore you are a human as well?

As terrible a burden as it is, you are a living creature on the planet Earth, and you have to live in it. Absolutely, try to do good where you can, but you must live. You are not the protagonist of this entire planet, the Great Man upon whom the entire planet's fate shall rest. You fundamentally cannot control any other person, let alone the outcomes of global geopolitical economics. You can look at the 25% tariffs on Canada and feel an obligation to stop them, or you can feel powerless to stop them and feel ashamed of your powerlessness, or you can accept that you most likely are not positioned and capable of doing anything about it, and so you must refocus on what you are positioned to do.

The Verge wrote a great article recently called Can Anyone Stop President Musk? and when I read it, my instinctive thoughts were "I shall! I shall be the one to stop him!" which is patently absurd. How would I even start? The man won't leave the whitehouse even for meetings walking distance away. He's been having virtual meetings with people who work next door. Am I gonna bull rush the secret service? If you work in the federal government in some capacity, then you are positioned and empowered to do some things to fight, slow, and possibly stop Elon Musk's fascist reign of chaos and destruction. Mostly, by non-complying and sabotaging internal systems. Just because a directive is given does not mean you have to follow it or follow it competently. This is a great way to resist. But for the rest of us? There are ways to resist, there are movements you can be involved in, there are ways you can oragnize, but you alone are not going to be the single hero whose brave actions stop fascism. Especially if you don't live in anywhere near Washington, DC..

Even when you accept that never will everyone "just" do anything, you must also accept that the answer cannot but "but I will do all of it anyway, because I'm just built different. I'm the most ethical person, and even if this is pretty ineffective if I'm the only person doing it, I will do it anyway." You are doing nobody a service by saying "I can't blame others for being happy during the war, but I'm certainly not allowed a moment of joy while anyone is suffering in the world." You are also doing nobody a service by posturing like this is your attitude and shaming others online as if you have never smiled or eaten chocolate.

Have you ever seen the Good Place? In season 4, there is a man who is burdened with knowing perfectly exactly what actions would be the most ethical decisions at all times, and knowing for certain that making any unethical decisions will result in his eternal torture. Not only does he still go to hell in the end, but he also lives a miserable life in the meantime, because nothing he did could ever be enough.

So, what do you do, if you were born in North America, and don't happen to be 100% Lenni Lenape. Well, if every person of settler-descent would just give half their wealth to the corrsponding indigenous nation whose land they live on...

Being Good Within Your Lots

So, do we just give up on being good people? How can we choose to live and be happy, knowing the horrors we are complicit in, or even tacitly perpetuate through our participation in the economy? Every transaction you make at any store in the United States is growing the country's GDP, as well as every hour toiled. So do we only have the choice give up and die, or to accept being evil and never feel obligation or a desire to help?

As usual, binaries and black-and-white dichotomies are not helpful. We must accept living in a space between. We must narrow our field of view and focus on what we can do, and let that be enough. We can and should try to be good, try to improve life for the people around us, but we must also remember to live our only lives and try to live a life worth living that brings us pleasure and satisfaction. When we make choices, we must accept that our choices are driven and constrained by economic factors, and only impose reasonable expectations upon what kind of ethical decision is possible. You can't beat yourself up for moving to a big city where you had the opportunity for economic betterment and finding a community that accepts you—you can consider how to do it in ways that somewhat mitigate your contribution to gentrification and you must accept that you probably cannot afford to not contribute to gentrification to some extent unless you are particularly wealthy.

I also want to emphasize that you will never live a life where nobody resents you, externalizes problems onto you, or believes false things about you. Just because someone online hates you doesn't meant you're a bad person.

With all that said, these are the questions I am asking myself, and what I recommend you ask yourself.

What am I best positioned to affect?

If you work for the federal government, then you may be in a position to refuse to comply with DOGE directives. If you work for Whole Foods, you may be in a position to start organizing a union in your workplace. If you're a union member, you may be in a position to work to strengthen your union against attacks on the NLRB. If you're a teacher, you are in a position to try to protect your students from ICE, and refuse to comply with directives not to teach Black history.

Look at where you already are, and leverage that. You can only focus your energy on so many places, and you will be most effective working on issues that are "on your turf" than you will be parachuting into someone else's life trying to be the hero. Even if it would be more materially effective for group X to self-organize in revolt, you will be more effective at organizing the group you are already a member of. You have the most power to affect the things you are already in close proximity to.

It may be that you do not happen to be well-positioned to affect any major system or events. You are not suited to marching or shouting, you have little financial means, and your rent is paid by e-begging on social media. However, perhaps you are well-positioned to affect the emotional states of the people around you. Reproductive labor is valuable labor too. You can bake zucchini bread for the activists in your life who you see running low on fuel. You can check on your elderly neighbors and make sure someone is taking care of them. You can try to lift someone's spirits. You can check on the people nobody has seen in a bit and ensure they know they're loved.

I have a friend who is very disabled, and not really well-positioned to be a warrior fighting ever onwards against the powers that be. But she is really good at baking babka, and sometimes she just brings people babka when she has the spoons to leave the house. I think this counts as working within one's lots to do something good, somehow, in the places she is well-positioned to affect. It may not be leading the vanguard of a revolutionary army, but it makes people happy, it helps people find the will to keep on living. It adds pleasure and satisfaction to the lives of humans. It is kind, and appreciated, and I think sometimes we have to accept when that is the most that we can do within our means in the moment.

What Will I Focus My Efforts On?

If you try to do everything, you will burn out, and fast. I met my gender-swapped clone recently. He's very smart—and attractive—by the way. He told me about his "three hobbies theory." Besides your career, or whatever you do to make ends meet, you reasonably can only do one to three other things. He calls them hobbies, but it also includes activism, organizing, any sort of project you do outside of the basics of obtaining the means of subsistence and consuming them. Perhaps another term could be "ongoing committements." If you have three hobbies, you will not be able to do anything else. If you have more than three, then you will certainly burn out, drop some balls, and be a stress tornado.

You cannot fight fascism, climate change, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, famine, pestillence, war, and death. They are all intertwined, but if you are to effectively impact any of them, then you cannot attempt to fight all of them. You cannot be active in the DSA, YCL, AFL-CIO, Sunshine Movement, UNITE HERE, Wobblies, PSL, and SJP. Even if you only choose three, you will be less effective in each of the three than if you chose fewer than three.

If you are best-selling author John Green, perhaps due to your wealth and influence you are well-positioned to affect a lot of things. John Green decided to pick tubercolosis. He made it his thing and has devoted the bulk of his wealth and influence towards efforts to eradicate tubercolosis in the global south. Because he chose just one thing, he has been immensely impactful on the cause of tubercolosis, and has been able to organize millions of people to contribute to the cause.

You have three hobby slots, and if you want a very balanced and healthy life, it's best to just have two slots and leave an open spot for doing anything besides your hobbies. If you fill all three, where will you fit relationships, fun with friends, laying in the park on a sunny day?

So I recommend you pick one cause that you are well positioned to affect and make that your focus. One thing that is your thing that you try to do to make the world a bit of a better place within your capabilities. It doesn't have to be your lifelong focus, but it's the one you are committing to right now for the immediate future.

Then, pick at least one fun hobby that brings you pleasure and makes your own life enjoyable and more worth living. It doesn't have to be your only fun thing forever, but this is the one you prioritize and make sure you don't forget to indulge in, in this current moment of your life. Make sure you have this, so that you can actually live your only life, and not be solely a robot fighting for the sake of the humans.

Leave the third slot open as your flex spot, which can either be used for fun or for fighting the forces of evil, but not for anything that you commit to. Leave yourself some freedom and agency.

Let yourself live, and let it be enough

You have your one big thing you're committed to do to make the world a better place. Organizing solidarity actions for Gaza, union work, sanctuary work, sabotaging DOGE, volunteering to distribute free food to a community fridge, or feeding the Gaza activists after the march. Whatever it is, you're doing it, and it is good, and I'm proud of you, and I'm glad you're doing it, and it is enough.

You have your other thing, the pleasurable enjoyable thing that makes your life have restorative moments of joy that make you happy you're alive, the thing you remind yourself to do so that you don't burn out. Whether it be crochet, a book club, sports, a tabletop campaign, creative writing, gardening, renovating your house, hosting dinner parties, or photography. Whatever it is, you're doing it, and it is good for you, and I'm proud of you, and I'm glad you're doing it, and it is enough.

And maybe you have a third thing right now, or you're taking those free moments to volunteer to clean your city block this Saturday, or to catch up on Severance, or to have sex with a friend, or to go to a party, or to attend a march for Gaza, or to read the new Brandon Sanderson book, or to bake cookies for your coworkers. Whatever it is, you're doing it, and it is good, and I'm proud of you, and I'm glad you're doing it, and it is enough.

Congratulations, you are living a full and complete life. You are a very interesting person who does many good things and enjoys life too. You may not be saving the world. Your life is not ethically pure and untainted by global capitalism or societal privileges. But this is it. You are one single human being. You could not possibly be expected to do more than this and work to earn your daily bread. This is pretty much the most anyone can do after their youthful infinity pool of energy dries up in their mid-twenties.

You are doing your best to do good, and that's more than most can say. You are enough. You get to live. You, too, were born unto this earth, and so now you have an entire life to live, and you have filled it with good deeds and good memories. This is pretty much the best it gets.

"But! The horrors! I can see the horrors! I have to do something! I am filled with dread!"

You are doing something. You can decide to do something else, but I don't think you can reasonably do something more. You will always be complicit in something, so you have to make selective choices.

You are but one human in the great machine that is the economy, and in the great ecosystem of the earth. Your choices are limited. You cannot do everything right. You simply have to choose what right thing to do. So if you're looking for an answer, on how to exist ethically in this world, then here it is. Pick one good thing you are positioned to do for others, and one good thing to do for yourself, and let it be enough.

It is not your job to be perfect, to complete the work of learning new lessons and doing good deeds—but nor may you neglect your learning or the inclination to do good. If you always keep learning, you will be rewarded with wisdom. If you always keep trying to do good, your labor will bear fruit. But know that the totally righteous will die before they ever see reward.

So even as you wallow in blood, staining every inch of your clothes and skin, I beseech you: live.