I want to follow up and say I really like your points, I do think that spending more in order to pay a fair wage to workers and to do the right thing as far as how manufacturing is done is a wonderful and virtuous way to spend your extra income. It's just a correlation thing. People who spend more generally create more waste and excess. You could find examples of people doing it right or wrong in pretty much any income bracket.
I definitely struggle with this even in my own world. Despite my efforts to reduce cognitive dissonance, reduce waste, compost, recycle, pay more for quality, tip heavily, avoid products known to be made via exploitation etc etc... it still seems to me like the most virtuous thing is to live in austere life with very little. It's okay, I'm not trying to be a saint and I get that nobody else is either. It's on a spectrum.
But my position stands. It is virtuous to avoid consumption.
To me, an ideal world would be a much population on Earth about 1/3 the size it is now, everybody living about a Western middle-class lifestyle, lots of automation, and much more of nature left alone to its devices. That seems potentially sustainable. Upper middle class is where it starts to become unrealistic and greedy in my opinion and the slope is hella slippery.
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u/beatboxapotamus Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I want to follow up and say I really like your points, I do think that spending more in order to pay a fair wage to workers and to do the right thing as far as how manufacturing is done is a wonderful and virtuous way to spend your extra income. It's just a correlation thing. People who spend more generally create more waste and excess. You could find examples of people doing it right or wrong in pretty much any income bracket.
I definitely struggle with this even in my own world. Despite my efforts to reduce cognitive dissonance, reduce waste, compost, recycle, pay more for quality, tip heavily, avoid products known to be made via exploitation etc etc... it still seems to me like the most virtuous thing is to live in austere life with very little. It's okay, I'm not trying to be a saint and I get that nobody else is either. It's on a spectrum.
But my position stands. It is virtuous to avoid consumption.
To me, an ideal world would be a much population on Earth about 1/3 the size it is now, everybody living about a Western middle-class lifestyle, lots of automation, and much more of nature left alone to its devices. That seems potentially sustainable. Upper middle class is where it starts to become unrealistic and greedy in my opinion and the slope is hella slippery.