Stop Shaming Individuals—Fix the Systems Burning Earth
Every plastic bag I accept feels like a small betrayal, but the alternatives cost three times as much and I have rent to pay. Every time I take a rickshaw instead of walking, every time I buy vegetables wrapped in plastic, every time I use electricity generated from coal—I feel the weight of complicity in my chest, the familiar ache of participating in systems I know are destroying the world my son will inherit.
This guilt is a weapon they’ve taught us to turn against ourselves.
The companies that have spent decades perfuding carbon into the atmosphere want me to feel personally responsible for climate change. The industries that have created systems where sustainable choices are luxuries rather than defaults want me to believe that individual virtue can solve collective problems.
They’ve made environmental consciousness into a consumer choice rather than a political necessity, then shamed us for not consuming our way to planetary salvation.
I calculate my carbon footprint and discover that my entire year of careful choices—walking instead of driving, eating less meat, using less electricity—is negated in minutes by a single corporate jet flight or a day’s operation at any major factory. Yet I’m the one who feels guilty when I buy a plastic water bottle because the neighborhood tap water makes Arash sick.
This is how systems maintain themselves: by making the victims responsible for the violence done to them. They create conditions where every choice is a compromise, then blame us for compromising. They design cities that require cars, then shame us for driving. They package everything in plastic, then lecture us about waste.
The guilt we carry is real—we are participating in destruction, even when we try not to. But the guilt is also manufactured, carefully cultivated to keep us focused on individual purity rather than collective action, personal responsibility rather than systemic change.
Happy grows vegetables on our balcony with the intensity of someone trying to save the world one tomato at a time. I love her dedication, but I also see how it exhausts her—the constant calculation of impact, the research into sustainable products we can’t afford, the guilt when she chooses convenience over principle because she’s already working sixteen-hour days keeping our family afloat.
We’ve been trained to carry the weight of industrial civilization’s ecological debt as personal shame. Every choice becomes a moral test, every purchase a referendum on our values. We’re so busy flagellating ourselves for not being pure enough that we forget to ask why purity is required of us but not of the systems that create the problems we’re supposed to solve with better shopping habits.
The environmental movement has been co-opted by the same consumerist logic that created the crisis. Instead of challenging the assumption that endless growth on a finite planet is possible, we’re told to buy organic, drive electric, shop local. Instead of questioning why a small number of corporations control the infrastructure that shapes all our choices, we’re encouraged to feel guilty about our individual choices within that infrastructure.
But guilt without power is just suffering. And suffering without systemic change is just performance.
The weight we carry isn’t the weight of personal failure—it’s the weight of being told we’re individually responsible for fixing problems that require collective solutions, that were created by people with vastly more power and resources than we’ll ever have.
What if instead of carrying this guilt, we carried rage? What if instead of perfecting our personal environmental practices, we demanded systems that made sustainable choices the easy choices, the cheap choices, the default choices?
The planet doesn’t need perfect individuals. It needs imperfect people who refuse to accept that destruction is inevitable, who understand that the crisis requires political change, not just personal virtue.
The guilt they want us to carry is meant to keep us isolated, competing to be the most virtuous consumer rather than joining together to create different systems entirely.
I still feel guilty about the plastic bags. But I’m learning to feel angrier about the people who make sure I have no choice but to accept them.
