My Costco post generated some buzz! I’m trying to act not-surprised. The comments are appreciated. I wanted to follow up to address two points.
What do I mean when I say I’m “better” than Costco shoppers?
Initially I thought this would be the central part of the previous post, but I went a different direction and this point was glossed over.
At the risk of sounding completely full of myself (as if I haven’t already done that), I’ll frame this as “these things are good for society and these things are bad”.
Good
- Do things that are a minor inconvenience for you because they’re better for society. Someone who returns their cart is good. Someone who leaves their dog’s poop on the ground is bad. There are less binary cases where you can make judgement calls, but for the most part, these points are clear.
- Approach conversations in good faith and be willing to update your views / change your mind. When you genuinely try to understand people, explain yourself, have a dialogue, etc. these are ingredients for a productive society. This is my biggest gripe with social media politics. People get huge engagement using rage-bait points knowing that they’re bad faith arguments and no one ever says “hey, that was a good point that I didn’t consider, I’ve changed my mind“.
- Longform intentional engaged thinking. If you’ve followed this blog you know that I think shortform video is poison and should be avoided at all costs. The counter to that is something like reading a book, watching a movie (without your phone), writing a blog post! Anything that engages your brain. A podcast I listened to recently called doom scrolling “shitty flow“, where you’re in a state of a flow, but it’s for absolutely useless shit and after 30 minutes you regret the time you wasted. Avoid shitty flow. On the individual level you can say this isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for society, but on the aggregate, I think it is.
Bad
- When you rationalize “this wouldn’t be sustainable if EVERYONE did it, but I’m going to do it anyway“. This is the every-man-for-himself, whether its cutting in lines or driving like an asshole, these people are shamed as bad for society.
- Avoiding accountability like the lady knocking something over and not picking it up. This is an obvious counter point to doing things that inconvenience you but are for the greater good. That one display by that lady was “bad”. Does that make her a bad person? Not necessarily, but that instance was bad.
- Exploiting loopholes for personal gain even if knowingly unjustified. This is the person who buys something, uses it, then returns it because they can. Or signs up for discount codes with 10 different email addresses because they can. None of this is technically “wrong”, but when it’s done knowingly at the expense of a person or company, that’s bad. Some may straight up disagree with this one and say “Fuck the corporations, fuck the systems, they don’t care about you so you should steal every dime you can“.
- Parenting via social media. I’m way too new of a parent to judge other parents, and small instances like a trip to Costco do not paint the whole picture, but the evidence for social media being bad for kids is very strong. If parents resort to this regularly simply to stave off parental responsibilities, I would argue that’s bad.
With that laid out, I think it’s clear where my interpretation of good and bad come from.
When I say I’m “better“, I mean I try (not always successfully) to align my behavior with the Good section and what I think scales well if everyone did it. The opening of my previous post points out people doing the opposite. This Good vs. Bad is not liberal vs. conservative, poor vs. rich, etc. though I’m sure there are certain overlaps depending how you slice it.
Maybe you’d say “judging people” should be in the bad section, and I’m clearly doing that.
The second point is also from Alex’s comment regarding the elitist paternalism of liberals. I haven’t really heard this point before and I’m surprised because I think it’s a good one.
Why do I feel some need to intervene and act as if these people, Costco shoppers in this case, are so helpless that they want people like me to stand up for them, as if I’m the well-off, well-intentioned savior even though I basically never donate to charity, never volunteer my time, and more or less act entirely in the best interest of myself / immediate friends and family.
My thinking goes to two examples, one blatant, and one less so.
The blatant example is lobbying.
Big companies will spend when it’s good for them even if it’s bad for you. Walmart, for example, spends millions trying to make food cheaper and less healthy to produce, while also making sure food stamps can be used on these ultra-processed options they sell so they can increase profits. Costco, surprisingly, doesn’t do this much, so shout out to P$ for endorsing them as not the bad guy, but the point stands.
The other example, unsurprisingly, is smart phones & social media.
I am of the belief that social media has been a net negative for society. The big companies do not care if you have meaningful relationships, an improving career, or fulfillment in any real sense, they want you on your phone using their apps. Though popular now, this notion was absent for the first ~10-15 years of social media use and people gradually, unknowingly became addicted, became withdrawn, and became depressed (generalizing).
When I look at these two examples, it’s less:
“Hey poor individual who doesn’t know any better, let me tell you how to live your life”
and more
“Hey big companies, you have a social responsibility to serve this society better than you are“
And since companies are almost entirely incentivized by money, they are only going to change if laws are put in place or they can make more money some other way. They are not incentivized to improve society. This is where the free market needs help. I don’t believe the government is the perfect solution, but more that these are real problems that the average person would agree with and want changed.
Now, do they want change on food lobbying and social media more than, say gas prices or a war in Iran? Probably not, I totally understand that these aren’t top priorities for people. But left unchecked, they are eroding society in a way that feels harder and harder to reverse as time goes on. THAT was my thesis from the previous post.
Perhaps some disagree entirely with the notion that big companies have any social responsibility for the people they serve. That’s essentially the point I’m debating and I think the case for “companies bear no responsibility for anything the individuals do” does not hold up.
That was a lot. There may only be three people who read it, but hey, I had fun writing it. Appreciate it if you made it this far!
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