Context matters quite a bit here. Not all boycots are created equal.

I used to be the guy who wandered into Target every other week to get one thing and left with an $150 cart full of junk I didn’t plan on buying. I joined the boycotting over their DEI policy shift. I wouldn’t judge someone for continuing to shop there. Though I would encourage them to spend less. I view that boycott as an important lesson in respecting all stakeholders and not bending the knee to authoritarianism, but hardly an existential crisis for anyone or anything but Target.

I’m not sure if I’m technically boycotting Tesla because I’ve never done any business with them. However, it’s my firm conviction that someone who buys a Tesla today, is a piece of shit. Someone who knowingly invests in Tesla is a piece of shit. If they’re someone I continue to interact with after that they’re very likely to hear about it.

Tesla, in my opinion, is complicit in everything Elon does. It has proactively financed, and propagandized oppression and undermined democracy and the functioning of a government that is supposed to serve and represent me. Anyone who buys a Tesla today is also complicit.

She’s not an idiot. She represents idiots. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Her and Susan Collins with their “oopsie… I fell for it again” routine. I don’t know who it’s for at this point, but they’re both still in office so I guess it’s working.

Medicine has improved by leaps and bounds. We have greater life expectancy and mostly a better quality of health along the way. Child mortality is down globally.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?time=1996..latest

Improvements in our understanding of neurodivergent students has resulted in better educational and quality of life outcomes for millions who in past decades would have fallen through the cracks.

The proliferation of environmental lead from paint and gasoline are WAY down, and the hole in the Ozone was just about peak in 1995.

Open source, public domain, and freely available knowledge have democratized education, technology, research, and product development in ways that would have almost been inconcievable in 1995.

We are able to communicate more globally, even with total strangers, often across language barriers, and for free.

Video games, films, and television are able to create visions that would have been technically impossible 30 years ago. And technology has reduced the barriers for people to gain entry into those industries.

I carry around a tiny super computer with instant access to all the world’s knowledge. That would have been a dream in 1995.

There are of course many things that are worse. It’s a harder time to be starting out in life. “Luxuries” are dirt cheap and necesities are unaffordable. We’ve traded our sense of community for a paranioa of “others” even as the world has gotten safer. Globally the world has been swinging toward extremism and it constantly feels like capitalism may collapse and we don’t know what comes next if that happens. But failure to see how much is better and for how many seems like too much doom scrolling and too narrow and outlook.

It’s just consumption in general. It predates capitalism (as we know it). For thousands of years humanity has been using beer and wine to cut the fat, sugar, and salt on our palate so we don’t feel too full or sate and can eat more.

I didn’t make it through that movie, though it’s very well done.

It wasn’t so much a tear jerker for me. It just left me feeling sick to my stomach.