Our culture is experiencing a Cambrian explosion of life optimization strategies — lifestyles, aesthetics, -ists, -isms, -cores, and -spheres.

Today, we are guilty simply for standing still and breathing.

Hell, I’m even a part of the problem.

My family eats carnivore – only meat, eggs, dairy. My wife has turned into a veritable nutrition expert from watching YouTube and reading peer-reviewed nutrition articles online. It seems like everyone is talking about what to eat, what not to eat, what happens when you eat such and such. This discourse is immense.

Our first child was also born recently, so we’re also partially paying attention to, and simultaneously trying to resist, the mommy-fluencer machine which rolls on and on with its content, techniques, recommendations, products, and memes.

I’m a man, and the discourse about masculinity has been particularly saturated with discussions of lifestyle optimization. Figures like Brett McKay of the Art of Manliness have been around forever, and the disparate groups of the Manosphere have also emerged in recent years from their digital catacombs to enjoy some prominence in mainstream discourse. Everywhere you turn, there is advice about lifting, daily habits, how to relate to women, etc… My Twitter feed is full of it.

This isn’t really new though.

Throw back to the hippie movement in the 60’s, or punks, goths, and vegans in the 90’s (not to mention the endless stream of fad diets), and you’ll quickly realize that we live in a culture which generates personal lifestyle regimes with an almost religious fervor.

Our society places an emphasis on the individual’s unique responsibility to conform their life to some higher standard of flourishing. This self-mastery cannot be abdicated or ignored. The calls of ‘awake!’ and ‘open your eyes!’ constantly bombard us with the injunction to act.

Feminists coined the phrase that "the personal is political," and this is a crucial insight which cannot be missed, but we can only properly mobilize this insight by opposing it to another – "do not personalize the political." The personal is political, but not in a way which can be personally acted on. The relationship is asymmetric, and believing that it's not produces a host of psychological hazards.

In a slightly different wording – Don’t let the system make you feel guilty!

Climate change isn’t your fault.

Inequality isn’t your fault.

Institutional dysfunction isn’t your fault.

School shootings aren’t your fault.

Economic chaos isn’t your fault.

Sperm count decline isn’t your fault.

War isn’t your fault.

Don’t let them make you feel guilty for not altering your life to mitigate the consequences of the systems' operation or the effects of the decisions of our institutions run by society's elites.

The people in charge of our society’s institutions of government, media, business, and education have the gall to pester you to change your life by sacrificing your time, your energy, your money, and even your family’s well being, to ever so slightly mitigate the negative impacts of their decisions. We should refuse to put up with such shameless gaslighting.

Climate change activists harangue us endlessly with a preacher’s fury — turn off your lights, recycle, take shorter showers, buy an electric car, take fewer trips to the store, drink sustainably sourced coffee, the list goes on and it’s increasing in length seemingly every day.

But the truth is that you could meticulously plan out your life to perfectly execute these sustainable practices, and it would affect exactly nothing.

This is not to mention how much you would be mentally impoverished by having to make countless micro-decisions each day. Human beings only have so much bandwidth.

These regimes are designed to exhaust us.

We could change all the cars and pickup trucks on the road to electric vehicles right now, and it would never outweigh the carbon being pumped out by the mining equipment pulling rare earth metals out of the ground in Africa, South America, and Australia in order to build the batteries for these vehicles. Any gains we might see would be more than wiped out by a single volcano eruption from one of earth’s 1,350 active volcanos.

My first job after college was with a SaaS company working with asphalt contractors. This provided me an inside view into the highly technical process of producing asphalt and building roads. You would be amazed at the immense amount of waste which takes place. In order to build a road, a contractor runs 3 and 4 axle dump trucks in a loop from the asphalt plant to the job site for 8+ hours a day. The further the job site is from the plant, the more trucks they have to run to maintain their production speed. I’ve seen jobs where contractors had to run 16 trucks driving one hour each way, and they were driving back empty! This is happening everywhere in the US for the majority of the year (the work is weather-dependent), but they can still mill (tear up roads) in the rain, and the process is essentially the same but reversed.

I’d be remiss to pass over the media darling du jour — the war in Ukraine. The Russian and Ukrainian militaries are pumping an immense amount of carbon into the atmosphere by way of tanks, ground transportation, and aircraft, not to mention the firing of missiles, rockets, and mortars which our government uses our tax dollars to send to the Ukrainian military. Also, don’t forget the immense fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers which our government continually shuffles around the globe or the fighter jets which daily are taking off and landing. Don’t even get me started on the entire domestic and international airline industries…

Your actions are the tiniest drop in the tiniest thimble. You need to see that. Once you do, you can start to break free.

“Sure, your actions individually aren’t very meaningful, but if everyone started to change their habits, it would add up to a much greater impact!”

I hope that what I’ve said thus far would make you see that such a proposal lives in the fantasy realm of fuzzy feelings and self-righteous delusions. This proposal only makes sense if we were in a position to alter the systems which make the largest contribution to the problem, but unfortunately, we are not.

We believe the delusion that our actions can have an impact on the problem because our minds are trained to over-index on the things we are familiar with and the structures which make up our daily lives. However, the reality is that it’s the unnoticed, invisible, and autonomous structures which shape our physical environment, our economic structures, our social outcomes, and our psychic landscapes which generate the world that we live in.

There are people who are much closer to the levers of discourse, policies, and decisions, and these people realize that with that agency comes an increase in responsibility. The people closest to the solutions spend their time gaslighting us who are much further from any sort of agency, because they need to cope with their inaction in the face of the moral demand which their circumstances place on them to exercise their agency for the sake of others.

The proliferation of lifestyles in our society’s collective discourse and imagination directly correlates to our perceived lack of agency in affecting any real change in the world. As we feel more and more out of control, we more desperately manufacture and cling to personal regimes which give us the sense that we are having an impact, that at least we will be able to escape.

No one will escape.

You are not pure.

No one makes it out of this unscathed.

If each of us can start accepting that, we will be able to start making spaces for ourselves where we are free to pursue what is good, but it will be at the cost of the mythical purity which we esteem so highly in our heart of hearts.

If you enjoyed that, you can check out more of my writing at Samsara Diagnostics where I post a free weekly piece about topics in religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. I try to buffer that space from my politics (with a high degree of success, I think), so I used Mirror to express more of my personal opinions.