When buying stuff, consuming media and picking jobs - where do you draw the line of considering something too evil? Among my peers there’s a lot of people who will actively avoid Nestle products, or who don’t eat meat. But none of them bats an eye at using Facebook or X. Nobody cares about using products made in China under awful working conditions. I have worked as a freelancer translating greenwashing for a few doubtful megacorporations, others work as lawyers or programmers supporting them.
Especially when it comes to work I find myself between a rock and a hard place. I have tried doing blue collar jobs instead to avoid this. My body tells me very clearly that it’s not a full time option for me and I have been running into the same problems of having to consider working for people who either get their money from evil megacorporations or and/or having to do stuff that actively causes some kind of harm, and being forever poor while doing so.
Where do you draw the line? How do you live your life in such a way that it doesn’t support evil directly or indirectly while being able to bring food to the table and pay the rent?
It’s pretty impossible not to be tangentially connected with someone bad somewhere. Unless I have reasonable grounds to think the production of something was directly unethical I can’t and don’t worry about it.
For example, if you buy a thing from a poor country, there’s a chance a slave made it, but a greater chance it was part of somebody’s ticket out of rural poverty, and there’s no way to tell. On the other hand, meat is always meat (unless it’s lab-grown I guess, but that technology doesn’t work very well to date).