All in, I'm prepared for a long despair, in the glowing plasma of my Revolution Flow. Life is a complex idleness, not everything is what it seems. Northern lights rage in unexpected places, today I learned to be an aphantast. No day is like the next, but still in a pragmatic state of anger.
Today I am looking at my dubious
Starbucks
and nestle myself into this sustainability story that is being advertised so modernly by the big and middle players. But I'd better leave out my new passion AI, I don't want to draw my own conclusions, I want to give them a piece of my mind.
On the other hand, I don't really like the demonization either. Neither every company nor every person can be tarred with the same brush. Changing perspectives and questioning yourself and everyone else more than usual is not the stupidest plan.
Öko-Test is one of the few media outlets for this in the German-speaking world. I cannot and do not want to follow their style, but I am interested in communicating and if we see Nestle as a well-known problem child of food capitalism, then we still have to start interacting in order to take a healthy new path for everyone.
This will probably also mean dealing with the shadows instead of escaping from them into wishful thinking or painting desperate posters at demonstrations.
Starbucks is already a very questionable pseudo-coffee in itself, the shop wouldn't even be greenwashable by Master Propper, so it's not a well-chosen example, an older example would be the purchase of Body Shop by L'Oreal, but even here the questionable nature of the natural cosmetics brand is already fundamentally controversial for really thoughtful people.
This acquisition has made it hardly acceptable any more, but there are those who support the idea of not digging too deep, and these are allies who should be taken seriously as a broader group. A strong and clear analytical language without any ifs and buts is therefore not always good. Oh well, I don't care, lol.
My basic thinking
It's somewhere between Peta and Sea Shepard without their hysteria and with a bit more color. It's better to go with the Tao than to get a permanent bloody nose by running into it.
And I haven't even gotten to all the green lies yet; the finger-pointing approach isn't all that new, and some things seem to have changed for the worse since the first black books and greenwashing films came out.
I see more and more, its the last decade we lose us.
And at the end of the emotion, I still think differently, the most hypocritically sustainable are still us humans ourselves, not the companies whose common sense is at least beginning to be a noticeable social component. Society, on the other hand, is waging war against heat pumps and is cultivating cruise ship fetishes. W
A second car here, an evening in the cocktail bar there, fluffy hedonism in the Don't Look Up mode (should you really pour the annual income of an entire African village family into your liver on a Friday evening?) should not be embarrassing, ordinary everyday faux pas, Dead can dance, even if we like to project onto the big bad boys. I have not yet discovered any great overlap between minimalists and LOHAS or BOBOS.
And that cannot be washed away, not even with fair joy. The true value of things catches up with you unconditionally. And that is not a different story, but has something directly to do with it.
The fact that it is at least as much about misdirected cash flows and profit margins, not just about ecology and ethics, but about an adjustment and redirection of capital IS YET INDISPENSABLE.
Margeleaks is one such idea and tries to show all the calculations that lead to prices and will inflict some wounds, not least in actually valued industries, because living the good life at the expense of others is one of the most human specialties of all.
And how much cheaper and more authentic could the green revolution be if it came from social media and not from Liebeskinder.
The need to look every day, not just occasionally like through seals or case-based research, makes me think that we should only believe all this crap if we constantly evaluate it.
I mean, as an individual citizen you are monitored, mapped, crunched into data, then we should do the same to the big guys and move from binge watching to Nestle or Macron watching.
Trump is almost well enough illuminated to be able to get away with shaming and disgrace, but if that had happened earlier with Epstein, it is doubtful whether the L'oreal heir really likes being held personally accountable for all her animal testing, every step of the way. The rich and famous love the invisibility of their decadence and immorality. We know about the flight movements before global economic and climate summits.
Let us watch those who watch us, and let us watch ourselves even more:
And yet our true nature is not - I would give us a much better intergalactic seal - I think core human values do not require religiosity or legislation, but are based on a positive and community-strengthening sense of right and wrong. When did the group leaders become monsters, a kind of seduction of power? Anthropologists and sociologists should be able to find out together with archaeologists in an interdisciplinary manner. Reptilian brain or not, we did not put ourselves in the breech position entirely out of emotional incompetence. Gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo or orangutan? Choose wisely.
But in the end, we still need several thousand years of practice to be truly human. We are only just emerging.
And when the developed and understanding human being one day grows up - and that is also what my visions of the future are about - then he will be able to judge leniently but also speak very clearly about what kind of scum, for the sake of all values, was allowed to act in deed and shame in history then and now, permitted, not prevented, and how many unforgivable, glossed over stupid mistakes and cruelties have shaped the course of history up to the present day.
And we will be allowed to name what we hardly want to see today.
Up to the very first topic of conversation, our relationship with our fellow creatures of DNA and the biosphere. Our questionable behavior as a species actually capable of this.
In our global refusal
Responsibility
to take over.
That's the complex web that I explore in Fast Vegan and Beyond, and when I sip a Starbucks like I did today because I didn't feel like having tea, at least I think about what's going on with me.
Hopefully, if we take a closer look and report on it, we can achieve something that is not subject to automatisms. Instead, habits are replaced by mindfulness. Not the mindfulness of the mindful and their waste of time. Thoughtfulness might be a better fit. Actionable thoughtfulness. But innovation is difficult to convey in the context of criticism of progress, we are faced with an unmanageable new discussion.
h. And Greta comes from there. They must be the good guys, and even sex requires a yes. This is now being extended to the murder of old people, in benevolent consent for one's own pleasure-seeking.
I often hitchhike into literary flight until my doctor recommends something else. Into the Greenland of dissent. But it's okay to be carefree as long as you don't enjoy the slaps in the face. I'm not here to follow the smooth talkers into the you-can-play paradise. I'm just rubbing salt in your wound and poking around in it with my finger.
There are always new triggers. I read excitedly about the mushroom farmer who really seems to be working on a change in an organic and logical way. Only to then vomit on his Facebook profile because he turns out to be a stupid, brazen vaccine denier. A Billie Gates hater. Yes, sometimes the misanthrope is the better choice.
Escaping Kafka's fate will be difficult.