I gave up on ethical consumption, and I want to explain why.

I don’t come from a particularly wealthy family, and I work an ordinary job. But when I was a teenager, I spent a surprising amount of time thinking about ethical consumption. I’m not even sure what initially pushed me toward it. We hear about the problems of consumerism and exploitation all the time, and this isn’t exactly a new issue.

Whenever I saw news about labor exploitation in manufacturing, for example in the clothing industry, I obviously didn’t support it. Especially as a worker myself, the idea of someone being exploited to produce something I buy has always bothered me.

For a long time, I tried to buy only from so-called responsible or ethical producers and to avoid mass-market brands whenever possible.

Eventually, I realized that I simply cannot afford to live this way.

I understood this particularly well a few months ago, when I decided that I wanted to become vegetarian for ethical reasons and stop eating meat. I quickly ran into a very practical problem: a lot of the products marketed toward vegetarians are simply too expensive for me.

There is a bio supermarket in my city where I can barely afford to buy anything. The prices are genuinely enormous from my perspective. Looking around, I often get the impression that the people shopping there are considerably wealthier than I am.

I already know someone will want to tell me that being vegetarian can be cheap. I’m not interested in arguing about that. I’m just describing my own situation. I don’t feel properly fed by eating salads, and meat is one of the cheapest and most practical sources of calories and protein available to me. Grains, meat and other basic foods make up the foundation of my diet.

Clothing is much the same. I simply cannot afford to buy clothes exclusively from ethical or sustainable brands. Sometimes H&M is what I can afford, and that’s the end of the discussion.

And I don’t say this to make some dramatic statement about how poor I am. My point is something else:

If you are poor, ethical consumption is often not realistically available to you.

And yet modern society constantly encourages us to feel guilty about our consumption.

Don’t buy this. Don’t eat that. Don’t use plastic. Don’t buy fast fashion. Buy organic. Buy sustainable. Buy ethically sourced. Check where everything was produced.

But why does so much of the responsibility fall on the consumer rather than the producer?

Am I really responsible for more plastic waste than Coca-Cola? Is my decision to buy a cheap T-shirt more important than the industrial system that produces millions of them? Why are individual consumers constantly asked to make morally perfect choices while companies are allowed to structure the entire market around making those choices difficult or unaffordable?

I don’t think ethical consumption is inherently meaningless. I understand why people want to make better choices, and I don’t think exploitation or environmental destruction should simply be accepted.

But I’ve started questioning the idea that the burden of solving these problems should primarily be placed on individual consumers.

Because if the ethical option is only affordable to people who already have enough money, then ethical consumption isn’t really an individual moral choice available to everyone.

It’s a privilege.

UPD: I feel guilty for giving up on it, but I don’t really know what to do with the guilt that society puts on me. What am I supposed to do? Is unethical consumption morally justified for poor people, given the assumption that poor people simply cannot afford to consume ethically? And does what I wrote above imply that ethical consumption has become, above all, a new class signifier that allows us to divide society?