Guilt

Avocado angst: is there anything safe to eat?

Your morning coffee is now an ethical minefield. Sure, you’ve remembered your reusable cup and are smugly avoiding adding to the 2.5 billion disposable cups dumped each year. But, ma’am, which milk would you like in your latte? Asked this question in my local coffee shop, I panic. Obviously not dairy, thanks to the methane-burping cows that produce it. Coconut is imported and food-mile heavy. Aren’t almonds causing drought in California? And isn’t the Amazon being razed to make way for soya plantations? Oat milk then, except I don’t like the taste. And isn’t coffee a pretty unethical product all told anyway? I recently stood at the counter for a full 20 seconds, lost in a moral milk maze.

avocado angst

Our collective nervous breakdown

It’s being sold by some as a glorious revolution, but what Western culture is really experiencing is a garden variety nervous breakdown. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it began, but it’s certainly well progressed, wouldn’t you agree? The latest mania for gathering in furious mobs to denounce and expunge reminders of our past is what therapists call transference. We don’t hate our forebears anything like as much or as vigorously as we hate ourselves. How could we? They gave us everything we have. Instead, we are shamed by them. Born into what, statistically, is the easiest time in human history to be alive, what have we done or worked towards relative to the men and women cast in bronze or marble who came before?

nervous