A few days ago I saw a documentary about a German farrier working in a very poor region of Romania first helping horses, then dogs and then helping people with a soup kitchen. When I see something like that I am immediately obliged to think, why can’t I do something like that. I would like to improve the world and still I am at home writing this stuff. There are a lot of reasons. First of all laziness, the lack of energy getting up in order to do something, then the courage to take something in my own hands and so on. A friend of mine a while ago said she didn’t want to improve the world anymore. That is stupid (I suspect that even before she had not changed so much). She could have said as well ‘I shit on what is happening in this world.’ Unfortunately, it is difficult to live a good life in a bad world. The next stupid thing is to talk about what others should change. ‘They should do this and they should do that.’  Who is they? The anonymous others, which probably means everybody else except oneself.  Referring to others is one of the easiest way to elude one’s own responsibility. Even for people who consider themselves as progressive, change is always hard for everybody. Often we say that for example horses are creatures of habit. Not only in this regard, we humans are animals as well. We don’t like to change our habits. We don’t like it, because we don’t get it without any effort, it can be troublesome, even painful.

It is not for everyone to go like this farrier and really try to change things. Most of us are not the kind of people to be a politician, take to the streets, have great ideas etc. But I realised that there are small things everybody can do which probably will not change the world (who could possibly do that?), but which can change small things. Obviously, we are all different, so what seems to one person easy to achieve might be for another impossible. This means everybody can try to find a way suitable and achievable for him- or herself. That is the scope of this text, to offer possibilities. I am sure, you might find a lot of other ones.

The communication scientist Paul Watzlawick had this very famous idea that it is not possible not to communicate. I would extent that to being political as well: It is not possible not to be political. Even if you are a non-political person, not interested in politics at all, seemingly not doing anything political, you are very political. Because doing nothing is not the total absence of doing something, doing nothing has an impact as well.

Let’s say you are an average person, raised in a middle class family who had one or two cars, ate meat, had a bank account in a local bank (and didn’t bother how the bank earned their money), is now used to buy things online using big companies like Amazon or even worse fast fashion companies like Shein, which have a huge environmental impact and so on. Or quite likely, you have never thought much about the company you get your energy from and where they get it from (coal, nuclear power, green energy). This is politics.

Let’s see. You have a car which runs with petrol. Firstly, bad for the environment. Secondly, it “helps” your country staying dependent on oil exporting countries which are usually politically not nice ones exploiting their people and so on. Third, now it might ruin you financially, with the oil price going up in the future. Okay, not everybody can just go by bike or use the public transport. When you live in the country side, that is very hard or often impossible. If you live in a big city, it would be much easier. When you have to use a car, you could buy an electric one. They are too expensive? Not really, I just bought one (used) and the money I save when charging the car compared to the price of petrol (a few days ago I heard on the radio the presenter saying she had just spent about 200 Euros for putting petrol in her car. She might have a big car, but 200 Euros? It takes me months to spend them) will amortize the money I had spent very quickly. So, this is a very political decision.

Another political thing is eating meat. Did you know how much CO2 is produced from animal farming? Did you know that to produce one kg of meat you need eight times (which is 800%!) more land than for producing one kg of grain? Did you know in which conditions the farm animals live and are being slaughtered? A part from being not really healthy food (eating meat leads to cardiovascular deceases which leads to high costs in the public health sector) meat eating has a very high environmental impact and it does not show any respect for animals. (I know, you might love your dog or cat, but what is the difference to a cow, a pig or a hen? Exactly. None.) So, also this is very political. There is a two-step solution (I must admit I am only on the first one but struggling with doing so: to become first vegetarian and then vegan. The first is to renounce eating animal food, which is already a good thing. The second is renouncing any animal product (including honey, wool, leather etc.) So, there is a lot every single person do.

What about your bank? How did you choose your one? Probably because it had the best conditions for you at the time. Maybe you didn’t think much about it at all, because you took just the local branch of the one you knew. A bank can have a huge impact as well. It depends on how they earn their money. Will they spend it in military equipment? Will they give credits to suspicious companies or even countries? Just look at the buildings where they are located or which they own, then you will understand immediately that usually they will earn a lot of money. Often, they will not tell you exactly how. Transparency is a big problem when it comes to earning money. So, what can you do? Get informed about alternative ways, e.g. banks which are transparent, which for example sustain environmental projects, which show that they don’t spend their money, which is actually ours, in suspicious ways. And then simply change your bank.

What is the problem with Amazon and Co.? When Amazon started (Do you remember that? At the beginning, they only sold books), I loved it. Finally, we could get hold of books, foreign books, which before were very hard to find. It was like opening up to a much bigger part of the world. And nowadays? What is left of it? It still sells books, but it also sells literally everything. Whatever product you are looking for, in almost all of the cases Amazon will offer a better price than other companies, I imagine threatening the survival of a lot of smaller ones. I just heard: Oh, I bought a new suitcase, on Amazon for half the price than the competitors. That is unsane. When looking up for products, some companies have on their own website a link to Amazon where the product is usually much cheaper. They undermine their own business. That is madness. I wonder if Amazon is forcing them to do so. This is one aspect, but the other one is the political power companies like Amazon, Tesla, Meta, Facebook etc. do have now, especially since Trump is at the power, and they are so close to him. Buying from them means helping Trump and the neo-fascist American regime keeping their power.

The third aspect is the fast fashion of nowadays. Many people buy stuff, clothes, shoes, mobiles, computers etc. more often than they actually need them. The market just suggests that they need the latest whatsoever. Did you know that most of the returns (of new, unused products) get destroyed? What about all the fast fashion clothes? I often wonder what happens with all the clothes when people change their whole wardrobe in one year, sometimes in one season, only because the fashion has changed. So, buying less is one option, another one is buying used things. It is very good for your personal purse, because you can save a lot of money, for example, I like to buy high quality clothes, but I would never pay hundreds of Euros for it, so I get them used. The crazy thing is that often they are just as new. If you shop a bit around, you find things that have been used once or twice and people will resell them (why did they buy them at all?). Use your clothes and shoes to their end. Don’t throw them away, just because they are from last year. This is also very political. It would have a political and an environmental impact at the same time.

Shopping around in order to find cheap stuff seems to make sense. But actually, it does not. Regarding clothes, how can good clothes be produced in a cheap way? There are many ways, often combined. Exploiting the workers, using cheap material, which often means with a lot of chemicals (Shein is the best, sorry, worst example of it. Investigations have shown that they use chemicals in a much higher concentration than legally allowed.), not caring about the environmental pollution (water, air, land etc.).

Regarding meat, there is a very interesting fact. Prices of most of the living cost have gone up in the last decades of hundreds, sometimes thousands of percent, like housing, energy, cars etc. What did not raise at all or very little is the price of meat. How can that be? When everything gets more expensive, logically for meat it should be the same. Think about farming. Once, the farmers had their own farm, they had their own animals who they often knew by name. They had a small number of animals which they could manage. Nowadays, farms are more like factories (in the US they call them farm factories), where everything is optimized, from feeding to milking to slaughtering and processing, even the animal is optimized, chickens grow faster then before putting more weight on, hens laying more eggs living in small cages with fake seasons and fake times of the day to stimulate them to produce more eggs. So what has changed is the productivity, the quantity. Of course, there must be a price for all that. But who is paying the price? Not we customers who want cheap food (Once, people spent a much larger portion of their income for food then we do today). There is only one answer to that. The animals are paying for it, with living conditions unimaginable to many of us. When our pet lived in such conditions, there would be a very loud outcry. But they are only cows, pigs, lambs, hens … it can’t be called other than hypocrisy.

All this is political. You don’t need to get engaged, in a party, institution etc., run for elections, take over some jobs, no need for that. Just change some small things in your everyday life. Maybe not all at once, starting with one or two, or even better, starting with reflecting about what your impact is in this world. There is always space for improvement. Thinking that if everybody lived like me, the world would be good, is a way that for sure does not help. That is the way most people think of themselves. Otherwise they would change, right?