Apparently, people read this. I have no idea how many. I don’t keep track of it at all. In some sense I don’t care while simultaneously wondering who’s checking me out. I know some people do because I have specific friends I share select works with and some of them are like, “Oh yeah, you’re in my RSS feed.” That’s kind of strange to me.

I’ve had conversations related to the really hard moral view pieces like Fruit of the Poison Tree and More Than Output where individuals I know and love will apologize or express guilt for their complacency in what they also believe to be evil.

For my friends and perhaps also for those who would disagree with my moral stances, let me be clear: moral compromise is essential to make it through life. Most of us are nothing if not a collection of moral compromises. I understand this. I, unfortunately, do not live in perfect congruence with my own values. I make no claim I am free of hypocrisy. I don’t even believe such an existence is possible.

Life puts us on the horns of dilemma more than any of us who aren’t psychopaths would like. It puts us in the position of choosing lesser evils or doing things we’re not proud of. Sometimes the long term game we play forces us to consider that the ends may very well justify what appear to be unsavory or compromised means.

You cannot function in any present society without a lot of moral compromise. There’s too much evil to pick up a holy banner in every imaginable crusade. The powerful among our species dish out darkness, selfishness, inequity, cruelty, and destruction with unmitigated glee. The structures around us make us constantly choose and, in many cases, vote against our neighbors for the sake of self preservation—or sometimes just plain comfort or convenience.

When I was a young neoliberal libertarian borderline Christian nationalist of sorts1 I was particularly oppressed by two flawed ideas:

  • Systemic problems require individual solutions and that the onus of solutions to systemic problems rests on the entirely voluntary actions of individuals.
  • That I could make sense of the moral dilemmas of my current time and place by relying on books, texts, and ideas that were forged sometimes thousands of years ago in cultures that are entirely alien to me and my time.

The first of these is particularly relevant and ultimately compounded in very weird ways by the second.

You cannot be a personal bulwark against every perceived evil out there. Maybe there is some sort of monastic lifestyle where this works, but if you want to operate in any heterogenous society, you will have to give up on moral purity. We’re left to pick and choose the moral positions that are our hills to die on and the ones that we lack the will or energy to resist.

If you pick too many hills, you’ll certainly be given the opportunity to die.

The individual responsibility angle that flooded my youth—and I mean through at least the entirety if my 20s—coupled with the religious implications of it all made everything feel like some kind of sin, and in a way far more personal than just the the general “we’re all sinners” sort of evil. Somewhere in the ether beyond the veil some bureaucrat in the hereafter was making a list and checking it twice. Every single action in my life was a moral quandary.

  • How much money can I justify spending on myself?
  • How much evil am I complicit in when shop at a supermarket or department store?
  • What foreign laborers were harmed because I can only afford cheap goods?
  • What environmental ruin is the result of my consumerism?

The list goes on. Trying to make sense of this within a religious framework sort of built on texts written thousands of years ago for cultures that are completely alien translated from languages I don’t understand and put through the ringer of thousands of years of reinterpretation by more alien cultures being preached to me by a modern religious corporation, was driving me mad. I was going absolutely mad.

It wasn’t until my early 40s that the level of madness and emotional destruction became clear. I still feel extreme guilt and shame for all kinds of things in my life that make no sense. Fail to stop for any given homeless person? Shame. Failure to properly disassemble garbage for proper recycling? Guilt. Buying literally any food in plastic? Yeah, total and complete madness.

I would argue the act of existing in a consumerist industrial society is impossible without even the most banal day-to-day activities creating harm. The generation and creation of energy is harmful. That’s the world many of us were born into. This harm is multiplied if you live in the US because you’re part of the empire that—even in its decay—still sits atop all of this and dictates global evils on a greater scale than any other nation.

Systemic problems require systemic solutions though. None of us can just leave it all behind for some uncharted place and live with the land like our ancestors could many millennia ago. That’s pretty much not an option for anyone who wants to anyway. Even if you did, isn’t leaving other members of your tribe behind to get away from it all itself a compromise?

It’s not moral compromise that disgusts me in most cases2. You cannot escape them. It’s the cowardice of those who evade the question of whether or not they are making a compromise that create the fuel for evil to thrive. Understanding personal compromise is the gateway to identifying systemic problems you cannot conquer on your own. In democratic societies this forms the basis for action and legislation—systemic solutions.

Let me provide a dilemma that is very much a problem of our current times.

About 10 years ago I bought a used minivan shortly after my first son was born. I have been looking to upgrade this vehicle for the last couple years. The old girl has served us well, but it was bare bones, many little things like the power locks had just stopped working, and it was pushing 200K miles. It’s also the daily driver for my wife and kids. Safety features have evolved considerably since 2011 when the vehicle was manufactured.

The problem was, I wanted an EV. While I don’t buy into the terrible imagery that buying an EV is somehow me wrapping Mother Earth in a soft, green embrace, they’re a lesser evil3. Okay, so get an EV, right? Perfect, I’ll just go get the EV minivan that no one manufactures! I figured by now there would be an option, but not really. VW is sorta close but this is not a company I trust at all. When it comes to both reliability and generally choosing an auto manufacturer for my family, I’m never going to bet against the Japanese.

Do I need a minivan? Yeah, as someone doing normal things in an industrialized society, I do. My family tends to travel by our van, not by air. I have a house of musicians and one of them plays a double bass that I have to lug around with a full crew. They also play as a band and there’s a lot of equipment involved.

I weighed the options and compromised on a gas guzzler, even in 2026. I recognize said compromise. I recognize that I was unwilling to make the changes required to have an EV. The thing is, the trouble with emissions is a systemic problem. It’s not up to every single consumer to compromise to make this work. That’s not even a real solution. It’s libertarian nonsense making excuses for the fact that they hate even the idea of a “nanny state” or being forced to make anything but the most selfish choices at their disposal4.

We should have a much wider infrastructure for EVs now—among many, many other entirely attainable and affordable alternative energy solutions both in terms of production and consumption. Instead, the United States elected a president who uses the phrase “clean coal.” If you have ever seen or burned coal, you know that there is nothing clean about this. There are modern measures that reduce the impact of coal, but the simple reality is this: burning shit is not a sustainable future for energy production. Get the fuck over it.

As a result, just existing in any normal capacity creates environmental harm. Energy production has an environmental cost. Human expansion has an environmental cost. Consumerism has an environmental cost and typically also a human cost due to the current trend toward exploiting cheap labor in nations with little to no worker protections. Almost none of us living in the first world are going to agree to give up our refrigerators though. Even the seemingly responsible act of recycling is often just dumping that trash on poor foreign communities so you can feel good about yourself. These problems all require systemic solutions. In order to be part of the voting block to bring that about, you must be aware of your own impact, your own harms, and your own moral compromises.

I think the most frustrating thing about the time in which we live is that most of the particularly existential threats to our species and our environment are entirely solvable. We don’t need magical technological breakthroughs from a future that isn’t here yet. We have less than perfect options that will almost certainly get us there. Our leaders and power brokers that continue to consolidate the world’s wealth work actively against these things for reasons I cannot comprehend. Their children will be consumed along with the rest of us. They breathe the same air we breathe. There comes a point where even wealth and power can’t insulate nor save you.

Hunger can be solved, right fucking now. Housing can be solved, right fucking now. There is no reason anyone should have think about the personal economic impact of going to the ER. There is simply no need for war. There is no need for poverty. There is no need to marginalize others. There is no need for oppression. The cliché world painted by John Lennon in Imagine is right there for the taking with the tools, technology, and wealth we have at our disposal right here, right now. Instead, we get to live in the alternate reality he sung about in Working Class Hero5.

Why do we always choose the second song?

More often than not because avoid the recognition of our moral compromises rather than accepting them as the necessary evils that they are and considering whether we’re truly individually responsible or if the solutions require forces and organization greater than our own actions and social spheres.

You do not have to strive for perfect compliance with your own values. This world and this time regularly puts them in conflict with each other. Please though, do not feed the beast. Do not put your head in the sand and pretend the compromise does not exist purely because you’re not at fault. Do not pretend that your complacence in matters of morality—or worse, your avoidance of consideration—does not feed the worst of our species.

However, do not waste mental and emotional energy blaming yourself for the compromises necessary to exist with relative sanity. These are not your problems to solve alone. Conscious compromise is not an act of acceptance, it is more an act of basic survival.

Perhaps one day, things will be better.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

It’s easy if you try.

  1. It is hard to describe my youth. The descriptor doesn’t even begin to express the insanity and cultist nature of youth. I’m sure, if you read these essays, elements of this still persist. ↩

  2. Some compromises are so selfish and so terrible that yes, they disgust me. You should be disgusted too. ↩

  3. No. Shut up. If you forward me another crank piece about how a single molecule of minerals used for making batteries consumes more fossil fuels than all the cars that have ever existed, I will drive a stake through your heart and light you on fire. You are wrong. You are uniformed. You are probably insane. Go away. I have entertained the nonsense of your kind as legitimate discourse for too many decades at this point and I am fucking over it. ↩

  4. You know, the people who decided that gas burning stoves that contribute to cancer are somehow part of the bedrock for freedom. As I said, I have entertained the nonsense of your kind as legitimate discourse for too many decades at this point and I am fucking over it. ↩

  5. And you think you’re so clever and classless and free… but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see. ↩