I just deleted a reply to two different threads where I wanted say that the thing people were talking about seemed to me to be that pattern in capitalism where "not doing a thing" gives you less power over time, so people always end up doing something.

Like "buy this to save money" instead of "don't buy this to save money" or "buy this keyboard to fight the pain in your wrists" instead of "work less to fight the pain in your wrists".

If you advocate for not doing a thing, there's no money changing hands and therefore no ads to buy, no voice to gain, no political decisions going your way. Which is a slightly different explanation than greed and greenwashing for the failure of degrowth to take hold: If you sell flights and buy carbon offsets you'll always be growing unlike the competition that sells less flights to lower emissions. Even if the employees of the second company are feeling no need to grow, in the general population, their message will tend to get lost, their percentage of the market, even if enough for them, will continue to shrink, and eventually people will not have heard about them.

I don't know how to change that except by laws against doing all the things I think we need to stop doing. Because the entire market, the public speech, the commercial activity, it is all dominated by people who do the thing. Sure, it's greed, in a way, but it's also a ratchet, unstoppable, step by step, a selection process that is ongoing.

Do right and stop doing the thing and you leave that public sphere. Like Voltaire says, tend to your own garden. You'll be happy but the political storms raging around you will seem more and more alien. Because the people that didn't drop out will no longer hear you or see you. The next generation will not learn from you.

So one needs to stay in politics? Fight for the thing even though all the money goes to towards doing the things that we shouldn't be doing?

I don't know what to do.