boycotts (moral ocd)

maybe i forgot it or something last year but apparently spotify ran ads for ice around dec 2025… i looked it up and now they don’t run them anymore, but now i don’t know what to do about it. i figured it out because someone i knew posted about it last year and i saw it while searching through their account for something unrelated. i understand that nobody *needs music, but there aren’t many good alternatives that have everything. now i feel like a bad person for not switching and i don’t know what i should do about it. so much of our money ends up going to bad causes but i understand that the point is to boycott what you can. the problem is that i believe literally everything is problematic to a degree when talking about buying products. everything you buy will go somewhere bad, so whenever i shop, does that mean i have to buy only necessities in order to do the least damage??? this keeps sending me into a spiral and i just wish i had some sort of answer, you know? everyone acts like it’s so clear and the rules are so easy to follow but i genuinely have never been more confused!! i’m confused on how i should treat myself, how i should treat others, and what’s good and bad to do at all. the lines people have to call things unacceptable is something i just don’t understand, because no matter what they do they’re contradicting themselves by using a platform that’s just as bad anyway. i wish this made sense

madadam

Date posted: Yesterday

It doesn't make sense. And that has to just fall into the "maybe, maybe not" mentality of OCD-havers. Everyone draws their own moral lines, and like every person out there, it's nuanced and complex in ways we as a society just don't want to examine. It's something I'm trying to work on too. OCD therapy teaches to give ourselves grace, so I've been trying to extend that to other people too (to a certain point, obviously). "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism". I don't eat Chick-fil-A because of their values and my close LGBTQ+ family and friends, but I do listen to Spotify (even tho i deplore how ICE works and treats people). I can only afford emotionally to be mad at so many things and I couldn't pinpoint exactly why I consume some things and not others other than "vibes". I guess pick the things that mean the most to your values and the rest can be written off as necessities if you still consume them.

anon7336474864

Date posted: Yesterday

i get what you mean but i really don’t think i can pick and choose what i care about like that. just the bad feeling of “i don’t care because it’s not happening to me,” i can’t just brush it off because i’m privileged enough to not have me or my family affected by ice. i think in the end i would’ve switched if i could find an actual good alternative but these big companies basically run everything. now it just feels kind of hopeless trying to avoid this ai junk even though i will continue to only use it probably just in search engines since everything is either sketchy, stealing your data, still throwing ai in your face, or all of the above. i would use other search engines where you could turn it off but i hear they don’t work well and steal your data too. i can type in -ai on my searches but i think all it does is just not show you the results they generated. i really don’t want to give up, but honestly it’s inevitable if it keeps going the way that it is. saying this makes me so guilty because i’m aware of what they’re doing to the water of homes near data centers but i’m afraid this won’t stop. more on the necessities part, i mean things like buying snacks/candy from bad companies and that type of stuff. because treats aren’t a necessity and most likely everything comes from a bad company, i don’t know if i should just give that up or what…

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