Are we throwing away our future?

We need to talk about eco-anxiety

Author: Fern Ling Chettle
Editors: Alejandra Arias

My Story

My name is Fern Ling Chettle, age 21 and raised on the island of Bali. Growing up, there was little room for wishful thinking that climate change was some far distant threat. Every year, Indonesia has faced new forms of environmental crises and the warning signs are all over the news. When it comes to the global waste problem, we’re often made one of its key faces: with images of our littered beaches and overflowing landfills regularly going viral across the world. 

Amidst all of this, I’ve often felt like a big, big hypocrite. Throughout my teen years, as I grew more anxious about the future, I looked to those doing the work around me: I volunteered for local green causes, continued to criticise corporate giants to everyone I knew, and made small changes to salve my conscience (like no longer buying Oreos as a road-trip snack, and trying to avoid fast fashion). But deep down I knew I wasn’t making any major sacrifices - not enough to make me feel like any kind of real environmentalist. 

Is there such a thing as Ethical Consumerism?

If you’ve ever used TikTok, you’ve likely heard or seen the saying, “there can be no ethical consumption under capitalism”, employed in a bunch of viral videos. It’s often used to convey one of two things: 1) a sense of hopelessness for the lack of power our own individual actions carry in the face of corporate greed, or 2) to excuse overconsumption and the making of deeply unethical choices. 

As part of a generation that continues to experience both growing eco-anxiety and feelings of powerlessness against a global system, I think it’s easier to relieve the guilt we feel over our own contributions by saying ‘well, we live in a society. When it comes to my own guilt over buying over-packaged items and generating unnecessary waste, I’ve often let that thinking take root. 

The Year I Spent (Over)consuming 

During the height of the first 2020 Covid lockdown, I was quarantined overseas in my dorm room like many other students my age. Social media (with an emphasis on TikTok) became a lifeline of sorts to the outside world: both an escape, and a way to experience the pandemic collectively. 

With social media usage and online spending skyrocketing, the internet saw a major resurgence of haul culture - with hundreds of dollar Shein try-on hauls and Amazon “TikTok Made Me Buy It” compilations going viral every week. 

At the time, I was struggling with bad stress-induced breakouts, so I turned to the internet for help. I googled reviews for a few products, followed and saved the content of some well-known ‘Skinfluencers’, and instantly: the algorithm caught on. 

Within days, all the sponsored content I was shown online targeted my skincare and self-care woes. On Instagram, there were skincare discounts and new releases and limited deals; on TikTok, I was shown a flood of 10-step skincare routines and Sephora hauls, sometimes showing up to 30 products in videos less than a minute long. 

I’d never been much of a shopper, but as lockdown wore on, I started wondering if I could really fix my skin (and maybe my life!) by buying just one viral skincare product? Then maybe another, and another? 

Before I knew it, I was sitting at my desk with 5 barely-used bottles of reef-safe sunscreen and a terrifying collection of half-used products all over my bathroom. New waves of viral brands and products had come and gone, and within weeks most of the products I’d purchased had already been dismissed as ‘overhyped’ and ‘overrated’. 

I’d been guilty of buying into a culture of overconsumption and it didn’t feel great. In fact, it felt terrible. I was surrounded by a handful of things I didn’t need, and ultimately didn’t even really want. I’d allowed myself to become so desensitized to the consequences of consumption because I’d been privileged enough to never have to face the true impact of my choices. But the planet does. And communities in other parts of the world do too. 

All the packaging from everything I’d bought, skincare and otherwise, had gone straight into the recycling bins down the hall - right out of sight, out of mind. But a quick Google search reminds me that less than 10% of what we put into the recycling bin ever actually ends up being recycled. 

In fact, thousands of tonnes of non-recyclable waste produced in the Western world have historically been stuffed in hundreds of packed containers and offloaded to the Global South - dumped in places like the country I call home. 

So where do we go from here? 

As I write this, I’m still working my way through the last of the completely unnecessary and expensive sunscreens I purchased last year, along with a handful of other products from that time. Becoming a 2020 impulse shopper remains one of the most wholly un-eco mistakes I’ve ever made - and I’m the first to admit it probably won’t be the last. 

I’ve come to realise that to be any kind of environmentalist in today’s age doesn’t dictate committing to living off-grid and never engaging under capitalism again but instead striving to find balance on a planet that desperately needs us to change. For those of us privileged enough to have disposable income and any sort of financial privilege, that means taking on the responsibility of making the most ethical choices we can. 

Whilst so much of what we see both online and off still seeks to convince us we need newer, better, more, to feel good - we increasingly have the power to reject those trends and influence new ones. Countless young environmentalists and zero-waste activists continue to lead the way toward embracing a different future - many of whom have been featured on Force of Nature. For all the rest of us: choosing to support a culture that’s purpose-driven over profit-driven, and an algorithm that tilts in Earth’s favour, seem like pretty good places to start. 

You can listen to Episode Ninth, Season Two, of the Force of Nature podcast here.