Pluck, pluck, pluck — issue #74

Imagine you’ve discovered an entirely new and useful fruit, growing only on land you own. Let’s call it “wonderfruit”. 

You have a couple of options:

• Leave it alone
• Use wonderfruits sparingly for yourself and your community, and leave the rest as they are
• Learn the best ways to cultivate wonderfruits. Sell a portion of what’s available, ensuring you have a tidy stream of income
• Look for a well-financed entity that will invest in growing it at scale, and then become a salaried employee of said entity

Now, what if you learn that each time you pluck a wonderfruit, an animal you find cute has a higher likelihood of dying? Pluck, it chokes on its own saliva. Pluck, its family develops a mysterious disease. Pluck, it spontaneously combusts. It didn’t cost you anything to benefit from its usefulness, but it definitely cost something to another being. As a discoverer of the wonderfruit, your choices are very real and immediate to you.

But what if you’re just a consumer? You might have heard about the wonderfruit’s impact on animals, and thought to yourself, “that’s nothing to do with me”. Maybe there is a more expensive brand, where a portion of what you pay goes to helping wonderfruits grow more sustainably. But how do you ensure that? You can’t, and maybe… you don’t really want to think about it, because it’s too bitter a pill to swallow. So you buy the fruit and enjoy it. That’s the end of the story for you. 

In a system that wants to blind us with sweetness (A well-deserved holiday! This shiny new thing! A miraculous wonderfruit!), these bitter pills are rarely offered up willingly. It’s not just about that new phone, AI chatbot, or blindboxes with the latest collectible. Think: the carbon emissions from your flight on every vacation, or out-of-season fruits in the supermarket that need hothouses to grow all-year round. The hidden costs are not always hidden, but we all do our own implicit calculations that we can make sense of and live with. 

The wonderfruit seems like a silly little example, but it represents a kind of cost calculation that is involved in the discovery of every useful thing we’ve obtained from our world. Just substitute “wonderfruit” for any other product or service that is of use to societies, and follow that train of thought all the way to the end-consumer. Like you and me. What are the bitter pills that we’ve long learned to swallow, the tastes that no longer linger on the tongue? It doesn’t mean we have to stop enjoying things, but those trade-offs will always be part of the larger picture, if we choose to look. 

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