Photograph courtesy Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Like everyone else, I made some lifestyle changes during the pandemic. While others were perfecting their sourdough, I decided to stop being an Ethical Consumer.

During the pandemic, like everyone else, I made promises to myself and tried to take up healthier habits. I started knitting, drawing, and journaling again. I traded in my reality TV addiction for Ken Burns documentaries. And, while others were learning to bake bread or garden, I decided to stop being an Ethical Consumer. One day, I needed new pajamas. Gap was selling two pairs for $40, so I bought them. I needed home office supplies, so I ordered them off Amazon. And I went back to using plastic single-use cups at my local coffee shop.

Ethical Consumers are people who believe that we are slowly and inexorably driving business and society to be more responsible one purchase at a time. For decades, I’ve bought into this belief system, right down to eating vegetarian, buying organic food, eschewing corporate fashion, and writing books about conscious consumption. I live in a Brooklyn neighborhood engineered for Ethical Consumers, dotted with non-toxic nail salons, Fair Trade baby clothes stores, and organic wine shops. Being an Ethical Consumer is a part of my everyday reality, my work, and my identity—or at least it was.

I could explain my decision to give it all up as a lack of emotional energy or money to shop ethically during the pandemic. Or blame it on the fact that my coffee shop prohibited reusable containers for all the obvious reasons. Those things are true, but the turning point for me was working on the #PayUp campaign, a mass movement of citizens and garment workers that formed in March to pressure huge apparel chains, including Gap, to pay their garment workers for $40 billion worth of orders manufactured prior to the pandemic. (Gap and 20 other companies have since agreed to pay.) I also raised money for garment workers who lost their jobs and were going hungry. These are mostly women of color who, despite working for the world’s largest apparel brands, live in poverty and have no safety net.

What did all of my decades of Ethical Consumerism do to protect these workers and raise their wages? Nothing. My Ethical Consumption couldn’t protect Black and brown people from dying and getting critically ill in far higher percentages than white people during the pandemic. It hasn’t put a dent in climate change or plastic pollution. It couldn’t even protect retail workers, even those employed in “ethical” chain stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, who had to keep working as the virus spread often because they don’t earn enough money to stay home.

The pandemic has swept away so many illusions. Our societal problems, from the climate crisis and systemic racism to economic inequality, run so deep and down to the bone that we’ve had no choice but to face them. For me, that’s meant that I’ve stopped confusing my ethical PJs for social change—and I’ve thrown myself into figuring out how to build real political power instead.

An Extinction Rebellion activist at the Redress the Injustice Protest in London. Photograph by Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.