💾 Archived View for nicholasjohnson.ch › 2021 › 12 › 02 › breaking-my-promise captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:52:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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📆 2 Dec 2021 | ⏱️ 2 minute read

Breaking My Promise

Towards the end of July, I promised to quit flying[1] until the climate crisis was averted and until the TSA stopped groping passengers. As it turns out, that was a commitment I couldn't keep. I booked a flight. Since I made the commitment very publicly, I don't think it's fair not to write an update after breaking it. I'm not perfect. I suppose the lesson here if there is one is that I shouldn't publicly make commitments that I'm not certain I can keep.

Although I still fly, the silver lining is I've made a different personal decision which drastically reduces my net emissions orders of magnitude more than not flying: I'm not having kids. Not having children may be my second best contribution to humanity besides this journal. I'm not 100% committing to this, but I estimate a very high probability that I won't have children. Especially because there's many reasons I don't want children besides just the climate, such as not becoming a slave to people with money.

I'm also vegetarian for the climate and animal welfare reasons, but I think any good from that is probably canceled out by my flying. I still think everyone should avoid flying and also avoid having kids. Unfortunately I haven't been able to. So I broke my commitment. That's my update.

Links

🔗 1: I promised to quit flying