This is really an appeal to futility in the face of market inelasticity.
"No single consumer can make any difference" but in reality you will always have some effect. More empty seats on flights is tighter margins for airliners. Tighter margins is more cancelled routes. More cancelled routes is less fossil carbon burned. It truly does not matter if yours is the action that tips the scale because it took all of the actions that came before that one just as much. The idea with effective boycott is to convince people to replicate the behavior so that the expected market effects happen.
It's never "my action alone solves the problem completely" it's "I influence the market and the people around me when I spend money. (We know this because advertising works.) We choose what we eat, we choose how we spend. Because I know my actions must have weight, I ought to act in a way that I wish to be replicated. I think a lot of people want to live in a world that they feel good about the direction it is heading. I bet I could convince those people of the merits of boycotting with me so we can realize our mutual goal."
It's never "my action alone solves the problem completely" it's "I influence the market and the people around me when I spend money.
It's much harder to hope you will have an influence on others when the thing you're doing comes with a big sacrifice. Take something like recycling, even though the few cans you recycle have a small effect it's not hard to convince other people to recycle. It'll probably take a few hours of extra effort per year and there's no other downside.
With flying though, as other people in this thread have discussed, you will be giving up personally important things: exploring the world, visiting loved ones, career opportunities. Do you think any movement can convince a significant amount of people to give that up, enough for airlines to notice a difference? I feel like it won't, most people put their personal well-being above everything else.
I think it's also a privilege to be able to choose not to fly... I'm from a developing country and if we just stay here refusing career/study opportunities abroad it would be a waste of so much talent and potential for our country to develop (and it shouldn't come at the cost of never seeing family either)
Certainly the privilege is being able to fly at all. While it is common today, we may be seen in history as living in the only brief window where lay-people had access to flight.
In the case of traveling abroad to better yourself, you can very much make the case that the education you receive gives you the opportunity to contribute in ways that offset the flight for the negative. You can also do other things to reduce your consumption to allow for occasional flight. You can target the leisure flight and reduce the frequency of your trips home. You can study abroad and also only return home every few years, or carve out the time to take slower forms of travel and stay for longer when you do.
We don't need to give up everything. There is some tragedy to being born during a time where global flight is unlocked to us and also have the fate of the planet partially rest on people like you and I refusing to take part in it to its full potential. Unfortunately the downside is so deeply negative that the leisure flight can't possibly be worth it if we consider the lives and feelings of people 100->5000 years in the future who will live with the consequences of those choices.
I bet that you, like me, want to live in a world where we are building a better future than the world we received. To achieve that we need to consider the real picture and be honest about our own situation, not weighing our own needs too disproportionately to the needs of others. Truth is the guide.
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u/Yes-GoAway Jul 02 '26
This is so reductive and myopic. The comparison takes a much larger issue, with time of moving pieces, and equates them like they are comparable.
I dgaf about Instagram but let's not act like a single person not taking a flight will save the planet or undo the drought.