I was eight when my first superpower arrived. My index finger developed an ability to ‘disappear’ rubbish. From the backseat of a 1983 Toyota Cressida, I spent hours scouring Harare’s roadside ditches, zapping plastic bags and coke bottles into non-existence. One particularly slow-traffic day, a second superpower came to me. The same index finger began to turn smoke-belching buses into trees. Pedestrians seen littering? They became trees too. I was an eco-warrior, ridding the world of polluters, and my battleground was everything eco-destructive on the other side of the car window. 

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Children live more intentionally than adults and, as I grew up, I forgot to use my superpowers. By 14, they had gone completely, leaving a superpower vacuum. At 20, I started a life in London, that bread-and-circus capital of wasteful, polluting behaviours. In London, you can be that thing your parents raised you not to be: a spoilt brat. Self-serving and acquisitive behaviours are rewarded in London. Instead of joining the free-for-all, I submitted to horror and shame. I was of a species that was, in its current form, fundamentally amoral. Success at all costs was the game. In its quest for 21st century enlightenment, society was without a candle. Meanwhile, my superpower vacuum, vacant for so many years, finally found a new incumbent - not lightness and go-getter self-belief (as would make this story shorter), but misanthropy - poisonous and all-consuming. 

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For the last 15 years I have been a misanthropist. At 30, my misanthropy entered an era of new leadership, allowing a greater diversity of voices (some of these positively magnanimous) to speak at the table of inner-dialogue. But for the whole of my 20s, existing in society had my soul crumbling. London was the catalyst, but the crumble accelerated at SOAS, as I wrote essays with titles like “Are Transnational Corporations Agents of Development or Exploiters of Developing Countries?” By the time I started working at film festivals, my soul was in full avalanche. I saturated my conscience with films about awful, cruel, senseless episodes in history, and with documentaries on environmental and human rights abuses. I was feeding my misanthropy’s insatiable hunger, unable to look away. 

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The more I learned about how the world works, about our extractive, cut-throat economic system, the more immobilised I felt. I was plagued by the guilt that my life and its concomitant demands had already contributed to so much damage in the world. As I contemplated my habits and whims - the way I had consumed things over time - my whole existence morphed into one manifold and unforgivable crime. In the name of living well, I had been using up the world’s resources unthinkingly, simultaneously thwarting the chances of whole communities and ecosystems to live at all. 

 

In the scheme of things, I hadn’t consumed excessively. A childhood in Zimbabwe had meant a locally grown diet. 1990s Zimbabwe was still the breadbasket of Africa. I owned hockey sticks, a piano, clothes on a spectrum of trendiness. Over to the UK in 2002, and there was a late teenage obsession with superfoods and natural skincare products. I liked theatre, art, music, dance, sport, travelling. I had consumed in a way I thought was normal. Not excessive. Prioritising virtuous things towards the general betterment of the brain and body. 

 

The green-goggled awakening of my early adulthood led to a sad epiphany - that no matter how virtuous my pursuits, by engaging with the goods and services I needed to facilitate them - a squash racquet for squash, a hairbrush to look presentable, the freshly coiffed seat in the Gods at the Royal Opera House - I was participating in a wholly unsavoury business. In buying things – items and experiences - I was giving my blessing to a global system that thrives on environmental destruction and the perpetuation of human poverty. 

 

On top of black-dogged all-consuming guilt, I was frozen in the knowledge that I had to continue to commit my crimes in order to function in the normal world. Back then, I didn’t know there was a way out of the normal world. And so, I entered the hamster wheel of self-loathing. In daily life, I was paralysed, each morning knowing that I would have to engage in some evil transaction or other. The most seemingly innocent activities filled me with disgust at my own immorality. 

 

As a meat-eater, buying supper took hours. How had this steak lived? How had it died? Less packaging if I buy it from the meat counter? As a vegetarian, I eliminated some of the aisles, leaving more time to commiserate with the vegetables. Why, Mr Broccoli, are you wrapped in plastic? Why is there loose broccoli and plastic-wrapped broccoli right next to each other? What did the loose broccoli arrive in? Was it plastic? What pesticides were used on this broccoli? What fertilisers? Where will the broccoli go if I don’t buy it? Aside from windfall apples, fruit was an enemy. Raspberries, pathetic on their bubble wrap beds in their little plastic coffins. Bananas, the sugary devil. Which plantation? What deforestation? Had the glue on the tiny sticker caused eutrophication? 

 

I devoted these happy years to pulling apart (figuratively only, so as to avoid unnecessary waste) everything I encountered. Inside the house, my t-shirt had poisoned the Aral Sea and my almond cake had drained an aquifer. Outside, the roads, the buildings - the things on the roads and in the buildings - flaunted their depravity. How had everything been made? What mines, what factories, what people, what habitat destruction, what evil? Everything I looked at inspired the impact question. The impacts were impossible to know fully, though projects like ‘The Story of Stuff’ and my self-flagellating docu-tragedy watchlist helped me join the dots. More knowledge only made me angrier. I would scowl at passers-by eating chocolate bars or drinking lattés. Which trees fell for your cocoa and coffee and milk? 

 

My family worried about me deeply, distraught about how distraught I was. It was only for them that I displayed my full despair. For my 24th birthday, having just returned from a meat-free tour of India, I asked my parents to make a birthday supper that was exclusively vegetarian, locally produced and packaging free. It was November. The root vegetables were called to the stage and gave a convincingly orange and beige performance. 

 

As well as the “where had it come from” question, I agonised endlessly about where things went once their usefulness had expired. The ring-pull on my oat milk will lasso a seahorse. My period pads will leach plastics into groundwater. My oatcake wrappers will be burned and cause a cancer. I’ll do my recycling, but onto which Balinese beach will it wash up?

 

I became a hoarder of packaging, to save it from the great unknown. My empty Neals Yard collection was eighty strong. The blue glass/thick black plastic-lidded affairs were too good to throw away. Who makes disposable packaging that beautiful? I had four years’ worth of period pad wrappers and foil toothpaste tube seals. Before paper stemmed earbuds existed, I would cut off the used ends of the plastic ones and keep the white sticks. They would be useful for when I got round my earth-shattering enviro-art installation.

 

One particularly impressive guilt-mitigating ritual began as a first year student in 2007. It involved tearing the last four digits of my account number off all of the month’s receipts. My dad told me this would prevent bank fraud. The four numbers would go in the main bin and the residual scraps in my paper recycling. I would take the recycling out onto Pentonville Road and slot each item into its rightful bin. Halo aglint. Pat on the back for me. I never saw another student doing their recycling, so I loathed them. In hindsight, I congratulate them for not having wasted precious time. (It is now advised that we don’t put our receipts in the recycling because the presence of the BPA coating complicates the paper recycling process. Also, my caressing of these receipts, as I carefully removed the four offending digits, will have done my endocrine system no good. We are now supposed to handle thermal receipts with gloves to avoid absorbing BPA.)

 

My deepest despair lasted for about eight years, through the phase of my life when I was supposed to be pursuing a dazzling career as a… .? But I was crippled in the fear that whatever I committed to would sign me up to a life of feeling morally corroded, hypocritical and complicit in destructive things. In what job could I get away with not using a single pen, or paper clip, or chair, or computer, or, or, or….  lest I disapprove of its provenance? 

 

I now see that all of my thought patterns and behaviours were indicative of eco-anxiety/depression. But left undiagnosed, all I could think to do was soldier on. I would conjure the fix the world needed eventually. It would involve everyone watching a lot more documentaries and feeling bad. I went ‘into education’. I thought, “At least if I have to use a disposable biro or a laminator, then I’ll educate someone not to in the future.” Alas, the education system is not one to enter if you’re looking for a restoration of faith in humanity. I never did use a laminator, but other moral dilemmas prevailed… like how not to be complicit in wasting a childhood. And so, flapping about in search of a moral livelihood, I have worked as little as possible. 

 

These days, I still keep packaging for longer than I should, buying time for sciency types to discover the perfect plastic-eating mushroom before I send my empty toothpaste tubes into the sea. In recent years, we have had a bio-packaging revolution. We have ‘biodegradable’ coffee cups with imprints of green leaves, and brown paper bags with wholesome slogans. We use these with clear conscience, knowing that from dust were ye made so, surely, dust ye shall be. **But only if the right industrial composting environment is afforded you.** I hate bioplastics for all the green-washing propaganda they tout. But I am glad we are collectively waking up to the fact that over-use and over-disposal of conventional oil-based plastic needs to stop. I am glad that we are starting to ask our leaders for policies that will take us towards sustainability.

 

After years of scowling into other people’s shopping baskets, of clucking at humanity going about its business, I have finally boiled the problem down to its simplest form. We use too much too quickly. We demand more from the earth than she can sustainably give. We do so with the wide eyes of a child pushing its luck, expecting an affectionate wag of the finger and impunity eternal. With all our grown-upness and technological sophistication, surely we can say ‘no’ to ourselves? 

 

As for me, despite all my holier-than-thou hyper analysing and agonising, I have never been able to construct my perfectly good life. In stationary life, I find myself stumbling often, mostly for the sake of convenience, in the name of propping up my artificially easy life. I am earth-conscious, but what good is that when I am also a helpless sheep, floundering in my own hypocrisy.  All I know at 35 is that I can’t carry on abusing the planet and expect to escape with my soul intact. I can’t, in the name of civilisation, continue to lay waste to the ground that feeds me and the air I breathe. 

 

Now my walk approaches, salvation glimmers on the horizon. My walk is full of intentions. I intend to slow life down. I will dedicate my time to making every decision an ethical one, even if it leads me off the path of least resistance. I will come up against plenty of resistance - there’ll be overpackaged toiletries and luxury food items to resist. I’ll be tired, hungry and grubby often, but I’ll try my best to find the most innovatively earth-kind ways to a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, sweet-smelling me. 

 

I don’t want my life to be without pleasure and nourishment. I have no space in my backpack for a flagellant’s whip. I will seek joy and health through connection and friendship, and through satisfying what Plato calls my ‘natural needs’. I will be as Horace: “a pig from the herd of Epicurus”, “...drinking moderately with garlands on my head, singing the praises of the gods.”