The All-or-Nothing Trap in Sustainable Living

I brought my own container to the fishmonger last week. Handed it over, quite pleased with myself, avoided a piece of plastic three times the size and shape of a salmon fillet, and walked out feeling like a minor local hero.

I mentioned this, foolishly, to someone at a party.

“That’s good,” they said. Then, without any real pause: “Do you still fly, though?”

I did fly, actually. Once, in March, to a wedding. I opened my mouth to explain this and closed it again, because I could already sense where the conversation was going, and it wasn’t toward the salmon.

This happens constantly, and I don’t think it’s just me. Someone brings a reusable cup and gets asked about their diet. Someone goes vegetarian and gets asked why not vegan. Someone takes the train and gets asked whether they’ve really thought about what their pension is invested in. There is always a next question, and the next question is never “well done.” It’s “well done, but.”

I’ve started to think of it as a very specific kind of small talk. Not quite an attack. More a reflex. As if any evidence of someone trying is, for some reason, an invitation to locate the nearest thing they’re still getting wrong.

What’s odd is that nobody does this about anything else. Nobody tells a person going to the gym twice a week that it “doesn’t really count” unless they’ve also fixed their sleep, their diet, and their posture. Nobody hears “I’ve started saving a bit each month” and immediately says “yes, but have you sorted your pension.” Sustainability seems to be the one area where a good thing isn’t allowed to just be a good thing. It has to be weighed against everything you haven’t done yet, and it always, somehow, comes up short.

What gets me is the sheer confidence of it. The person asking about my flights did not, as far as I’m aware, have a spotless record themselves. Nobody does. And yet the question always arrives with this faint air of an inspector holding a clipboard, as though the asker is simply confirming what they already suspected, rather than someone who, statistically, also flew somewhere last year and ate a beef burger without incident.

I’ve made a rule for myself, since noticing this: I say “well done,” and I mean it, whatever the size of the thing. Someone mentions they’ve started walking to work twice a week, or swapped one meal for something meat-free, or finally fixed the zip instead of buying a new coat — and that’s the whole response. Well done. Not “well done, but.” I don’t have a follow-up question loaded and ready, because I don’t think I’ve earned the right to one, and neither, frankly, has anyone else.

Because that’s the real cost of “yes, but.” It doesn’t just puncture one nice moment. It teaches people that partial effort isn’t worth declaring, that unless the whole picture is spotless, better to say nothing, try quietly, or not try at all. Which turns “well done” into a prize nobody’s ever quite allowed to collect, dished out only by people who seem to have appointed themselves the judge, despite having exactly the same gaps in their own record as everyone else.

The salmon was still saved from the plastic, regardless of what anyone did in March.