New Must-Have Accessory: Six-Pack rings!

Credits to me, year 2025.

At the start of today's topic, I want to show you these beautiful photos for comparison that I included in this post. Where are they from, you might ask? From my own neighborhood. And this is not a joke, they are real live shots that once again reflect the carelessness and the widespread lack of interest in this issue.

For months, if not years, this poor scooter, not even an electric one, has been lying abandoned and half sunk on the riverbank.

This topic had to come up sooner or later. It has been on everyone's lips for years, among environmentalists, experts, climate protection lawyers and now me as well. The irreversible climate change and the associated global warming.

My attitude toward this topic has changed significantly over the past few years. Being outside more often and spending more time in nature, you really start to notice the impact. Nothing but trash everywhere. And yet, nobody seems to really care. Cleaning only happens where it is officially necessary or where there is visible demand. Everything else is considered irrelevant. That is how I increasingly perceive it. And let us not even forget all the chewing gum under tables and chairs, in cinemas, and in every parking lot. My opinion on that is simple, disgusting.

I've been waiting to write this post for a long time because it keeps occupying my mind. Politics often speaks completely past people. Everyone talks about how we should reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible, yet what we actually see on the streets, in consumption and in everyday behavior does not match that at all. The topic is often generalized so much that the discussion keeps going in circles. The German saying comes to mind: "Den Worten müssen Taten folgen". Months later, this image was taken from the same spot, which in my opinion confirms what I said above quite well:

Credits to me again, year 2026. Same place, same spot.

Many people simply do not care. What matters more are things like which smartphone model to buy next, when the new Tesla is coming out, where the next charging station is, or can I get an electric scooter, mom?

With so many e- things, even I start to feel uneasy. I recently saw an interesting article describing how people are changing. They become more withdrawn, they lower their heads, they seek validation, they constantly adapt, they avoid conflict, they live in constant consumption and they completely lose social skills. I found that not only convincing but also alarming. If there are so many individual bubbles, where should a shared interest in change come from?

This question stays with me because I also notice how differently people think today. Everything has become so fast and superficial. No more long conversations, especially no more patience, tolerance or moments of reflection. We have completely unlearned that since quarantine. But honestly, it was already happening before that, just more gradually.

I will not present a technical article or statistics about reducing carbon emissions or possible solutions. That would miss the point of this post. Instead, I want to invite you to reflect on what kind of change we are actually going through.

Back in the days when people were more present in the moment, someone would have simply pulled that old scooter out of the water. Today, people do not care anymore. 

Not my problem = does not affect me. 

Many people take this mindset with them into their work and their interactions with others. And the result?

Complete indifference, and in extreme cases, even hatred. I believe this is already a good preliminary stage of hatred, because anything that does not fit the image must be removed so that the indifferent-self can keep going.

To finish, I want to show one more image that I recently found. The large, powerful billboards from recent years about fast fashion and the modern era that look like this:

Dressed in Plastic via link