My experience of the 2008 financial crisis was an interesting one. I was living abroad as a Mormon missionary, with all my bills paid for by the church (and, indirectly, my parents, who footed the costs that all Mormon missionaries pay). I lived in a bubble of religious purpose wrapped in a bubble of privilege, and it rarely occurred to me that there was real economic crisis happening around me (and all this despite reporting to someone recently retired as a high-ranking executive at Fannie Mae).

I aspire to a level of radicalism that I know I may never attain. I like reading books on anarchism and degrowth, and the ideals that they present really resonate with me, but I struggle to extricate myself from existing systems in order to show a personal commitment to new ones. Very obviously, I am not alone in this: Very few of us have the commitment to live like Doug Forcett, the character from The Good Place who carefully calculates the ethical ramifications of every action he takes. In fact, one of the most interesting things that the show does with Forcett is turn him from a one-off gag in the first season to an actual character who is overwhelmed by the ethical burden of these calculations and serves as an example of how systems need to change, not just people.