Great callback. I haven't thought of Thank You For Smoking in ages.
That is a prescient little film from my teenage years back in earlly 00's. The film was a nice stab at the culture of "spin" and how lobbying was gonna dig us into the hell we are now.
Hmmm, Thank You For Posting would be an actual relevant sequel in the time of endless sequels. Backdropping it with the lobbying for the Turd Reich and the ascension of Fascism and you got something there...
Thank you for reminding me of Thank You For Smoking.
You're doing great. I've been on this ride for a while... I'm just glad to see more people hop on due to recent events making what was obvious to me for so long obvious to a lot more people. I would still say not enough numbers though, but better than six months, or a year or two ago.
I would say that challenge comes with what personal value is bestowed upon what. Let's say that the most common hard switches for people are youtube and whatsapp. But if you are a person who never liked Youtube and just used standard sms to chat with people, then the challenge will be elsewhere. Or like you said, for you the streaming services are a big source of convenience with you and your kids. For me, that one wasn't a hard one, as I generally prefer what Filmin and Mubi have to offer as a catalog. For some YouTube is irreplaceable, and I understand why, but I think YouTube is one of the worst things to have happened to the world since it was bought by google like a decade and a half ago. And in this decade and a half look at what has been happening to social discourse and the societal unravelling that came with it... I saw the rise of Gamergate and saw this ending this way more than over a decade ago. Polarisation recalibrated what was already a terrible algorithm for engagement. And the grifters and all the vile ones smelled that putrid scent of opportunity. Not to mention the building of a system that seeks outrage and rewards deranged and unhinged behaviour. Doesn't even matter if it is performative or not. Google and Meta are the source of all I consider horrifying in our silly quasi-global dystopian society. So those ones weren't also hard for me due to that motivation being such a great one for me. Then there's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple... and why the hell are people that say they hate Elon Musk still using Twitter (no, I won't call it by the other name), why?
But the answer will always be habit and convinience (they tend to overlap and sometimes be one and the same) to which one can bestow more value than the morals which one believes one possesses and even proclaims to have.
Even though I degoogled my phone, used a variety of browsers and search engines over the years, am a big Linux Stan, etc etc, I only quit reddit to join lemmy here very recently. Why did I take so long? Reddit has been terrible for quite a few years now too. We're all creatures of habit, and habits are hard to break. But we better start breaking them before they break us and take the world along with them.
And so I thank you for your efforts and I shared my thoughts to say this...
We do what we can, at the pace we can muster. And as long as we look at tomorrow with the same outlook and attitude to keep on, then that's enough.
If there were a lot more people like you we wouldn't be in the mess we are now. I just hope I behave and act in a way that fits that same description.
Have a great life and keep doing what you already do.