Or kids who have trouble remembering that kitchen cabinets and drawers are actually not indoor climbing walls

Some still are. Bigelow I think.

But loose leaf tea is much better quality anyway and avoids the issue of what’s in the bag entirely. They also have ceramic filters so you can completely avoid having plastic in contact with hot water

No, it’s not excuses, it’s just reality. It’s hard. Does that mean people shouldn’t try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.

The thing is, just because people aren’t doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn’t mean that they aren’t in other areas that you may not know about.

For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn’t leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that’s ok.

Just be the best human you can be every day and don’t beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.

It’s not really the time. It’s more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.

Sure, it’s easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it’s there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.

Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.

The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.