The title of this post is not a metaphor. It is a line item missing from my monthly budget.

Before you start clutching your ethically-sourced pearls, let me explain. I don’t say this because I lack a conscience. It’s just that my conscience has expensive tastes while my bank manager would like me to shop in the clearance isles. I’m not sitting around plotting crimes because I can’t afford a movie ticket. I’m just trying to exist in the South African economy without my debit card audibly weeping at the till.

I’d love to live a life aligned with my values. I would love to buy free-range meat, ethically produced clothing and locally sourced everything, all while creating a carbon footprint so small it tiptoes. What I actually have is a Shein cart and a Temu browsing history I’m not proud of. I have even started a vegetable garden out of financial necessity rather than whimsy and the opportunity to ground myself in nature. Spinach from my garden is cheaper than spinach from Woolies and also cheaper than the emotionally devasting spinach that I order for Sixty-60 that wilts as soon as I look at it.

Let’s start with the most obvious sin: Temu and Shein. These are the online bazaars of cheap despair. Sweatshops. Child labour. There is no ethical ambiguity here. The information is available. I’ve watched the documentaries and read the think-pieces.

I don’t buy from these platforms because I love fast fashion. I buy from them because R89 for a top is sometimes the difference between “I am appropriately clothed” and “I am creatively rotating both items of clothing that I own by turning them inside out because it’s been raining for a week and running the tumble dryer is too expensive”. I’m not chasing trends or curating my unique aesthetic. I’m just buying replacements for the clothes that are full of holes, because they were also cheap.

Being, as I am, a rather passionate fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, I must at this point interject with the Sam Vimes boot theory of economic unfairness. In Men at Arms, Sam Vimes explains why being poor is more expensive than being rich.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

This is why the wealthy live twice as well spending only half the money. Ethical consumption has quietly become a luxury hobby. It assumes a disposable income time to research brands. It assumes that you are not choosing between petrol or groceries, or electricity and dignity.

I also can’t afford free-range meat, which is deeply inconvenient, because I do care about animal cruelty. I would very much like to eat animals that enjoyed their lives, or at the very least, did not live in misery before becoming dinner. But free-range chicken costs more than a phone contract, and my last phone contract was a very bad decision I made while I was tired and hungry.

This is where my mental gymnastics begins. My pets are among the most pampered animals on the planet.  Vet visits. Climate controlled comfort.  Emotional support blankets. The irony is not lost on me. Somewhere, a chicken is having a worse day than my cats ever will, and I am complicit in that.

I’ve even considered going vegetarian. Really, I have. But I have a deeply strained relationship with lentils, and I’m not delighted by soya. To be a vegetarian, I’d have to live on eggs and large helpings of resentment. Ethical purity collapses surprisingly fast when paired with food aversions and a tight budget.

So, this is my life. I love animals. I eat some of them. I pamper others.

I’m remarkably good at adapting to moral tension. I manage it rather than resolving it. I live with discomfort because the opposite is paralysis.

I can’t afford morals. What I can afford is awareness, discomfort, and the hope that one day ethics won’t be a luxury item.  If morals ever go on sale, please let me know. I’d like a full set.