One of my favorite pastimes is looking through the Google Photos app on my phone. This is in large part thanks to my dad, who has tirelessly amassed a vast collection of family photos spanning back to the 1910s. Weddings, baptisms and parties filled with relatives I’ll never get to meet become accessible with just a touch of my fingers. Every so often, I indulge in inhabiting those memories.
My dad and I share this pastime. Recently, we looked through these collections together. This time, it was a set of warm-hue photos from the 1970s when my dad lived in Medellín, Colombia. He showed me photos taken at his birthday party, where little kids lined up for cake against a background of dramatic, lush mountains encasing the city. I have been to Medellín several times, but the beauty of the place struck me through the lens of these photos.
Why would anyone leave a place like this?
Although I half-knew the answer to my question, I asked my dad anyway. He told me that when he and his parents moved to Miami, Florida, when he was just 8 eight years old, they were supposed to move back to Colombia a few years later. The move was meant to be temporary — for his father’s job — but those plans changed when Medellín became increasingly unsafe in the 1980s. And while I hesitate to strengthen the association between Colombia and the drug trade in your mind more than the media already has, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a major contributor to the social unrest that prevented my dad’s return.
I became aware of the drug as more than a word in a news heading during college. While I had heard rumors, I was shocked to hear it so often in casual conversation. In my mind, and for many others I know, cocaine exists in a separate realm than the usual college substance suspects, like marijuana and alcohol. Its presence was most notable on February 14, 2026. This year, I wasn’t even on campus for the festivities; instead, I was staying with my dad’s parents in Miami, where they have spent the past 40 years. It was an interesting thought experiment to visit my grandparents in the place where they had made the difficult decision to stay, considering that one of the reasons they did so was the drug that is abundant throughout University of Michigan fraternity houses. Though I doubt that most college students are wondering about the origins of the cocaine they are indulging in.
I can’t say I really blame them for this mindset.
Although cocaine may seem categorically different from other products we consume considering it’s a) not really ubiquitous and b) illegal, I think it highlights a broader pattern: the moral distance we often have between the products we use and what it took to get them to us.
I had this same kind of thought when giant plastic-wrapped packages filled my apartment mail room days before Halloween. Cheap clothing to fill three nights’ worth of outfits arrived in bulk, many of them not likely to be worn after the first week of November. I am not totally exempt from this purchasing behavior and I don’t wish to villainize it. Just this past Halloween, I bought cheap cat ears for my very bland costume; I couldn’t really claim to be a cat without them.
The same can be said for food: We don’t know how much it takes to produce just one meal in one of the University’s seven dining halls, or how much of it is then wasted. I, for one, rarely stop to think about who picked the blueberries I’m buying in a frozen Ann Arbor winter, despite how disconnected fruit is from the climate and season.
Psychologists sometimes refer to this as “psychological distance,” the concept that people experience faraway events more abstractly than immediate ones. This is natural — hearing about a factory collapse halfway across the world is going to register very differently than someone getting badly injured right next to you. It’s easier to emotionally separate ourselves from harm when we never directly witness it.
Many industrialized systems are built around maintaining that kind of abstraction. Most consumers will never meet the people who sew their clothes, harvest their food or absorb the environmental costs of the products they buy. Supply chains stretch across countries and continents, dispersing responsibility so widely that no single individual feels — nor can be held — fully accountable. By the time a Halloween costume arrives, conveniently packaged in my apartment mailroom, the human labor behind it has become almost invisible.
At the same time, I think there is a reason people instinctively maintain this distance, beyond simple selfishness. I know that if I were forced to fully confront the human consequences attached to every ordinary action, daily life would become unbearable. Eating breakfast would mean thinking about the ethical quandaries associated with the people who harvested the food, the water it took to grow it and how factories produce it. Ordering something online would mean thinking about underpaid warehouse workers, packaging waste and carbon emissions as the product traveled across the world to reach me. It would produce a low-level, never-ending hum of guilt in the back of my brain, where even normal decisions feel heavier than they’re meant to due to a constant, unresolved feeling of responsibility.
And importantly, most people are not directly choosing these systems in any meaningful sense. They are born into them. Even people who care deeply about labor rights, sustainability or ethical consumption still rely on supply chains, because there are very few realistic alternatives.
I think this is also part of why conversations about ethical consumption so often feel like spinning around in a hamster wheel. Individual choices simultaneously matter and do not matter. It is true that consumers shape demand, and it is also true that most exploitation cannot realistically be solved through individual purchasing power. Buying one less fast-fashion going-out top does not dismantle anything, just as one student refusing cocaine does not disrupt the international drug trade.
At the same time, though, it feels too easy to use that reality as permission to stop thinking critically altogether. If the thinking ends at “my choice doesn’t change anything,” then it doesn’t prompt thought about what would change things or what else is going on in the system.Take fast fashion for example. I’ve often seen people flocking to the extremes, either purchasing more ethical — usually more expensive — brands or becoming frustrated and deciding the whole thing is pointless. Rarely does the conversation spill into things like working conditions, laws or collective action beyond individual buying choices.
College campuses, like that of the University — where the median annual student family income is $154,000 — are strange places because they squeeze enormous privilege into a relatively small environment, while encouraging students to imagine themselves as socially conscious and politically aware. There is often a strong language of activism and justice attached to campus culture, but many of the systems that make elite college life comfortable depend on forms of labor that remain almost entirely hidden to students themselves. Dining hall workers prepare thousands of meals each day; custodial staff clean bathrooms overnight; workers shuffle packages in dormitory mailrooms almost immediately after being ordered.
I do not say this to accuse college students of hypocrisy, because I am obviously included in this too. More than anything, I think college reveals how normalized this kind of separation has become. Most systems in modern American life are designed around maximizing convenience, so part of that means reducing insights into the work it takes to produce said convenience.
I do not think most U-M students intend to participate in harm when they decide to do cocaine any more than most students intend to participate in exploitation when they order clothes online or throw away dining hall food. Much of modern life and everyday consumption depends on not tracing these connections too carefully. But in looking through my dad’s photos with him, it struck me that the distance between a fraternity house in Ann Arbor and a family leaving Medellín decades ago is not actually as large as it initially appears. For many students, cocaine exists socially as just another party drug, detached from any larger context. For my family, though, the drug trade was part of the reason my grandparents stayed in the United States. But most of the time, those connections never see the light of day.
Statement Correspondent Julia Arboleda can be reached at jarbol@umich.edu.
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