If you search up green tips, you get lots of lists suggesting easy ways to make ecofriendly changes. There’s good reason to be suspicious of anything claiming that personal actions can be simple. Here’s why:

Change Your Damn Bulbs: Why are there so many jokes about changing lightbulbs? Because it’s actually hard. You have to get out the ladder, except you don’t have one. So you pile a few books on top of a stool and hope you don’t become a statistic about accidents inside the home. Or, the fixture is placed over a counter, meaning you have to awkwardly stand on the counter while cats mill around below, waiting to mock you when you fall. Asking a clerk to help you find the LED bulbs is the easiest part of this task. Whether or not those get installed, or you decide to live with one fewer light . . . that’s the challenge.

Recycle: It’s so confusing to know what can be recycled. And there’s simply no way of finding out. Not by using Google. Not by checking the exhaustively detailed web page put together by RecycleCT.

Take the bus: Sooooo hard. The five seconds it takes to learn which bus to catch will take time away from finding the perfect meme to send out to the ongoing group chat. By the way, the Meryl Streep applause GIF is always the best choice.

Buy less stuff: But how will people know that I matter if I’m not spending money on crap I don’t need at one of those department stores? It will be impossible to define my brand.

Opt out of leaf blowers: This asks so much. First of all, how else would I remove dirt and grass clippings from the sidewalk? Am I expected to use a broom? Secondly, if I have not given myself and those within a quarter mile permanent hearing loss, how will I know if I have truly cleaned some visible-to-me-only dust off the street? And thirdly, asking me to give up the leaf blower is asking me to abandon Ghostbusters cosplay.

Bring a reusable bag: It’s easier to spend forty cents on plastic bags a few times a week, which adds up to something like $50 per year, then to stop and grab the cloth bags before leaving the house. Other things that seem to get forgotten because it’s ridiculously difficult to remember things: wearing pants, saying “thank you,” and putting gas in the car. Next you’ll tell me there are errant plastic bags blowing around the grocery store parking lot, and if I really needed one, I could pick one up and put it to use.

Meatless Mondays: It is a mystery how anyone could survive by eliminating meat from their diet one whole day of the week. Plus, if you forget that it’s Monday, how do you even recover from that? It’s not like you can just make up for it by having a Meatless Tuesday — there’s no assonance. It wouldn’t work. Not just that, but would it even count?

Lower the Thermostat: Add a sweater? Put seasonally-appropriate socks on? If I wanted this kind of strenuous exercise I would join a gym, and then I would circle the gym in my car so that I could park super close. Wear a hat indoors? This is absurd. What’s next? Removing window A/C units in the winter?