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Part of the comparison here is that the alternatives are both cheaper and practically better.It's not the case here, because you're not buying gems for their practical value. If you were, then there would not be an issue - lab-grown diamonds for cutting things would be even cheaper than they are, and you wouldn't care about other gems unless you were playing with lasers or something.
As much a I hate it, the entire point of jewelry is that it's expensive and useless. It's the OG "proof of work" kind of thing - you prove your affection by burning significant resources on some piece of junk, and the recipient can use that piece of junk to prove their status to others ("look how much wealth I can burn on stupid shit", or "look how much wealth I can get someone else to burn on my behalf"). Layer a millennium of traditions and a century of De Beers marketing on top, and we get to where we are.
Being practical devalues jewelry; being cheap is opposite of its point; being alternative means being unauthentic, and makes the wearer a liar.
> The reality is that we regularly choose minor improvements to our lives or even just spend through laziness at a cost of other people's lives.
That's the unsolved part. For any given thing enjoyed by me and a billion other people, with hardly anyone talking it's wrong, I suddenly have to take some stranger's accusations and/or guilt-tripping at face value. The math goes like this:
- Surely my responsibility can't be more than one-billionth of the whole thing;
- It's not like I can actually make a difference without upending my whole life. That doesn't feel commensurate with one billionth of whatever the bad thing is;
("Voting with your wallet" is bullshit; boycotts don't work; you can't really make a dent without a large movement here, and good luck creating one over random consumer decision - you're competing with efforts to start a movement over ever other such decision, and people's attention is finite.)
- You came out of nowhere and started guilt-tripping me, it's not just inconvenient and makes me feel bad, but it's also a technique used by scammers and cultists and politicians - so why should I trust your math in the first place?
With a little hand-waving, the solution to above inequality is "I'm not going to change, and I don't like you anymore".
I'm not saying this is good - just that it is. That's the bit that's unsolved in practice.