Short and immediate responses as I read some of this post about Leverage:

https://cathleensdiscoveries.com/LivingLifeWell/in-defense-of-attempting-hard-things

When I first encountered the group, it was clear that something different was going on. They were pretty much crap at any of the conservation behaviors that in my circles meant that you cared about improving the state of the world: they didn’t recycle, they’d turn on the kitchen sink and then walk away to go get something, they’d hold the fridge door wide open while they tried to carefully answer a question about the limited types of goals they’d seen in people’s motivational setups -- I don’t even know if they were registered to vote! But that was almost symbolic of their determination to not flinch away from the size and complexity of the problems that humanity doesn’t seem to be on track to solving: they weren’t pretending that taking public transport and reusing shopping bags would handle problems of such magnitude, they weren’t resigned to never solving them or in denial that they existed -- they were spending all their attention genuinely trying to figure out whether there might be any counterintuitive ways that they could end up successfully addressing these very real and very hard problems.

I appreciate this reframing of this behavior as being especially determined. 

I also think we might end up turning such behaviors into a kind of social signal that reads to our ingroup as focused, determined, and doing it for real. Which would be equally bad as using recycling as a social signal (since we've lost the actual good thing in favor of signaling). But this would also actually be slightly worse imo because you're hitting the 'wastefulness' button as a favorable signal, so it becomes better to waste 'noticeably' or excessively. 

What we do with our minds matters at every level. I think conspicuous wastefulness is not a good thing for a mind to train itself to do.