It's not even a feasible long term goal, though. There are plenty of places where steady progress will lead to achievements in the long term that seem unbelievable now - science may yet reverse climate change, achieve nuclear fusion at scale, cure cancer (and aging), etc.
This isn't one of those things, though. There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.
It sounds like you’re imposing a specifically slow set of increments here.
We know that these goals can’t be met overnight, so the only option is some kind of incremental progress.
But the size of those increments certainly isn’t set, and will be increased (voluntarily or not) as our situation becomes more dire.
> Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.
I think it’s problematic to conclude that what we’re discussing can’t be plausibly achieved. Insanely difficult, sure, but at some point these decisions will be made for us.
Going further and calling these kinds of goals “bad” seems actively harmful.
The “everyone just needs to do <x>” part wasn’t a reference to a long term idea, it was them replying to somebody expecting that immediately (or, with a more forgiving reading, in a shorter term)
Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do <x>”) can (must) coexist alongside shorter term incentives and PR campaigns.
To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable.
But conversely, short term incentives must necessarily be informed by long term goals if there’s hope of establishing a useful incentive structure.
Success will require focus on both ends of the spectrum.
Ultimately what we’re talking about is society-scale habit change, and habit change relies on both a belief in a long term outcome and a commitment to daily progress towards it.