Privacy from my perspective is a mix and mach, not a goal to achieve. Its a continuum, a lifestyle, like veganism, not ruining the environment, etc.
Of course you can try to not exist in the registries of big corpos and governments but for that you need insane amounts of discipline and decades of experience, not to mention extensive computer knowledge.
You can achieve good results by using some very basic measures like ad blockers, not accepting any cookies if you can help it. That already just moves the needle in your case. Then you tell your friends to do just this.
If you are curious and want to do more, you can but if you dont have capacity, jusy leave it at that.
What you're talking about is virtue signaling to gain attention. People try to "be good" in the eyes of their perceived mentors and "fans". They post how paranoid they are in the hope of achieving upvotes or other forms of clout. Its not real. What you're feeling is the emptiness of clout and the pointlessness of doing even a good thing for mostly selfish reasons. The return on investment is not great enough.
Thats why one should never try as hard as they can to avoid privacy invasion but just take all passive measures they can put in without negatively impacting their lives.
I for example tried a lot of things but I'm a programmer and system integrator. I do this shit for a living. I tried using a postmarketOS phone as a daily driver. It didnt work out because even after months i still had to think around my phone to not constanly face being disadvantaged. Thats why i changed to lineageos. It is not as awesome as postmarketos but for now, it does the trick, without falling all the way back to apple or stock android. Same goes for pc. Using linux mint or ubuntu is no shame. Its far better than going for arch or nix and falling back to windows.
The important part is to not give in to fascistoid systems and still be functional enough to live, not only survive, if possible.
If you need any help or advice, feel free to contact me.
Thanks. Very nice of you to say that. Have a good one.