For a Librem product to help you -

Both you and the person you are communicating with have Librem Products. Librem Computer. Librem Phones.

My Social Security payments says it will still be awhile before I get Librem products, but then again, my family will never use Linux or Librem.

Tell me why I am wrong?

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Depends on what sort of priority you have as a target. If both you and the one you are communicating with have the attention of very powerful people, such that the chances of people attempting to physically modify parts of your laptop are high, then yes, you probably both want Librems for the Pureboot security stack.

If you are not concerned about physical tampering, then your weakness will come from exploits/breaches taking place over a network (and if you are communicating with someone, then you are using a network). Here, the choices don’t have to be Purism - you just need to be using open-source (audited) software so that you can be relatively certain there aren’t backdoors or exploits and using encrypted communication, so that things don’t get intercepted.

Purism is working hard to make these last two things easy/default, but you don’t need Purism for them.

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Because you are speaking in incomplete thoughts and absolutes.

There are many nuanced details that come into play with security and privacy.

And to the statement “for a Librem product to help you” … This is incomplete. To accomplish what?

In most scenarios that one could make reasonable assumptions about your meaning, even just yourself using Librem products will help yourself in some regard and may even help others by allowing them to see another way of doing things.

Never is a long time… It’s very difficult to estimate in what ways, so maybe your family will use a Librem device running Linux at some point after seeing yours.

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You are wrong because a Librem product can help you even if you never communicate with anyone.

A computer in isolation running unverifiable (closed source) software, including drivers, is a problem.

If your sole focus is in the privacy of your communications then the choice of communication mechanism is at least as important as the choice of access device. For example, even if your access device and that of the other party is the most wonderful on the planet, if you are communicating via vanilla email or via Facebook direct message then your communication is not private at all.

As a previous comment said, security and privacy are very big areas and you need to clarify what your main goals are i.e. narrow it down.

You ought to give an indication of your basis of comparison i.e. what your starting point is. (For example, if your starting point is a computer running Microsoft Windows, a step in the right direction is to investigate how well Linux runs on the existing computer, something that requires negligible financial investment.)

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I thank the posters for their well written, insightful comments. I intended to open a discussion without too many pre-conditions of what other posters would say. I did expect more to say I was wrong, i usually am wrong.

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