Less is More - Day 18

What I Learned This Year = Minimalism & Sustainability

As I mentioned earlier this month, I could've written the whole blog this year on these topics alone. 

I've been interested in minimalism for a while. I regularly read the Zen Habits blog and I've always believed that having stuff doesn't bring happiness. This year, I ran into 3 things that inspired me even more:

1) Minimalism: A Documentary. My family and I watched this last year at Christmas time. It's a real reminder about how wonderful a simple life can be.

2) Early in the year, I saw a video (could not find it to share) of a man who had counted up all his things and had gotten rid of stuff until he had less than 100 things. After watching the video, I thought, I should count how much stuff I have! So I did. After counting up all the items in my room and my hallway closets, I stopped. I had over 1000 items in just my room alone. I decided that was enough counting for the message to be clear: I have too much stuff.

3) I finally got on board the train and read the New York Times bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. As a cleaner/organizer/thrower by nature, I was already destined to love this book. I enjoyed it a lot and got rid of several bags/boxes of stuff that I realized "didn't bring me joy". 

The topic of minimalism has a strong connection to sustainability. The news is full of examples of how our current societal behavior is destroying nature - the very thing that keeps us alive. The more I learn, the more I feel sad...and determined to be active about fighting it. I'm very clear that what I do as an individual won't be enough to save the planet. However, as I mentioned earlier in this blog, it's about having integrity between beliefs and actions. If I believe that I should be working towards a sustainable lifestyle, then that's what I should do. So here's a few ways I've grown in this area this year:

1) Transportation - A year ago, I vowed to stop driving to any location I could walk to. So, I now walk to the grocery store, bank, volunteer center, restaurants, and coffee shops. I take the bus to work instead of driving. I carpool whenever I can and have started to take the train rather than my car when I go visit my parents. I've even thought about riding a bike. As a lifelong non-biker, this is a good step for me.

2) Food - As a result of the aforementioned walking, I've had to be a bit more careful about what I buy at the grocery store because I have to carry it home afterwards. I started buying more organic foods and things that don't have a lot of packaging. I started to reuse those plastic produce bags and of course, bring my cloth bags into the store. Finally, I just received my first installment from Imperfect Produce! This organization will deliver a box of imperfect produce to your door that would have otherwise been thrown in the garbage due to cosmetic imperfections. As a result of my sustainability changes, I've had to eat more healthfully because healthy food comes naked; unhealthy food comes in packaging.

3) Clothing - There are mountains of books, articles and documentaries outlining the terrors of the clothing industry. There are so many sustainability and ethics issues to consider when it comes to clothing it's a little overwhelming. Something that shifted the way I look at clothing is this paraphrased quote from the aforementioned minimalism documentary: 

The problem isn't that people are materialistic; it's that they aren't materialistic enough. People SHOULD be thinking about things in terms of their material value rather than their social value. Clothes are meant to protect you from the elements, not convey your social status. If people thought of things in terms of their material value, they would have a lot less. 

This helped me shift my thinking about clothing and material things in general. So, I've started buying as many of my clothes as I can from Goodwill; if I have to buy new clothes, I'm trying to buy them from companies that are working towards more sustainable materials (boodywear.com) or who treat their workers fairly (naja.co). But more importantly, I'm tried to buy less. More on buying less to come.