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Hey again, Marie Kondo || Part 3 – mostly environmental and money stuff, but also a little bit about time

Alright, more thoughts going through the konmari process:

The upside of throwing things away?

Especially with everything closed, it’s been harder to get rid of things in a way that feels responsible.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Sometimes, it seems like having places to donate things to is a way to make ourselves feel better. It takes minimal effort to donate, but maybe it doesn’t do as much good as we think.

Maybe it’s better to feel the pain and effort of getting our stuff to good homes by giving it directly to others or selling it online.

Maybe it’s a good thing to feel the pain of throwing it away.

Maybe this pain will help prevent buying new stuff.

Maybe, now when buying something, it’ll be more automatic to think not just about the pleasure it gives now, but where it will live in the home, and where it will go after.

Otherwise, it’s so easy to continue on the cycle of buying things and then thinking “Oh, I can just donate it if I don’t want it later.”

We so often talk about reduce, reuse, recycle, and it so often feels like the focus is heavily on recycling.

After all, that supports industries: the purchase of the good, the collection of it, the manufacturing into something new that can then be resold.

But really, reduce is the one that will truly have the greatest impact.

No one profits off of that though.

No one except all of us, but where’s the fun in that?

Burdens

Thinking about how much money was spent on stuff that now feels like a burden…

In quarantimes, it’s been interesting to find things that took up space for a really long time and to discover that they actually bring joy now.

(Timing is everything…)

But, ok, so the worst case fear for getting rid of things is often a mix of sunk cost fallacy and “what if I need it?”

So, now that the best case scenario is coming true, now that those things are being used that have been sitting around for years, has it been worth keeping them?

I don’t know, I don’t think so.

There’s obviously the psychic cost of those things sitting around, taking up space, needing to be moved between homes.

But there’s also the opportunity cost, all that time when those things could have been making other people happy. Or at the very least not being irritating to me.

There’s also the possible cost of my now being tempted to bend my life so it fits into using these old things that suddenly seem more valuable since getting new stuff is harder.

I don’t know, I hope that experiencing the best case kind of shows me that it isn’t worth it to cling onto stuff, but I worry I’m not feeling that in my gut yet.

Delicious waiting

I’ve hit a bit of a bump in my process, but before that, I enjoyed planning out my konmari.

Staring at the mess and looking forward to processing it.

Putting it in my agenda for the future and actually getting excited.

I’ve been finding this for exercise too, learning about new ways to move my body and feeling antsy to get going rightnow; putting time in between now and moving that way makes it tantalizing, something I want to do instead of a chore.

My inability to repay debt right now is the same. I feel like once I actually get to a position where I can start that again, I’ll want to fucking destroy it.

On the flip side, I also found myself looking at shirts online that I really want to get but don’t feel ok ordering just yet.

I just hope the delicious waiting doesn’t apply to consumption too.

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Uhhh is EJ-washing a thing now?

So greenwashing is pretty well-established as being when corporations try to pretend that they’re “greener” than they actually are.

But recent conversations have made me realize that a similar phenomenon is happening with environmental and climate justice as well (and maybe it’s been happening forever but I’ve just been too naive to notice?).

I’ve seen it in the hierarchies of EJ-focused non-profit orgs, where white folks at the top make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, where if you put faces next to the org chart you would soooo quickly see that it gets darker the further you go down and significantly less compensated.

But still, they want to flaunt the pics of darker folks to the lighter donors…

(See Dr. Dorceta Taylor’s work at diversegreen.org for a systematic look at representation within non-profits.)

I’m still figuring out how to articulate what is often a gut feeling, but I’ve been having people tell me about how they’re trying to align their work with EJ because it’s becoming more popular (I can’t remember the exact phrasing but will try to track it better if it happens again).

I’ve been seeing folks about EJ when their current work is really focused on high income customers and there are only vague plans on how to actually serve everyone else (and like, it’s totally fine and sometimes necessary to focus on high-paying customers, but then, like, don’t try to pretend that EJ is at the core of your work).

I’ve been seeing them say that social justice is their priority while enabling more of the individual choices that have led us into this mess instead of thinking about the systems that influence our decisions.

I’ve seen orgs that deny the “relevance” of indigenous issues to environmental justice then turn around and center it in their programming, with predominantly non-PoC speakers, or who talk about how they’re on some EJ panels while brushing off the downstream impacts of their work on displacement rates, etc.

These experiences are making me wonder, is it even worth it trying to be part of some of these organizations or systems that have “low diversity”?

Like, it seems the want us so bad.

But maybe they just don’t deserve us.

 

 

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Hey again, Marie Kondo || Part 2, mostly fitness stuff

So I’ve noticed a few parallels in terms of dealing with fitness and konmari-ing:

Making the wait delicious

Instead of jumping right into doing the thing now, I’ve been deciding to hold off on different projects.

I’ve found myself reading about them, itching to get started. I’m finding that makes me more excited once I do get started.

And then when I do, I’ve been taking on less than I can handle (inspired by Tiny Habits), which makes continuing those habits really tempting.

Not sure if this will work with other things too, but interested to see!

Reduce focus on opposition

Another parallel with exercise is the fact that so much exercise is framed in opposition to the body instead of building it up. Or the destruction or reduction of things, like fat or weight. Or numbers that ultimately aren’t the *best* reflection of wellness.

For instance, I kept finding myself taking the most pleasure in the number of reps going up or increasing my weights.

I’d then find myself unfortunately glancing at the scale and getting a tiny bit deflated when I saw the numbers go up, when isn’t that exactly what I’d *want* to see happen if I’m weight training?

I’ve instead tried to focus on the tiny little bump at the bottom of my bicep that’s now starting to bulge, or the way I just *feel* stronger.

I realized that I need to reduce taking pleasure in the numbers; I need to reduce that focus to stay healthy.

I started noticing a similar thing with Konmari-ing. Like I was thinking about all the things I need to get rid of, all the material pounds I need to shed or bags of stuff to donate or throw out, all the *decluttering* I needed to do to slay the clutter monsters.

But I’m not sure where I saw this but somewhere it was mentioned that Konmari is more of a mindfulness exercise. And I realized that something may have gotten lost in translation.

Just like yoga has become about “poses,” Konmari has become about “decluttering” instead of really about the mental shifts that are at its core. I need to focus more on that inner work now, to process the grief and fear that’s making it hard to break the attachment to random shit.

Beware false / exploitative messengers

I’ve also been trying to be better about the people I’m allowing myself to read.

Like I’ve started listening to my gut when I notice that certain subreddits about these topics make me feel not great, make me feel more dragged down than uplifted.

I’ve also been hating on all the ways in which content can be exploited. Like, let’s be real, there are articles that are really just basic Konmari principles + getting us to buy shit + not citing the WoC who popularized the ideas in the first place. Let’s not pretend that you came up with that “pose” yourself; it’s an asana that’s existed forever.

Obviously a lot of content creation and teaching is about repackaging ideas in ways that are more applicable and beneficial for the audience, which is a huge value! I’m just saying please cite your sources, please and thank you.

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Hey again, Marie Kondo || Part 1, mostly COVID stuff

Alright, here are some thoughts revisiting Konmari this time around:

Clutter = scarcity mindset + abundant resources

I grew up in a messy, messy home. Like I’m pretty sure at least one of my close childhood friends has actually never been in my room because it was so.fucking.messy. I’ve probably never seen the whole floor.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot though for quite a while is the fact that the things that are holding me back might be the same things that have held my parents back, that it’s not just that I’m becoming like them, but that they’re similar to me.

(Like there’s a lot about how neglected mental health is for the kids of immigrants, but what about the mental health issues that generation had that just never got names?)

ANYWAY, I realized that I always resented the messy messy house and as a response, sometimes went in the opposite direction of wanting to have nothing.

But obviously that’s a luxury. It’s a luxury of an upbringing where there was always enough, while my parents’ generation grew up needing to hold onto everything.

But then they had the opportunity to finally afford more things, and so that need to hold onto everything met the ability to *finally* buy everything and BOOM clutter.

So while I work through my stuff, both figurative and literal, I’m trying really, really hard to turn resentment into compassion.

Can efficiency be the enemy of resilience?

Sooo ruthless efficiency has fucked us over in so many ways and is taking so many creatures down with us.

For instance, here’s a story about how so many animals that have been raised for slaughter will now be dumped in landfills because there’s so little wiggle room in terms of how these facilities are set up.

These economic considerations also led us to have less wiggle room in human hospital capacity here in the United States as opposed to other nations (there’s another article that did a better job explaining it that I need to find, but here’s one with a little info on how we compare).

How can we use this in our real lives? Well I feel like a question that I see going into a lot of personal finance people is about whether to hold onto cash or invest. I was usually on the side of, well, isn’t it better to invest that money so it’s doing the most? But I’m coming to see that having that cash cushion is super important.

(It’d be great if the same shame that we apply to individuals in having enough for a rainy day applied to businesses though…)

But also it has me thinking more about how COVID could impact my own relationship with stuff moving forward. Like I used to like to have just what I needed without stocking up, but I feel like I’m going to end up learning towards keeping more things on hand now just in case.

I’ve also been feeling super lucky to have a bunch of stuff around that I probably should have let go of a long time ago, which I worry will reinforce the idea that I should keep things “just in case.”

I think I need to keep reminding myself that there’s a psychic cost to keeping stuff around, that the cost of replacing it might be less, but that’s also assuming a level of financial security that seems pretty uncertain right now.

Even asking myself “What’s the worst case scenario?” seems a bit iffy given how this time has shown that there’s so many shitty things possible that might have been difficult to imagine before.

For a while, I was training myself to be better about not eating past being full just because it was on my plate, and I did find it helpful to think about the fact that that food is wasted if it makes my belly too full. Maybe that’s the angle I’m going to need to go with letting go of stuff as well…

Limited space = limited stuff

It was so easy to have less stuff in a tiny apartment.

So many suburban homes are just too fucking big.

And we’re probably really tempted to just fill up all that space, just like we want to eat more if we’re eating off of bigger plates or just like meetings will expand to fill the time allotted to them.

I’m going to try to use that to ensure that my “containers” are smaller, that I don’t have unneeded storage thingies, that there are fewer tempting surfaces for things to pile up.

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On squatty potties and the commoditization of fitness

Like many others, I’ve been trying to use quarantine to focus on making fitness a habit.

While trying to build new habits, I’ve also been thinking back to old, deep, multigenerational lessons about maintaining our well-being well into old age.

Here are some thoughts:

  • I really hate reading about fitness. GIFs work, photos are ok, videos that are like 30 seconds long and just show me what I need to know are cool, but goddammit I really don’t know if I’ll ever get through “Starting Strength.” Sorry bro.
  • I was reading about proper squat technique, mostly because I have shit knees on all sides and want to *try* to prevent that, and then found myself thinking again about really old folks I’ve known who were able to maintain deep squats into their 90s and beyond because their environments were engineered for them to do so. As in they had squat toilets and so needed to deep squat on a regular basis. As in they weren’t made to sit in chairs and instead naturally rested in a squatting position.
    • I thought about squatty potties, a classic example of how our culture created a problem and then tried to sell the solution back to us.
    • I also thought again about how the idea of needing to exercise is such a by-product of office-oriented work; folks who are essential workers are already active.
  • I found myself recording my workouts in a notebook, carefully tracking reps and sets, and I totally see the value in that and will probably continue to do it. But IDK, isn’t truly functional fitness about doing things that are useful instead of just the weight we can lift? Like are there downsides to this? I’ve already sometimes found myself occasionally resisting doing a movement because I don’t have my tracker nearby; I’m super curious if there’s anything about if tracking sometimes leads to less movement.
  • I also thought about yoga, and how it makes you consider every precious piece of you. Your eyes, your toes, the back of your knees.
  • I also think this is a great time to see how much I can do myself for free; yes I had an impossible to cancel gym membership that I never used, hundreds of dollars wasted to a not even that great company.
  • It made me realize how much fitness has been commoditized because of its compartmentalization from daily life – why do I even need a different physical space or a separate time set aside to fitness? How can I focus on better integrating into my life more naturally?
  • Why do I need names for a farmer’s walk (literally just walking around holding a heavy weight) or to be Googling proper form for something that would be a daily part of my life elsewhere?
  • Why am I so focused on things that could potentially injure me when there’s so much intuitive movement that could do me a world of good?
  • Also I’ve always hated sitting in chairs, and finally it’s looking like that’s a good thing. I’m curious if those studies looking at how bad sitting is for you also looked at different kinds of sitting (cross-legged, squat, on knees).
  • Also like why is on the floor seating seen as juvenile? My roomie and I dreamed about it but then ended up getting “grown up beds.” Sure it was partially to avoid roaches and mice, but also there’s the whole perception angle to it, you know?

Cool, ok, bye.

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What’s home? And who gets one?

Recently, I’ve found myself revisiting a lot of music that I used to love.

And I’ve noticed that a lot of them tend to center around the theme of “home.”

I’ve been very fortunate in the midst of COVID; at the same time, I also recognize that the place I called “home” might not really exist in the same way ever again. And I wonder what “home” really means now in the time of COVID and who gets a stable place to call home.

I’ve also been seeing reports about trends showing that growth in large cities is slowing while small cities are growing much more quickly. One question that’s come up has been how white collar work can happen from a distance, giving more flexibility in where they’re working from, and so they’re considering living outside of cities. However, essential workers who have to physically be in their workspaces even in the pandemic don’t have that luxury.

What’s the potential that this will have for speeding up a gentrification and accelerating displacement, as small local businesses don’t get the help they need while the stock market soars and those with more capital continue to benefit?

But then, where do people go? Is the option of leaving cities for more rural or smaller areas one that’s really appealing to people of all identities? One of the appealing features of cities is their diversity, the fact that it’s easier to find people to fit in with no matter who you are.

While moving to a cheaper area is often presented as an option for reducing cost of living, there are other potential costs to that kind of move.

What does it mean for those inclusive spaces as cities become harder to live in? In an ideal world, it’d be cool if it meant that other places became more inclusive. However, right now, it feels like losing a refuge.

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What’s there to do besides travel?

I was talking to my mom the other day — actually, I was showing her a SUPER CUTE puppy that was available for adoption nearby — and she said that she was pretty tempted to adopt him but that she’s planning on traveling in retirement so it wouldn’t work out.

I was thinking about retirement and the things that we choose we want to do with our time when we’re free from other constraints, and it seemed like travel seems to be the most popular activity I hear about from older retirees and FIRErs alike.

I went looking for some stats, and apparently it’s not just my imagination:

Nearly two thirds (63 percent) of Americans aged 50 and older say travel is an important retirement goal, according to a recent poll by RBC Wealth Management-U.S.

However, given that airplanes kind of suck when it comes to carbon emissions, what can we envision in terms of other things to do in retirement?

(And since I know folks tend to balk at “extremes”: I guess if it really truly has to be travel, how about some overland journeying to cut emissions or even getting to know your own town really really well? Of course, it’s easier to spend more time doing some local exploring in some places than others, but I’ve lived in both remote spots and urban ones and have often found that there’s more to see that we originally think.

BUT I do acknowledge that in some cases, that might not necessarily be feasible or safe. Again, if it absolutely must be travel, another way to cut down could be through some long-term stays instead of those “See 83942 cities in 5 days” type-tours that guzzle gas and prob sleep too.)

Ok, travel aside, here’s a list of other ideas (I’m setting myself a timer for five minutes and seeing how many I can think of):

  • Create a documentary about local history, family history, etc. Especially with the world changing so fast and how cheap tech is now, it’s likely that there’s quite a bit of fodder for this. 
  • Write that book that you’ve been meaning to write forever. Even writing about your own life could be super fascinating, but then again, I don’t know you?
  • Get into some art using local / upcycled materials.
  • Volunteer with a local non-profit. Like, the best volunteers are the ones who stick around forever so that you don’t need to keep teaching them shit and can instead focus on the other world-saving work that you get paid to do.
  • Mentor a young person. Again, stability is a plus here. And you get to have your legacy live on in yet another way. 
  • Fix something creatively. This could be something in your house, your community, your family. I’m sure there’s something in the world around you that you think could be better, and now’s your chance to do something about it.

Alright, my explanations got long so I might revisit this, but point is, I think we start thinking about alternative visions for retirement that aren’t quite so destructive to our planet.

Enough with “save to travel” being the default goal; what else can we imagine as something to look forward to?

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Snacks

So for this month, I’m trying to curb my own impulse to go to the giant stores that I am oh so comfortable with to try getting most of what I need from neighborhood ones nearby.

And one of the things that I’ve already gotten out of buying local is snacks.

Such good snacks.

Snacks I never would have tried before.

Snacks that fit my dietary needs that I thought would be too tough to match.

Snacks that are crunchy and not too sweet and just the right amount to last a couple of days.

Snacks that are cheap.

Like I know some of the benefits are the connections from going down the block or knowing that my money is going to my neighbors instead of lining pockets so far away.

But my goodness, I’m definitely enjoying the snacks.

Now knowing that they’re so close is a little problematic. And knowing how kind the shopkeepers are probably will make me just want to get so many more especially the colder it gets. And I’m also fortunate that there’s also a variety of fresh food in the area that I can access and that snacks aren’t my only option.

So I’ll need to keep an eye out and make sure that I’m not buying more of them than I would have if I was still going to other stores. 

But for the snacks I was going to get anyway, I’m ok with collateral benefits that just taste so good. 

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Should acquiring things be more of a thing?

Of course it’s already entirely too easy to buy new things. 

I don’t even need money in my bank account to get a thing. 

I don’t even need to leave my bed!

And don’t get me wrong, this is an absolute godsend for some folks, and it’s incredible that this exists. 

But could getting pleasure and meaning out of the consumption we need to do help us consume less?

 

Like, I don’t know, going on a quest for a baking pan led me to meet some lovely new people who I otherwise wouldn’t have known.

It helped me keep dollars here instead of sending them off to make super rich people even richer. 

It helped me get to know my community better.

And I actually spent less than I would have by purchasing it online.

 

Of course, I’m lucky that I have the mobility and some of the time that allows me to explore and do this. 

But now that I know about that place, I can go there again and again. 

And maybe it’s a good thing that it takes a little more time to buy something because it’ll lead me to think more carefully about what I actually need.

 

So this month I’m going to try extra hard to spend less time at that grocery store that I love so much but is probably gentrifying my neighborhood.

And I’m going to try to be better about supporting the stores run by my neighbors.

And I’m going to see what I gain and what I lose. 

 

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The tiniest, most painless (promise!) first step to reducing our dependence on Amazon

I know the last post was all about how creating a better world isn’t really just about sacrifice. 

And I promise that this post actually isn’t asking you to change all that much: 

I think by this point many of us are aware of at least some of the issues with Amazon (the company, not the rainforest). 

And there’s one really tiny, simple thing we can start doing right now to decrease its influence.

I’m not coming for your Prime memberships right now. 

Or stopping you from getting Whole Foods.

Or asking you to stop supporting yourself through affiliate links.

I am just asking:

Could we *not* with the free, almost automatic advertising for Amazon? 

Like when someone tells you they like a thing you bought and you respond, “Oh I got it off Amazon.”

Or making it the default place to buy things when you say “I’ll just order it on Amazon,” 

Or placing it first in the list of options for where to buy a book (like “available at Amazon or wherever books are sold” even when there’s no affiliate link)?

Shifting it away from being the default spot to buy all the things will be huge, but this seems like a relatively painless way to start!