Simple: Quit buying stuff you don’t really need, and that is a lot of stuff.
Can you imagine the societal and global repercussions if enough people stopped buying things that are unnecessary? It would crash the gobal financial system in the short run, especially with currently declining fertility trends, and I tend to think a reset is rather useful.
Increased economic deflation would become the long trend. Everyone talks about how corrupt the current system is, but is unwilling to: stop buying new and improved products from companies, create value of their own, and focus on localness. Talking water faucets, washers with double washer, and fridges that
Here are some fundamental ways to destroy the current negative growth curves, starting with “food”.
Food:
- Eat low-cost, unprocessed food like beans and rice, veggies/fruit, whole grains. Reduce inefficient meats.(My conversion went like this: Moved from eating white bread to brown, moved to homemade bread, moved to grinding my own wheat, and finally…now testing eating wheat seeds this week for even better nutrition and less work). Sure, sugar and fat might be cheap, but that violates health needs below.
- Do not buy pre-packaged foods
- Do not order, and definitely do not deliver, fast food / take out. This means restaurants are a rare thing.
- Eat less food period (growing obesity trends over time indicate this is clearly part of the problem).
- Grow your own food as much as possible, esp using permaculture and low/non-input, low/no-chemical methods. Rip up your lawn and grow high calorie foods. There are a few urban examples of this. Make growing food a fun hobby (once you discover high density planting and other methods to reduce weeds).
- Incorporate traditional food prep methods like fermenting and traditional treatments like bone broth (may help cure arthritis) to have a healthier lifestyle since most of our health issues these days seem to stem from food, exercise, and sleep.
Education:
- Displace the current, expensive, inefficient, and govt-driven education system. Education is the single fastest growing cost in the US today.
- Displace the public education system altogether if possible too. Instead, create community driven systems where people volunteer their time to teach and become mentors.
- Read books and learn skills on the job–available for many jobs actually, perhaps most, including some medical.
- Personally, I hire someone that loves to learn over someone with skills and no real interest even if that have a formal education.
Transportation
- This section is obvious to most
- Dont travel unless you really need to, Plan ahead to get many things done in one trip.
- Obviously, efficient travel methods like bikes and carpooling, car sharing, and walking, which also helps with our health needs. Horses are debatable in terms of efficiency, but at least their waste provides the best fertilizer for growing your own food, etc…
- Planes are the worst for fuel and pollution reasons. I have made one necessary plane trip in the last 5 years, and rarely leave my home since I work from it. I try to shop once a week (that needs improvement).
Entertainment / Leisure:
- Cut out 90% or more of entertainment and leisure.
- Cheap Chinese products are increasingly being replaced by more expensive stuff called “experiences” which amounts to travel and events. This may be one of the largest drivers of waste.
- Replace more expensive and time-consuming entertainment like video games, movies, and apps with a few low cost board games, balls, simple activities, reading, and hanging out with other people.
- Stop wasting aimless time online. Instead, find meaningful purposes for life and fulfill them.
- Use staycations instead of vacations.
- Spend more time pondering and relaxing instead of stimulating and using tech for fun.
Health:
- Health is difficult one for now at least as many health issues are best treatable by modern medicine
- However look for alternative treatments with a good track record, or good study results. Here one of several studies for example that show that yogurt cures IBS, which affects 8% – 20% of Western populations, yet our gastro doctor has no clue about these studies. I read a lot of medical studies databases to learn all the non-pharmacological studies that have been done, focusing on meta-analysis and good study design when possible, but ultimately testing an idea if it sounds reasonable:
“Yogurt has all desired physicochemical and microbiological characteristics to be used for treating IBS. 91% of the sample population achieved remission within 180+/-20 days and 96.4% achieved complete cure within 300 days. 98.2% of the population achieved remission and complete cure within 400 days in Indian trials. ” – source
Most importantly, live healthy. See the food items above.
Energy:
- Solar/wind will replace electrical bills eventually, but much more importantly-
- Cut energy usage. Use a Kilawatt or other tool to measure it.
- Do things like replace the dryer with line drying, use a hand washer when it makes sense
- Build a passive home, etc… It’s difficult to get rid of green energy tech.
Housing:
- Smaller, less fancy homes for sure.
- Build your own if possible
- Best solution may be open source designs and DIY homes from local sources (e.g. Open Building Institute combines off-grid, DIY, eco-friendly, & aquaponics).
- Most importantly, have multi-generational homes. In India for example, they average 4.4 people per home, Sub-Sarahan Africa it’s 6.9, and in the US 2.6. This way, he need half as many homes as we do today. A different family on each floor is a common design in come countries.
Govt:
Replace top-down, heavy, inefficient govt with bottom-up, low-cost, local govt.
- Global action would be needed to disempower many large and bloated modern states, but this would also reduce the expansive military budgets needed.
People generally desire one thing: more pleasure and more ease. This is what drives the modern society.
Dont do it.
Better tech is useful for things like energy efficiency, so I am not categorically against all tech. I am against wasteful, depersonalizing, low-usefulness, mind-deteriorating tech. To be completely against tech means we would live in caves. Okay, maybe some of you want to, but there is not a lot of cave space out there. A hard line to draw of course. Theoretically using a dishwasher is more efficient than hand washing, but now I have less work, so should I use it? I think the real question is: if a dishwasher frees my time up, then the real question is, what to do with the extra time?
I do not know how to find answers to a problem that will increase with time, but it is possible that society will experience a complete collapse. Consider how many large populations that have disappeared without a trace, except for the people that remained in the jungles and wildernesses. This includes the: Maya, Indus, Anasazi, Cahokia (Mississippians), Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Khmer empire, Clovis, Cucuteni-Trypillia, Minoan civilization, Mycenaean civilization, Olmec civilization, Nabataeans, Empire Of Aksum, Catalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, Angkor Wat, Nabta Playa, and of course all the ones we have not discovered yet because they disappeared completely.
So while some people live without a fridge and lighting, I do not (yet), but see that there is an incredible amount of overpriced useful features being sold today like talking fridges with wi-fi, clear doors on fridges, and even water/ice dispensers are a luxury in my opinion. If everyone at least stuck to buying basic appliances, with focus on energy efficiency and durability, this would end much of the fridge industry as we know it.
Another example is TV’s. Okay, most of us have a TV, but 4k, 6 foot screens, a the plethora of other growing non-sensical features for the most part… have not measurably improved the experience for most people. They are just new ways to sell people on more expensive stuff that they do not really need. While the jump from 640×480 to 1080 was substantially noticeable, the steps up after that was not. Personally, I am still fine watching on a 720 , and even 640×480 TV because the messages are clearly understood. You can even watch a Youtube video that compares all three, and I will bet that you will barely notice the difference.
Today’s purchasing reality is this:
The more money people make, the more they spend, which becomes increasingly wasteful, and therein lies the fatal human flaw. Endless human needs, or more accurately, the increasing trend individually, and for the group over time, in which “needs” are always replacing “wants”.
Instead of waste, we can invest our extra earnings in poor people/places, tech that is beneficial to humanity, and time with others. Of course, technological growth predicts that eventually no one will need to work, and that is a whole other problem that I discuss on this site.
Which aspects should we focus on first? I suggest the most expensive ones and ones that are most frivolous. Here are the most expensive ones. You can see that domestic produced products are most likely the cause of increasing prices over time.
In case you think the above points are unrealistic, I actually do most of these when it’s in my control to do so. Yes, I am suggesting we live similar to a third world country, or like the Amish, in many ways.
If everyone did this, GDP’s of countries would start to fall (faster) than they would otherwise with current populations going over the hill. I predict elsewhere on this site that a falling global GDP, or real growth, will become the basis for the largest disaster in human history, at least initially, because all current economics and future plans are built on the idea that countries will grow indefinitely, and they may depending on a few things.
Yes, I am the naysayer in the room when I suggest that we don’t really need more stuff or experiences to be happy.
Got more suggestions for main ideas? Leave your comment below.