Mindful Consumption: Rethinking our impact on Earth Day
I believe our individual actions matter. That the things that we do every day have an impact on the world we live in. Thoughtfully turning off lights in our home, mindfully using heat and air conditioning, driving as little as necessary. I believe that those small actions count. I wouldn’t say I’m a perfect practitioner (far from it – I see a light on in an empty room in my house right now), but I try to be mindful about these things because they seem like something I can do personally to leave a smaller footprint on the earth. So, it’s always a bit upsetting to read a news article about the emissions from a celebrity’s private jet used to travel between adjacent California counties. But maybe general consumption should also make the news.
I recently came across this video (an image from it is below), and then a whole genre of this variety of “pranks”. The genre was called “Empty Amazon Packages Prank on Husband” and is essentially someone coming home to discover dozens of packages on their front porch that their partner ordered – not knowing that it’s just a joke.
While the man’s reaction was funny, and people do find this funny – this particular video has hundreds of thousands of views and over 10,000 likes. It’s most shocking to me that a spouse can fall for this prank – that, even for a moment, they believe that their spouse really did order all this stuff. But of course it’s plausible. The video itself is evident of the culture. This particular video was captioned, “Because it’s cyber Monday! Who is ordering more than this today?! 😂”
Cyber Monday, or any other made-up consumer holiday aside, ordering online has become as easy as 1, 2, “Buy Now”. Beyond the ease, it’s also a form of connection. Watching influencers tell you how you will feel better, or enjoy your organized home more, if you simply buy a bunch of junk is compelling. We can get trapped in the juicy Instagram scroll loop and easily have something delivered before 8am the next morning. My guess is a lot of us have more packages arriving than we want to acknowledge.
Again, I am no perfect practitioner. There are few feelings more frustrating to me than the Amazon delivery truck arriving and me not knowing what is getting delivered or looking at my weekly spending and wondering what the “Amazon” charges (yep, plural) were – it goes directly against my personal philosophy of doing things intentionally.
While online shopping doesn’t seem quite as obvious as the other Earth responsible tasks – like conserving energy – it’s one of those small actions that adds up. It’s not just that a package is arriving at our door. It’s the entire supply chain for any given item. Who is making the item? Where is it being made? How are the individual parts being sourced? What impact does the creation of the parts or the item have on the greater ecosystem, including especially, the people making them? How about the shipping materials and actual shipping?
Changing our behavior is the hardest task, so while it’s going to be an entire system change for me to quit ordering online right now, I believe that these little things, in the aggregate, have an impact. So, this Earth Day, I urge us all to start thinking about smaller actions in our lives and how we might consider their greater impacts as we live on this Earth.
Earth day posts have become a tradition, and this is the third annual. While I think you should use your resources for exactly what brings you joy in your life, I take the opportunity of Earth Day posts as my chance to get on a bit more of a minimalist soapbox. If you’d like to read the posts from the past years, check them out here: