The Clutter of a Life

By Jody Tishmack, Anima/Soul

The older I get the less I enjoy having stuff.  When we moved three years ago it was shocking to find how much stuff we had accumulated, and how much work it took to pack and move it. 

Groomed to Consume

By Anja Lyngbaek, Local Futures

Rampant consumerism doesn’t happen by itself: it is encouraged by an economic system that requires perpetual economic growth. When national economies show signs of slowing down, citizens are invariably called upon to increase their consumption

“In Praise of Idleness” revisited

By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights

So much of modern culture insists that constant stimulation is the essence of living. In truth, constant stimulation is merely a tactic of advertisers, app makers, websites and myriad media outlets to hook you on their messages and their products. Leisure requires withdrawal from all that and—this is the key point—learning to derive pleasure from solitude, quiet observation of the world around us and introspection.

Car Culture

By Rob Dietz, Resilience.org

The truth is that Jim made a practical choice.  He had bought something he could afford.  He wasn’t a pretentious jerk, a privileged snob, a hyper-critical college know-it-all, or a buffoon with delusions of grandeur.  He was a hard worker who needed reliable transportation to get to and from work.

AI Has Already Taken Over. It’s Called the Corporation

By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning

Imagine a world where corporate charters were only granted if they adopted a triple bottom line, and where shareholder lawsuits threatened every time a company broke one of its own social and environmental standards. Until that happens, it may be that the “worst event in the history of our civilization” is not the future development of modern AI, but the decision by a group of 17thcentury politicians to unleash the power of the Corporation on an unsuspecting humanity.

A Conversation with my Daughter

By Michelle Galimba, Anima/Soul

My daughter, being sixteen, just got her driver’s license. I asked her a question a few days ago: ” If you had to choose one and give up the other, which would you choose: a personal vehicle or the internet (including social media, wifi, smart phones, etc.)?” She thought for a bit and said: “It’s a hard question but I would choose the internet.  Nobody actually likes driving, it’s just something we have to do, but I really like having access to movies at home and all that other stuff.” She is just one young person, but the choice and the distinction that she made surprised me.

Is Greenhouse Warming a Good Pretext for Selling Driverless Cars?

By Stan Cox, Resilience.org

The automakers and IT giants are predicting that autonomous vehicles (AVs or “driverless cars”) will play a big role in reducing America’s currently extravagant emissions of greenhouse gases. In this claim (as in the assertion that flying cars will be more energy efficient than helicopters), climate mitigation is serving not as a goal but as a selling point for a lucrative new technology that society doesn’t need.

A Society beyond Consumerism

By Tim Jackson, New Internationalist

Post-purchase dissonance is an expression psychologists use to describe the disappointment we sometimes feel on realizing that our latest consumer purchase does not fulfil the promise we bought it on. At first sight it’s a curious anomaly. On deeper reflection, it turns out to be the structural basis for the entire edifice. The engine of consumer society is discontentment. This is more than a rhetorical claim.

The High Cost of an Easy-Care, Low-Maintenance World

By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights

By abandoning the duty of maintenance we owe to the objects in our lives, we are distancing ourselves from the physical world and essentially sending the entropy elsewhere for someone else to deal with, whether human or non-human.

Globalization’s Blowback

By Alex Jensen, Local Futures

Now, in addition to the products that magically appear on Western store shelves absolutely shorn of history and provenance, much of the hitherto distant pollution emitted in their production has also arrived. It has come home to roost. Globalization’s blowback.