consume less

go through phases – sometimes without consuming much at all and sometimes consuming things left and right (although I usually am a mindful consumer and support local farms and businesses). For now, though, I will consider this accomplished, but I will always aspire to it.

I was thinking about why people are so stuck. Why, despite the fact that I know most people (around me in Seattle, anyway) are fucking fed up with what the government is doing and are finding more and more each day that the supposed democracy on which this nation was supposedly created on is a fucking sham, why is it that we all just keep on doing what we’ve always done? Go to work, commute (and many of us by car, mind you), come home and watch tv, read the newspaper, and maybe send an online petition or two. Ummm, the matters at hand require much more attention than that. People need to step up and stand up for something, anything! Instead we all passively insult the government and whine. Why don’t we all (and this definately includes me) have the galls to do something? Well, for one, what we need to do is not entirely defined. If we all knew what to do that would effectively make change, it would be a little easier for us to break the daily routine and jump on some sort of bandwagon. The other reason we don’t want to break the daily monontony to actually make change is because we are consumers. We were raised to consume and it is the only thing we know how to do well. We consume food, books, tv, gas!, alcohol, paper, clothes, coffee!, drugs, air. We don’t want to change our ways because we want to be able to consume in comfort. We eat too much! Our bodies need so little. Many of the things that we rely on everyday to accomplish daily tasks are unnecessary. If we hope to make any changes at all, we need to let go. Let go of what we think we need and listen to our instincts. If we were all to live simpler, our current government wouldn’t survive. Now that I’ve said all this, lets see how it goes…