Believing that my time is really valuable can lead to me making more wasteful decisions. Decisions like: “It is totally fine for me to buy all these expensive ergonomic keyboards simultaneously on Amazon and try them out, then throw away whichever ones do not work for me.” Or “I will buy this expensive exercise equipment on a whim to test out. Even if I only use it once and end up trashing it a year later, it does not matter.”
...
The thinking in the examples above worries me. People are bad at reasoning about when to make exceptions to rules like “try to behave in non-wasteful ways”, especially when the exception is personally beneficial. And I think each exception can weaken your broader narrative about what you value and who you are.
I was brought up in a family that was very pro-don’t-waste, and I’ve had an a lengthy shift towards “actually, ‘not wasting’” just isn’t very important. It’s more of a carry-over from a time when a) humanity had a lot less ability to produce stuff, b) humanity had worse landfill technology than we have now.”
Insofar as we do produce too much waste, it’s mostly at a corporate/organizational level than something that makes sense for individuals to prioritize.
It’s not that I think people should be making exceptions to rules like ‘try to behave in non-wasteful ways’, it’s that I mostly now think that ‘don’t be wasteful’ wasn’t that useful a core-rule in the first place.
(Among my cruxes here are a belief that landfill technology has improved since the era when ‘don’t waste’ and ‘recycle’ memes took off, as well as a shift towards ‘thinking broadly about having a high impact is much more important than individual local decisions.’
Past me (and perhaps you) might be suspicious of the ‘landfill technology is actually good enough that this isn’t that big a deal’, perhaps rightly so because it’s a kinda suspiciously-convenient belief. I don’t have arguments-at-the-ready that’d have convinced past me, so mostly just laying out my current reasoning without expecting it to be that persuasive at the moment)
I was brought up in a family that was very pro-don’t-waste, and I’ve had an a lengthy shift towards “actually, ‘not wasting’” just isn’t very important. It’s more of a carry-over from a time when a) humanity had a lot less ability to produce stuff, b) humanity had worse landfill technology than we have now.”
Insofar as we do produce too much waste, it’s mostly at a corporate/organizational level than something that makes sense for individuals to prioritize.
It’s not that I think people should be making exceptions to rules like ‘try to behave in non-wasteful ways’, it’s that I mostly now think that ‘don’t be wasteful’ wasn’t that useful a core-rule in the first place.
(Among my cruxes here are a belief that landfill technology has improved since the era when ‘don’t waste’ and ‘recycle’ memes took off, as well as a shift towards ‘thinking broadly about having a high impact is much more important than individual local decisions.’
Past me (and perhaps you) might be suspicious of the ‘landfill technology is actually good enough that this isn’t that big a deal’, perhaps rightly so because it’s a kinda suspiciously-convenient belief. I don’t have arguments-at-the-ready that’d have convinced past me, so mostly just laying out my current reasoning without expecting it to be that persuasive at the moment)