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Yes, there is. Personal fulfilment. Living up to your own standards. Why do you want to consume because everyone else is doing so? Is the only reason you're wi

Yes, there is. Personal fulfilment. Living up to your own standards. Why do you want to consume because everyone else is doing so? Is the only reason you're willing to consider doing otherwise to save the world? Is life worse without the disposable products? Why are the decisions you make in your life contingent on some insurmountable, unachievable goal such as "everyone else must do it first"?

xmprt 4y ago
Life is worse without disposable products. In some cases, the disposable products are cheaper. In other cases, they are more convenient. In most cases, you can't buy products without a ton of disposable plastic, foam, and cardboard packaging. It's hard/extremely expensive to not buy a detached single family home in the US. Public transportation in America sucks and you can't get anywhere without a car. I want to live a world with as close to zero carbon footprint as possible, however, short of sacrificing all my possessions and living like a hermit, I can't do that without collective change. I've taken many steps to minimize it but it feels like the next step I take will have almost no impact while also making the quality of my life significantly worse.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  Well I disagree. Life is better without disposable products. Life is better with less things in general. I use almost no disposable products. I think the disposable products I do use once, would be floss picks and fuel for the car. I even avoid buying trash bags and just reuse grocery bags. My carbon footprint is on the order of a village dweller from a third world country, and I don't even do it because of my carbon footprint, I do it because life is better when it is simpler. I'm not a hermit, I have an active social life and an active life in general. And my life is good, better than it was when I had a bunch of things and lived in an apartment. I don't care about carbon emissions, the collective, any of that, and I am doing vastly more for those causes than 99% of the people that lecture me about them, and my only motivator is living by my standards, being honest with myself. That's all it takes, if you care about these things live like it, if you can't be bothered to live by what you say then quite frankly shut the fuck up about it.
  - massysett 4y ago
    You consume grocery bags, you dispose of trash, you buy floss picks, and you put fuel into a car, and those things alone put you way above a village dweller from a third world country, who buys no floss picks, owns no car, puts no fuel into a car, and does not buy groceries at a market that hands out bags.
    - betwixthewires 4y ago
      I use on the order of a half gallon of gas a month. I'd say a village dweller has a larger carbon footprint in firewood alone. I re-use grocery bags for trash and use no trash bags. I reuse any disposable plastic I can, at least once. That cut's my plastic output roughly in half compared to other people around me. I've taken to using a water pick now, so a bag of those picks takes me maybe a year to use. That's miniscule. I don't know if you've ever been to a third world country, but plastic bags even at small street shops are all the rage. I probably dispose of less plastic than they do. And to top that off, most developing nations don't have the infrastructure to handle it, and you see the bags clogging up waterways and blowing around, it's a big problem. So the direct pollution, even if I used more plastic, doesn't compare because most of the plastic I use goes to a landfill, not the local creek that's used as a sewer.

xmprt 4y ago

Life is worse without disposable products. In some cases, the disposable products are cheaper. In other cases, they are more convenient. In most cases, you can't buy products without a ton of disposable plastic, foam, and cardboard packaging. It's hard/extremely expensive to not buy a detached single family home in the US. Public transportation in America sucks and you can't get anywhere without a car. I want to live a world with as close to zero carbon footprint as possible, however, short of sacrificing all my possessions and living like a hermit, I can't do that without collective change. I've taken many steps to minimize it but it feels like the next step I take will have almost no impact while also making the quality of my life significantly worse.

betwixthewires 4y ago
Well I disagree. Life is better without disposable products. Life is better with less things in general. I use almost no disposable products. I think the disposable products I do use once, would be floss picks and fuel for the car. I even avoid buying trash bags and just reuse grocery bags. My carbon footprint is on the order of a village dweller from a third world country, and I don't even do it because of my carbon footprint, I do it because life is better when it is simpler. I'm not a hermit, I have an active social life and an active life in general. And my life is good, better than it was when I had a bunch of things and lived in an apartment. I don't care about carbon emissions, the collective, any of that, and I am doing vastly more for those causes than 99% of the people that lecture me about them, and my only motivator is living by my standards, being honest with myself. That's all it takes, if you care about these things live like it, if you can't be bothered to live by what you say then quite frankly shut the fuck up about it.
- massysett 4y ago
  You consume grocery bags, you dispose of trash, you buy floss picks, and you put fuel into a car, and those things alone put you way above a village dweller from a third world country, who buys no floss picks, owns no car, puts no fuel into a car, and does not buy groceries at a market that hands out bags.
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
    I use on the order of a half gallon of gas a month. I'd say a village dweller has a larger carbon footprint in firewood alone. I re-use grocery bags for trash and use no trash bags. I reuse any disposable plastic I can, at least once. That cut's my plastic output roughly in half compared to other people around me. I've taken to using a water pick now, so a bag of those picks takes me maybe a year to use. That's miniscule. I don't know if you've ever been to a third world country, but plastic bags even at small street shops are all the rage. I probably dispose of less plastic than they do. And to top that off, most developing nations don't have the infrastructure to handle it, and you see the bags clogging up waterways and blowing around, it's a big problem. So the direct pollution, even if I used more plastic, doesn't compare because most of the plastic I use goes to a landfill, not the local creek that's used as a sewer.