Amazon: save pennies, ruin your community. My neighborhood is filled with delivery trucks taking up public space delivering tons of stuff daily, followed by sanitation trucks hauling tons of garbage. Meanwhile, there are no produce stores almost anywhere in the city. People shopping online wreck communities. First, they mostly buy less-than-useless things that will end up poisoning landfills. Click any result from a search on “most popular purchase on amazon”[…] Keep reading →

About a month ago, the core organizational team behind the workshop I lead and its alumni community had our quarterly meeting. I shared my vision and mission. I thought everyone knew it, but when I finished, they said, “You have to share this message with the alumni community.” I was wrong: everyone didn’t know it. It was my responsibility to share it. I didn’t want to impose my views on[…] Keep reading →

Many new restaurants have few to no tables. Single-use packaging costs less than rent for the space for tables, a dishwasher, people to wash dishes, etc. They don’t have to pay for cleaning anything. We taxpayers pay those costs. We suffer their pollution we didn’t consent to. Since the packaging takes resources to make, in polluting processes, and the waste poisons the rest of us, they destroy life, liberty, and[…] Keep reading →

Can you imagine living without money? Humans lived without money for 250,000 years, so it’s not necessary for life. Money seems like an invention on par with the big ones, like fire, the wheel, writing, and language. Right off the bat, Jo shares how her life before choosing to live without money was stressful, with less freedom or free time. If you thought having more money would give you more[…] Keep reading →

There’s nothing like Hands-On Practical Experience. People who haven’t tried keep telling me various ways of hurting people are impossible, that people wouldn’t go for them. Yet, simply trying reveals ever more little advances. Once I learned to find it joyful and rewarding to reduce suffering instead of a burden or chore, as mainstream global teaches, I find ever more ways to create joy and find reward. Two examples I[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo: Many of us know something of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was a psychology experiment in 1971 where a Stanford psychologist led a team that turned the basement of a building into a temporary prison-like space. They recruited two dozen local people whom they randomly assigned to play guards and prisoners for twelve days.[…] Keep reading →

Ryan shares his experience approaching people to share in his joy. The task is not easy anywhere, least of all the Bronx, where he doesn’t live but was visiting. Do people in the big city want to hear why some guy is walking around looking at trees and the sky? They wouldn’t know he was bird watching until he told them. Do you think they’d welcome him or consider some[…] Keep reading →

I keep my working spaces clean, including clearing my desktop every evening before going to sleep. I try to keep files off my computer desktop too. Working on my next book has me referring to and learning from the Declaration of Independence and Constitution so often, I decided to put them on my computer desktop. Many sites online carry their full texts, but I couldn’t find any with a file[…] Keep reading →

I was walking home from the food coop past NYU and saw this truck. They’re all over Manhattan, basically limousines. Rich people travel by giant truck, I guess as some luxury. It was sitting there not moving. The passengers weren’t in it but it wasn’t empty. A guy in a suit—the driver—was sitting in it, engine idling, I presume with the air conditioning on because it was around 90 F[…] Keep reading →