Meditation instructors often talk about thoughts arising and passing away in consciousness, as if they just come out of nowhere and go to nowhere. I’ve found otherwise. No part of your mind is superfluous. The human brain uses up too much energy for evolution to allow unnecessary parts to persist. Each part does something that helped your ancestors survive and pass their genes on to you. For example, some part[…] Keep reading →

You can imagine all sorts of reasons that made it more possible for me to live with my apartment disconnected from the electric grid than you, but admit it: if you didn’t know I did it, you’d believe it was impossible. Yet today began my seventh month. I’m not saying because I could do it, you can. I learned that because all human beings did it for 300,000 years, I[…] Keep reading →

I started my experiment about two weeks off my electric billing cycle, so about two weeks into my sixth month, I think this bill marks my fifth in a row with zero kilowatt-hours: Every month from the first until this one, I’ve thought I couldn’t go on much longer and expected to give up. But I keep thinking of people displaced from their land for fuel and minerals I don’t[…] Keep reading →

Several friends and readers pointed me to recent long article in the New York Times, What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay by Noah Gallagher Shannon. Does this paragraph describing and quoting the country’s president sound familiar? [Uruguayan President José] Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked[…] Keep reading →

In its August 22 issue, the New Yorker published a piece, Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of Refrigeration: For the developing world, refrigeration is growth. In Rwanda, it could spark an economic transformation. August 22 happened to start my fourth month of my experiment disconnecting my apartment from the electric grid, which is to say 3.93 months longer than I expected to make it. The article was about bringing[…] Keep reading →

I talked to a woman a generation older than me. She told me how she and her husband agreed that they were glad to have lived full lives before humanity faced the environmental tragedies she considers inevitable. Many people have done that calculation where they hear when our situation will get catastrophic. I did it at least a decade ago, when I first read the prediction that there would be[…] Keep reading →

I got my latest Con Ed bill, for August. For many people August is their highest bill, from air conditioning. Well, mine is zero kilowatt-hours for the third month in a row. Today is day 110, about 108 days longer than I thought possible before starting. You probably think you couldn’t do it. I thought I couldn’t either, until I did. Instead, this is Freedom: not hurting people. What else[…] Keep reading →