Living sustainably is easy. All humans did for most of human history. Animals do it. Living differently than everyone else can be hard, even when you live how they want. People push hard against people who remind them they aren’t living by their values. Alison, the host of This Sustainable Life: Untethered, wrote to ask me how I handled the challenge around the time she wrote a post, The Diary[…] Keep reading →

If you receive an email from me or browse my home page, you see I note I haven’t filled a load of trash since 2019 and last flew in 2016. I have also picked up litter daily since 2017. People tell me it sets too high a bar for people. They tell me people feel like they can’t catch up so why start. Recently I realized why I say it:[…] Keep reading →

I share the numbers below because people react to my cooking as if I’ve sprouted a third arm or somehow magically have extra time or money. Never mind that home cooking saves time and money, look at how much people spend on these polluting activities, much of which I suspect they themselves would say doesn’t improve their lives. I’d bet they’d say much of it worsens their lives. Meanwhile, I[…] Keep reading →

People spout bullshit that they don’t have time or money for home-cooking, daily exercise, or to sleep enough. I’m sure you’re different, but I’ll bring up numbers on things people spend time and money on. From: Average Time Spent Daily on Social Media (Latest 2022 Data) On average, we spend 144 minutes, or two hours and twenty-four minutes, on social media but this number is just that – an average.[…] Keep reading →

I mop as part of my six-day exercise cycle. Part of my ritual before my lifting days is to mop the floors, so every six days I mop the whole apartment. More accurately, I shifted from mopping to getting on my hands and knees and cleaning with a sponge. The ritual reminds me of monks, who seem to take on tasks with a measure of quality that focus the mind[…] Keep reading →

I last emptied my trash on December 25, 2019. My current load is close to full, though if I squeeze it, it compresses. That is, it doesn’t weigh much. I consider it too much so I hope to impose less waste on future generations next time. I’ll wait until at least January 1 to empty it so I can say I didn’t empty a load in two consecutive calendar years.[…] Keep reading →

An auspicious beginning to my second decade of my calisthenics sidcha: my heels reached the ground in one of my stretches, the downward dog. I did yoga regularly for a few years before starting burpees. Yoga means a lot of downward dogs. In all those years, my heels never touched the ground while doing them. At best I reached something like this: This morning my heels reached the ground. I[…] Keep reading →

I just finished my second set today of twice-daily burpee-based calisthenics. Normally, I do my second set in the evening, but since I started the habit on December 22, 2011 and today is December 21, 2021, today completes my first decade. I already finished my first decade of publishing blog posts, nearing 5,000. Here are all of them. 20 percent of the time has been on a single load of[…] Keep reading →

This morning as I walked to Washington Square Park to pick up litter, then to drop off my food scraps for compost in Union Square, I saw someone on the steps of a brownstone, curled up, fiddling with something. I’d seen that look before, of someone concealing doing drugs. Sometimes they pull their shirt or jacket over their heads. When not that many people are around, they just do the[…] Keep reading →