A friend wrote

Your perseverance in not flying around is beyond impressive. 🙂 Are you still not consuming normal packaging?

The longer you live outside a system, the less its goals and values control you. As with fitness, my skills living by my pollution-related values becomes easier all the time.

I responded

I’m no longer “not flying” or avoiding food packaging. I’m living by my values, which means creating adventure, cultural exchange, and what flying and eating brings without polluting the fuck out of the environment and lying to myself that I’m not, or that I’m powerless to do anything about it.

I recommend not being impressed by taking others’ into account in your choices, but viewing it like brushing your teeth — something you do daily, but hardly qualifies as a challenge.

Experience tells me that living by your values improves your life more than eating Twinkies, seeing the Eiffel Tower, or whatever, and that special snowflake excuses about family and work, which sustain the system that you want to change, assuming you do, eats away at your integrity, leadership, self-awareness, and so on, covering it with denial.

Factory-made food and flying look more and more like smoking. I agree they makes you happier in the moment, ignoring the long-term damage, but once you overcome the craving, you find you can create more value without, and then you don’t have to suppress and deny your effect on others.

Oops, did I sound too self-righteous? 🙂 … I wrote more strongly than usual because I sensed the sentiment was worth posting to my blog.

That’s what I wrote him. Here’s some food packaging for you:

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