People thinking sustainability is easier if single are insensitive, lacking empathy and compassion
I’ve been holding back on posting this post’s idea for months, maybe years. It’s a simple concept, though bold. More importantly, some may find it offensive, but, if so, no more offensive than people are with me.
Over and over people tell me it’s easier to practice sustainability for someone who is single. They suggest I can decide things unilaterally. Lacking hands-on practical experience, they think the hard part of living sustainably is the physical part. They’re wrong. In a culture that, despite the lip service it pays to sustainability, promotes and rewards unsustainability, the hard part is other people. When you live in one culture but practice the behaviors and values of another, countless interactions create friction, every day, often every hour, sometimes every minute.
It feels like swimming upstream and it never goes away. Well, if I succeed and restoring our lost values I refer to in the phrase Do, Leave, Live, Love, then it may go away, maybe after my APPLE PIE amendment passes.
What people who haven’t tried consider hard, like not using a fridge, is simple mechanical problems. Anyone can solve them. Dealing with friction every day—especially coming from people who claim to be supportive, like environmentalists, none of whom that I’ve met try to live sustainably—is much harder.
Unconditional, or at least reliable and consistent, emotional support would make things much easier, like a spouse to come home to after another day full of friction. I have plenty of friends, but not someone to lie next to every night, who vowed to support me through thick and thin. Married people take for granted the most valuable part.
Now the part that isn’t offensive but some might act as if it is. If, say, you’re a parent and you think living more sustainably is easy because the mechanical parts are the challenging parts, then you don’t believe the emotional part is significant. In that case, note what emotions you feel and how intense they are when I suggest something emotionally difficult in your life is easy just because the mechanical part is. To clarify, I’m not proposing the following, just typing the words to help you feel the insensitivity of someone saying something emotionally hard for you is easy. If you think the emotional part isn’t that challenging, you could become much more sustainably just by putting your children up for adoption. You’d make other parents overjoyed. Mechanically, the process isn’t that hard. People would be overjoyed to help the process. Insensitive isn’t it, just to suggest?
Again, I’m not genuinely suggesting it, but how does it feel for someone to suggest somethings is easy because the mechanics aren’t hard? It’s not easier to live more sustainably because I’m single. Couples have huge advantages in ways I don’t, assuming you’re happily married. So do parents.
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