Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [95]
Journalists and wine critics Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher of The Wall Street Journal recommend that you quit waiting for some occasion special enough for that most special bottle onto which you've been holding for years: “We invented Open That Bottle Night [OTBN] for a simple reason: All of us, no matter how big or small our wine collections, have that single bottle of wine we simply can never bear to open. Maybe it's from Grandpa's cellar or a trip to Italy or a wedding. We're always going to open it on a special occasion, but no occasion is ever special enough. So it sits. And sits. Then, at some point, we decide we should have opened it years ago and now it's bad anyway, so there's no reason to open it, which gives us an excuse to hang onto it for a few more decades. So OTBN—which is now always the last Saturday in February—offers a great opportunity to prepare a special meal, open the bottle and savor the memories.”
If you have to, you can wait until February, but wouldn't tonight be good enough for a special meal with those closest to you and a toast to the past and the future over a glass of something fine?
When it comes to the good stuff, you deserve to be enjoying even the nonperishables sooner. It’s actually better for the world if you upgrade even the long-lasting things. Well-made things are more sustainable than cheap ones.
As Bruce Sterling put it: “Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays. Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact. Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke anguished spasms of denial. … Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely ‘non-materialistic.’ There is nothing more ‘materialistic’ than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck.”
“Better for the world” and “nicer to you” is a great combination. Cult of Less creator and engineer Kelly Sutton has seen a big benefit to his very minimalist approach: “Now every purchase I make comes with a second-guess: Do I really need this? Like really, really need this? In the past year, ‘impulse buy’ has left my vocabulary. I found myself buying fewer things, but also nicer things. … Every possession also requires a certain amount of upkeep, and I find myself with more time and less possessional guilt.”
Let the bad choices go and give yourself just the things you’ll constantly use with pleasure.
Symptom #39: Killing Time
Solution #39: Living in the Present
I know you all have ideas sitting in the back of your head; go out and start it. I mean, there's no reason not to. Don't be afraid.
—Will Smidlein, teen entrepreneur
Don’t live the life of having to make the time pass
Don’t spend your time hanging on for tomorrow, clockwatching, and merely enduring. Do what you love whenever you can. Laugh long and hard at anyone who says you’re done living and that it’s time to buckle down to “real life,” by which they mean horrible dullness.
There is absolutely no excuse for failing to notice repeatedly that existence is bloody brilliant! Fantastic things are going on all the time, even in the worst of times, if you only watch for them.
Discard passivity!
Don't just consume some corporate product; make things! Support your fellow creators. I love to go to the Maker Faire festival of do-it-yourself arts, crafts, and technology to see the range of things that people are doing because it pleases them to do so. General geekery and personal passion everywhere you look. What interests you? What gives you deep enjoyment? Look around tonight and think about those projects you started but never finished or always wanted to do.
Instead of turning on the TV or otherwise blobbing out after work this