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//Tag: A life more sustainable
//Anemone
//Greetings from the Southern Highlands and this Eriocapitella hupehensis o/`
Be your best at all times
//It’s World Kindness Day :-*) applying kindness will make you happy and everyone else around you too <3
Days with pelicans
//are just great days :,D
Love my hood
//Spending time by the ocean on the cliffs of Kamay is good for my head and lets me forget all the bs that is going everywhere
Autumn equinox 2025
//Incredibly time has rushed to complete the first quarter already o_0 but much has happened too, and a lot of it was nice o/`
about belonging
//As a third culture kid -raised in a culture other than my parents’- I have never truly felt a sense of belonging to any particular place. It’s a feeling of statelessness, living in society but always as an outsider.
Even after 25 years in Australia, I am deeply grateful and respect my family’s heritage but I don’t belong to any of them. I love living in Australia because of the her sublime nature, the beauty of the Australian bush, the multiculturalism. But I don’t belong here either. I don’t belong anywhere, other than the earth beneath me. And I’ll do my best to protect her the best I can.
New Year New Luck •<
//
Bowral cherry blossoms
//Travelling up the kangaroo valley to see Bowral’s tulips and cherry blossoms was the perfect way to celebrate the spring equinox :*D
gone fishing
//looking forward to more good time spent outside <3
The Miracle Is to Walk on Earth
//The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
This book was originally a series of letters to student workers who were being attacked during wartime to remind them of the essential discipline of following one’s breath to nourish and maintain calm mindfulness, even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances.
save the fig tree
//Please help save the fantastic fig tree outside my house o/`
Add your support here -> Change.org/p/save-the-significant-fig-tree-in-alfred-st-ramsgate-beach-sans-souci-nsw
pretty gotham
//
Sydney’s being really pretty this autumn :,-D I gladly enjoy that every single day
Desiderata
//
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
Max Ehrmann, 1948
Dave’s view on work – or not to
//8 Sep 2020 – David Gräber: ‘To save the world, we’re going to have to stop working’
Writing as part of Jarvis Cocker’s Big Issue takeover before his untimely death in August 2020, David Gräber explains his confusion about why we’d destroy the planet if we don’t have to
“Our society is addicted to work. If there’s anything left and right both seem to agree on, it’s that jobs are good. Everyone should have a job. Work is our badge of moral citizenship. We seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that anyone who isn’t working harder than they would like to be working, at something they don’t enjoy, is a bad, unworthy person. As a result, work comes to absorb ever greater proportions of our energy and time.
Much of this work is entirely pointless. Whole industries (think telemarketers, corporate law, private equity) whole lines of work (middle management, brand strategists, high-level hospital or school administrators, editors of in-house corporate magazines) exist primarily to convince us there is some reason for their existence. Useless work crowds out useful (think of teachers and administrators overwhelmed with paperwork); it’s also almost invariably better compensated. As we’ve seen in lockdown, the more obviously your work benefits other people, the less they pay you.
The system makes no sense. It’s also destroying the planet. If we don’t break ourselves of this addiction quickly we will leave our children and grandchildren to face catastrophes on a scale which will make the current pandemic seem trivial.
If this isn’t obvious, the main reason is we’re constantly encouraged to look at social problems as if they were questions of personal morality. All this work, all the carbon we’re pouring into the atmosphere, must somehow be the result of our consumerism; therefore to stop eating meat or dream of flying off to beach vacations. But this is just wrong. It’s not our pleasures that are destroying the world. It’s our puritanism, our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures. If we want to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working.
Seventy per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide comes from infrastructure: energy, transport, construction. Most of the rest is produced by industry. Meanwhile 37 per cent of British workers feel if their jobs are entirely unnecessary; if they were to vanish tomorrow, the world would not be any the worse off. Simply do the maths. If those workers are right, we could massively reduce climate change just by eliminating bullshit jobs.
So that’s proposal one.
Proposal two: batshit construction. An enormous amount of building today is purely speculative: all over the world, governments collude with the financial sector to create glittering towers that are never occupied, empty office buildings, airports that are never used. Stop doing this. No one will miss them.
If we don’t break ourselves of this addiction quickly we will leave our children and grandchildren to face catastrophes on a scale which will make the current pandemic seem trivial.
Proposal three: planned obsolescence. One of the main reasons we have such high levels of industrial production is that we design everything to break, or to become outmoded and useless in a few years’ time. If you build an iPhone to break in three years you can sell five times as many than if you make it to last 15, but you also use five times the resources, and create five times the pollution. Manufacturers are perfectly capable of making phones (or stockings, or light bulbs) that wouldn’t break; in fact, they actually do – they’re called ‘military grade’. Force them to make military-grade products for everyone. We could cut down greenhouse gas production massively and improve our quality of life.
These three are just for starters. If you think about it, they’re really just common sense. Why destroy the world if you don’t have to?
If addressing them seems unrealistic, we might do well to think hard about what those realities are that seem to be forcing us, as a society, to behave in ways that are literally mad.”
Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It by David Gräber is out now (Penguin, £9.99)
start over
//off to new beginnings and feeling slightly wobbly about it but also slightly confident… hope all collaboration will be enjoyable for everyone involved x
Resettle
//It took me a while but now I’m really glad I’m back
Fitzroy Falls NSW
//Fitzroy Falls in the beautiful Morton National Park
Breaks are good for you
//On leave in my hometown hanging with fam and friends is the best thing ever 😀
Universal Basic Income
//From the Ethics Centre: A quick review of the topic of Universal Basic Income (UBI) – the idea of a regular and liveable payment with no strings attached – no exchange of labour or goods.
The idea of a UBI has deep historical roots. In Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, he writes that instead of punishing a poor person who steals bread, “it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse”.
Over three hundred years later, John Stuart Mill also supported the concept in Principles of Political Economy, arguing that “a certain minimum [income] assigned for subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable of labour or not” would give the poor an opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.
In the 20th century, the UBI gained support from a diverse array of thinkers for very different reasons. Martin Luther King, for instance, saw a guaranteed payment as a way to uphold human rights in the face of poverty, while Milton Friedman understood it as a viable economic alternative to state welfare.
Would a UBI encourage laziness?
Read the answer here: Ethics.org.au/on-ethics/blog/may-2018/ethics-explainer-universal-basic-income