A Fine Balance
I have often wondered what balance means and how does one achieves it. This balance between needs and wants has made me question my own life choices. The never-ending cycle of our collective consumption as a race has toppled this balance, the ripples effects of which can be felt and seen if we slow down to assess our planet's health. Overconsumption is a sickness that is making our planet sick too.
This new way of being is not just about learning to love oneself but also about acting sustainably. ‘Sustainability’ and ‘green’ are buzz words for corporations and humans who, like me, want a better world without questioning its direct correlation to individual action. In the documentary Planet of Humans, Michale Moore reveals how corporations are using these terms to gaslight consumers. Everything that is supposedly ‘green’ is being combusted by a fossil fuel before it reaches us. Tesla’s electric cars are produced in grids that work on fossil fuels, and burning trees produce biomass. These sustainable claims vanish if you torch their life cycles with the inquiry.
Over the last few years, and specifically the last few months, I have been trying to consume less plastic. This shows on my kitchen shelf; there is hardly any plastic-covered junk food in my kitchen, I'm not too fond of air-conditioning, and I am trying as much as I can to procure food from local businesses around my house. On hot sweltering days, I do sip into a cold can of Coca-Cola or Cambodia beer. But I am more conscious about supply chains that either accumulate flying miles or need artificial preservatives to ensure that products outlive the journey they have to make to get to me.
But it is exactly this that keeps me from living more mindfully in all aspects of my life. The narrative that if I am doing 3 things right, I can continue to slip on the other is extremely self-deceiving. This moral license I give myself every time I forgo plastic in some other way can only take me so far.
Malcolm Gladwell reflects on this in his podcast ‘The Revisionist History’ through the research being done by Daniel Effron, a social psychologist. He says, “One of Effron’s first experiments in moral licensing was in 2009. He surveys people who publicly self-identify as supporters of Barack Obama for president. He finds that supporting a black politician doesn’t always signal that you’re a racially open person who is inclined to be progressive in other areas. It can also have the opposite effect; it can free you up to go back to your old racist ways because you’ve proven to the world what a good person you are. And that’s what he discovers. A significant chunk of the people who supported Barack Obama was then more likely, at least in the experiment, to express racially questionable opinions.”
‘Going green’ in many ways fits into my romantic notion of a better world, but it dies every time I choose to consume something that will add to the debris suffocating our planet. In ways more than one by foregoing plastics somewhere else, I have been allowing it to creep back into my life through other ways. I do not want to sound like a radical because it is impossible to give up on plastics, but the key is to reduce. This reduction can only happen when I clearly demarcate my consumption based on necessity and wants. By reducing wants, I will automatically pull the plug on consumption patterns that ingest plastic into the atmosphere. It is really that simple.