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A Waste-Not Lifestyle: Cultivate Multiple Motivational Streams

What makes you want to reduce waste?

There are loads of valid reasons to choose a lifestyle that utilizes all resources well. Maybe your rationale is an awareness of earth's limited resources or of endangered species threatened by human refuse or habitat loss. Maybe you have financial goals that just aren't being reached, and you want to plug the holes in your revenue stream, spending less and saving more. Maybe you want to be more self reliant and resilient, able to handle the disappearance of a few paychecks into the auto mechanic's pocket or a disruption of SNAP funds due to government shut down. Maybe your friends like to brag about how they saved money and you find the concept inspiring.

Whatever your reason for reducing waste in your household, I am on board with it 100%! There's absolutely no possible bad reason for a Waste-Not Life! But, just as an investment advisor will tell you not to put all your financial eggs in one basket, I'm here to say that in order to craft a life of consistent efficiency, you need to have multiple internal motivators for your thrift. If the only reason for wanting to fully utilize your food dollars is economic necessity, your efficiency will wane when income waxes and in a future reversal you'll find yourself wishing you'd held onto more of your cash in the flush times. And purely moral lifestyle choices, not backed up by practical concerns, are honestly much harder to maintain when life gets more complex; an aversion to adding water bottles to the waste stream becomes incidental when you forgot to fill your Nalgene this morning and you're thirsty.


If you're reading this blog (hi, thanks for hanging around :) ) you're probably at a point in your life when you're motivated to at least think about spending less, wasting less, better utilizing your resources. Maybe you're scared about a coming disruption of income. Maybe you saw a couple of PETA videos on facebook, and while you're not ready to cut meat out of your diet, you're feeling like you should maybe eat less of it and better utilize what you do purchase. How do you ensure that the mood doesn't leave? That this little seed of wisdom you've planted will grow into a lifestyle? The answer is to seek more inspiration, to set goals, and to change your habits. I have written in other posts about setting goals and changing habits (see in particular "Fiscal Fire Drill"), so here I want to encourage you to seek out inspiration. Determine which of the four main Waste-Not Motives is your main source of steam; strengthen your commitment to it; and get excited about one or more of the other motives, too, because as I said before, they're all great!

Motive 1: Resilience and Self-Reliance


This one is the one I always come back to. Because I've hit financial rock bottom more than once, and even as a three year old I wanted to live off the land and be "independing," and I suspect that society's thin veneer of stability could at any moment come into contact with the solvent of war or famine or plague. And I believe that the better my habits of resource utilization, the more likely it is that I and my family will come through hardship comfortably. This has already played out admirably, whether in a winter without enough snow to keep plowing paychecks coming, or in a spring when a job dried up and a new job took a long time to come together. Even as we speak, two paychecks (stop me if I've told you this one) have gone to the auto mechanic, and the next one is going to end up paying bills we're behind on. Maybe then we can get ahead a bit more. But if I was spending $100/week on groceries, or even $60/week like I normally do in the summer, the bank account would be overdrawn; as it is we still have a few hundred just in case.

Motive 2: Financial Goals


What's a life of avoiding rock bottom really worth? In most of the world and throughout human history that's all life has been about for most humans, but the beauty of America is that we don't have to settle for bare survival or even solvency--we can accumulate capital and invest in ourselves and build a better future. Resilience is only one aspect of this; having goals means that when money shows up in the bank account, it has somewhere important to go and doesn't just sizzle away in the heat of that momentary euphoria. Our goal is ultimately to finish fixing up this house and build a beautiful farm for ourselves in the Free State of New Hampshire. There are lots of little goals along the way in order to realize that aim. Your goal could be totally different: retiring at sixty, home ownership, buying a reliable car: wherever you are in terms of goals and current situation, reducing waste in your spending and eating habits will help you realize your dreams.

Motive 3: Societal Concerns


Do pictures of pelicans  with their beaks wrapped shut by bread bags make you cringe? Do you think sloths are adorable and that rainforests should continue to exist if only so they have a place to very slowly wend their way across the canopy while the algea on their fur gets ever greener? Does your anger burn hotter with every soda bottle, cigarette butt and latex glove you pick up from the side of the road? Do you wish you could switch to feeding your family grass fed beef because you've heard such awful things about the lives of feed lot cattle, but fear that your grocery bill would become unmanageable if you took that plunge? If any of these apply to you, you're not alone; there are many people who have a strong moral compulsion to reduce the waste in their part of the societal system. Unfortunately, many people feel they can't afford to buy organic produce or responsibly sourced toilet paper, because those things truly are prohibitively expensive. If this describes you, I encourage you to poke through this blog. Making your own tortillas and bread means a lot less packaging in the landfills, as does buying single large bags of rice instead of a pound at a time. And fully utilizing your grass fed beef, supplemented with plenty of beans and other inexpensive ingredients, can greatly reduce the financial hit that making the switch represents.


Motive 4: Social Concerns


The power of positive peer pressure cannot be underestimated. My facebook posts about my waste-not lifestyle often get a lot of likes, and I gotta say--it's a real motivator to find new ways to save! It also helps keep me accountable when people at church ask me how my plan of not going grocery shopping all winter is working out. I'm not one who willingly admits defeat. So whether it's facebook posts or just a single sympathetic friend with similar tendencies, try to seek out some fiscal accountability and make your new habits of reduced waste a shared experience!

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