The Story of Stuff (and Triangulation of Information)

I just watched Bright Enlightenment's "Story of Stuff", and ended the 20-minute video with wider-open eyes than when I started. Being trapped in this cycle of consumerism feels so natural that I could never realize it as a problem on my own.

Though this trap of buying things and throwing them out seems to be without end, it does not need to remain negative. The writer, Annie Leonard, discusses how we can add hope to this cycle simply by recycling. Doing this lightens the load on the end and the beginning of the cycle: rather than adding mass to currently existing landfills, or removing more resources from nature, we take material from products that consumers are done using, and put them right back into the production part of the cycle. There is a lot of room in this circle of resource-mining, producing, selling, buying, and throwing out, for improvement, and a lot of it involves little things that we can control as consumers.

However, just watching a video of a woman I've never heard of before made me question the validity of some of the information she reported. One thing I couldn't believe was that we spend 3-4 times as many hours shopping as people in Europe. Do we really spend THAT much time at the mall? Well, according to the following sources, we do. The Huffington Post tells us that the average American (as of 2011) spends roughly 43 minutes a day shopping. Becoming Minimalist reports that the average American spends nearly 12 hours a month shopping. The Financial Press Gazette claims roughly the same information, reporting that the average American spends about one week a year shopping.

On Dumpster Diving

Most of the ideas from texts I've been discussing here have involved money, and compared and contrasted situations where would and would not have it. This time, I read Lars Eighner's essay, "On Dumpster Diving", which he wrote when he became homeless in 1988 and began his scavenger lifestyle by diving into dumpsters to find life's necessities.
Eighner's point of view in this essay comes mainly from his time as a homeless person, however he does mentions that he would scavenge around dumpsters even when he was still employed. Though most of the essay is spent explaining what it is like to actually dumpster dive, I feel that this is instrumental in the essay's power. There is such a gaping natural divide in how we interpret life with and without money, that it is shocking to think an employed person could partake in something that is typically reserved for someone without a job or a home, and even call it "surprisingly pleasant". I find this quite refreshing, actually. Eighner's open-mindedness on ways to remove stress from his life through abnormal means eventually translated to a skill that kept him alive for a very long time as he lived on the streets. Despite it coming from a need-based origin, it eventually became something he enjoyed and needed to know how to do. He went from doing it to alleviate the cost of bills, to doing it for the same reason villagers might hunt. I believe that this open-mindedness is crucial to unlocking our potential success, and we should all adopt it.

Short Personal Q&A Session with Steven Akdemir on himself as a writer

                  How did you learn to write, Steven?

English classes have always been a struggle for me, until I took English as a freshman and sophomore in high school. The sheer difficulty and volume (for me, not so much for everyone else) of the work at the time eventually drove me to put every single thing in my mind down onto the paper and just pick out what was good from that, and eventually I just started filtering out the pointless things from my mind before even writing it down.

What kind of writer are you?

I like to think of myself as a sprint-writer. A sprinter in any sport (namely track and swimming) works out by doing shorter, very intense work with a lot of rest, and that is how I write. I can put down a lot of ideas and get a lot done in a very short time, but can't do that for more than 30 minutes or so at a time. Rest is important! 

 

Narrow Your Topic

1. lWhat is the general topic area you are considering?

   I plan on researching the problems excessive waste and landfills cause and possible solutions.

2. Why? Are you truly fascinated/curious/passionate about the topic? (If your answer is no, explain why, and then move on to another topic without answering any more questions.) How did you become interested in this topic?

   I am not passionate about this topic, however, with recent thinking and research, I realized how serious of a threat excessive waste can pose to our planet and way of life.

3. What surprising facts have you gathered so far about your topic? What further questions do you have that you need answered with data? And what sources are you thinking of using?

   I learned that the US alone produces over 220 million tons of waste. I wonder if this includes waste other than solid (liquid, nuclear, etc.)? I will search for annual waste reports from the government to answer this. -

4. Do reasonable people disagree about the topic? (If your answer is no, explain why and then move on to another topic without answering any more questions.) If so, what aspects of the topic to they disagree about? Who disagrees with whom? Name names. Articulate at least three positions you have found.

   Plenty of people disagree with this topic. Republican candidate Donald Trump even said altogether, "Cut the EPA".

   
   

   Republican Governor Bobby Jindal  voted YES on barring a website that was promoting Yucca Mountain (a place to safely store nuclear waste).

   
   

   Democrat Martin O'Malley, however, supported the idea that it is important to take care of waste in America by upgrading water waste treatment plants. 

   
   
   
5. Is the topic researchable in the time you have?

   Definitely.

6. What are some subtopics that have emerged in your research?

   Pollution, the expense of reducing waste, and wasting food.

7. What questions might you pursue in further research, based on what you’ve discovered during preliminary research?

   Perhaps ways to make America more food-efficient, since a majority of the trash we throw out is food.

8. What are some key terms that keep coming up in relation to this topic?

Landfills, Pollution, expensive, solid waste, and wasted food.

Wasted

One of the biggest problems on our planet is one that we rarely encounter firsthand: trash. For a problem that we only personally know to the extent of, "Ugh I gotta take the trash out now", we are truly in a dire situation. The Toxic Actions Center reports that Americans have thrown out 570 billion pounds of solid waste. This is a size we literally cannot fathom. Though we only make up 4% of the world's population, we produce 30% of the world's waste! What could possibly comprise this monstrous amount of trash?
Another statistic that might help us figure out the source of all the waste is from the National Resource Defense Council, which states that Americans throw out $165 billion in food each year. For a country where roughly 16% of its citizens were struggling to afford food for their families just last year, this is a frightening statistic. Just thinking about the amount of land dedicated to holding this wasted food, responsible for a lot of pollution we have as well is a depressing thought.
Luckily for us though, this is a problem we can try to fix with a collective effort. Farm to Freezer offers a very green solution in their article, "Food Waste: We are the Problem and the Solution" in which they mention a company called the Compost Crew which picks up your house's food waste to turn it into compost, which can be used to feed animals or as nutrients for fields that we use to plant crops. This provides such a large outlet to a greener planet while being more efficient with our food and garbage, and with little to no effort on our part aside from actually taking the trash out for the Compost Crew to pick up. And this is only one possible solution to a crisis. This is an opportunity for us to show the world what Americans do best, by coming together and turning a bad situation into a great triumph.

Mo' Money Mo' Problems?

Though this is a cliché phrase, money really cannot buy happiness, and we have statistical proof for it. Based on my praise of Charles Murray’s thought experiments in “What’s so bad about Being Poor?” last week, my satisfaction with David G. Myers’ “The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People” does not come as a surprise. In this piece, Myers (who is a distinguished psychology professor at Hope College) and his department conducted nationwide polls to find out how happy the people of America are and what that happiness could be related to. Most people who took the poll said they consider themselves as “pretty happy”.

This part of the experiment is the most interesting part. When asked whether a little more money would make that person a little happier, they said yes, but they never said it was one of their main dissatisfactions in life. This is surprising, considering many of us often fantasize about living a life of wealth some day. Following this question in the poll, people talked about whether or not they were married, and the strength of faith in their religion and their friendships. The results showed strong correlations between the strength of faith, friendships, and marriages with peoples’ overall happiness.

These results are astounding to me: people aren’t as driven by money as I originally thought. I started thinking about the people in my life and whether I’d choose success over them, then decided to use these results as justification to play Super Smash Brothers with my little brother instead of doing my Calculus homework. Okay maybe Myers’ findings can’t be held true for such a specific instance, but the fact that there is statistical proof correlating happiness to things that money cannot buy is really eye opening, and should act as a notion for us to reconsider the things we prioritize in our lives.
RETHINK THE VALUE OF CASH!!!