A plastic free 168 hours
I’ve been ruminating about the interesting experiment I alluded to earlier for a while.
So the experiment was this:
I didn’t make any purchases for a full week, a whole 168 hours.. I started the period by buying some essentials at around 7 AM on September 3, and ended it by buying some more essentials at 8 AM the on September 10.
Why I did the experiment:
Pretty simple, I was just spending too much money, at too fast of a rate and I was having trouble saying no to spending. So I kinda figured saying no all of the time would make it easier to say no selectively..
What I found:
Initially I expected it to be difficult to not purchase anything. I actually found it quite easy, with the only real difficulties being the fact that I ran out of soymilk somewhere near Saturday. I just compensated for that by making myself eggs and toast instead of having cereal.
On the other hand I’m kind of amazed at the continual messages our society builds in to buy stuff. Plus it doesn’t help that at the moment I’m a retail bitch, so I also end up looking at shelves and seeing all the new crap that comes out…
I kind of think shopping is the natural evolutionary replacement for gathering and to some extent for hunting. In many ways it feels good to purchase something new. How many times do you hear people bragging about their latest purchase?
The thing is in the actual hunting and gathering days there were logical limits on how much time you could spend hunting, and even after that once gathering became purchasing there were logical limits based on income and need that enforced economics..
However once you had the rise of the credit card, especially in the late 1990s and current varieties, the economic choices and consequences became blurred you can go after the good feeling of shopping without having to balance the consequences for a long long long time..
My new endeavor has been to keep everything balanced. I still use credit cards (two to be exact) but they get paid off every month. But knowing that I have the credit to go out and buy myself a bunch of top of the line apple gear, or even a pimped out set of furniture is a strong draw that needs to be balanced.
Plastic free I am not, but I’m working on learning how to manage the damn stuff…