An old post never posted:

This is an old post from 10/19/07 that I never posted:

Live more Consciously

If you get nothing else from this entry, just go to this game:

A late night conversation, a short email exchange and a lead on an interesting Internet game, and suddenly I feel that I must do a blog entry.

A couple of nights ago Sasha and I were talking and I was telling her how I think that public transportation MUST have a come-back soon. I was making the argument that it needs to happen because we can't simply just keep making all our roads bigger. I had a few other points, but I wasn't doing a very good job at explaining myself. She was saying that it sounded like I was arguing that we return to a more primitive state of existence. I admitted that I kind of was, and we left it alone.

The game at the link above puts my point much more elegantly. You play by answering questions about your daily living habits. The site uses this information to calculate roughly how much of the world's resources you use. The next step that the game takes is very clever, and I like it. It tells you how many earths worth of resources would be needed if everyone in the world used as much "stuff" as you do. My number was somewhere around 3.5 Earths, and I don't even have a car!

This game shows in a very straightforward manner why we're going to need to trade our personal cars for buses and trains and start doing things more close to home. It also begs a big question: What are we all going to do if all the "underdeveloped" nations become "commercialized"? I imagine a seesaw: We (in America) are on the high end right now. We've got all kinds of stuff when and where we want it. If we want to bring quality of life up in other places we're going to have to cut back BIG TIME on how much we use and dispose of. We're going to have to "come down" off our high horses a bit.

Also in the last few days I sent Toph an email saying that I felt our economy was based too much on the continuous increase in population. I was saying that it seems investors are frequently putting their hopes in greater demand for products, services and land. This type of investing encourages and hopes for more people who need and use more stuff. Toph added that at the same time we seem to be automating more and more processes. This cuts jobs and undercuts the above investing plan. Basically, it's a messed paradigm.