The pandemic handed us all a super easy win on doing something about climate change by forcing a large chunk of us to (temporarily, it seems) stop sitting in our cars twice a day. Instant reduction in the amount of CO2 we’re producing. It’s not 100% of the solution, but it’s not nothing, and a year in, most of us had adapted just fine (I’d argue, most who could WFH, prospered, seeing a lot more benefit than negative).
But nah - let’s get back in our cars, waste time at the beginning and end of every day, spend more money on coffees and lunch, and breathe in the cubicle goodness because, fuck it - that’s the way we’ve always done it.
Do you know what I learned during the pandemic? CO2 emissions by PEOPLE are a rounding number. The pandemic hit and CO2 barely changed.
It’s industry and corporations and farms that output like 80 % of all CO2, yet we’re made to believe it’s “on us” to make a change.
It’s the same with recycling, it’s pushed like we’re saving the planet recycling some bottles while a paper plant will pollute the equivalent of 200,000 homes…
You are totally right, industry is the big polluter, but I think it’s important to also realize: what we consume drives industry to produce polluting goods, the only reason they pollute is to produce stuff to sell us, if we want them to stop polluting, “part” of the solution is to stop buying their stuff.
There is some truth to that, but you also need to be reminded that companies will look at profit before they look at environmental impact.
Yes, producing goods pollutes, but it could pollute way less if they changed the way they produce.
But corporations won’t do that because it cuts into their profit.
So it is much cheaper to blame the consumers for wanting products.
(Products they try to convince you to buy through marketing I might add)
Also fixing rent by not making it necessary to live in the same city you work in giving everyone more choices
Hell, you don’t even have to live in the same COUNTRY! My brother teaches “at” a school in Greenland from his apartment in Denmark, only going to Greenland (flight paid by the school, of course) a couple months a year.
"How DARE my employees use WFH to take the edge off the negative aspects of being at work! I’m canceling WFH! They make me so mad I need to… have a tumbler of bourbon… from the fully stocked bar… that I keep prominently displayed in my office… for ‘client meetings’… next to my office chaise lounge.
sips
I feel like the last hard worker left. Tsk tsk tsk."
15 minutes of just sitting in the calm quiet is proven to reduce stress hormones in the body by helping regulate the hypothalamic-pituatary-adrenal (HPA) pathway. 15 minutes of quiet every day can work wonders on your mental and physical health. Deactivating the HPA pathway reduces the stress hormones in your system, which reduces every bodily systems stress reaction. This can help your mood, obviously. Anxiety, depression, irritability, all responses to stress. It can also help with autoimmune issues, though. Stress hormones cause your immune system to go into overdrive because your body is expecting to have to deal with a wound as a potential source of infection. Lowering those stress hormones has been demonstrated to help with autoimmune disorders like lupus, fibromyalgia, psoriasis and others. It’s said that we operate in two modes: fight or flight, or rest and digest. When you’re stressed, your body moves resources away from your digestive system. It’s basically saying “We dont have time to digest food right now, we gotta run away from this bear”. If you’re stressed all the time, you’re always running your digestive system inefficiently. So regulating the HPA pathway has been correlated with improvements in shit like Crohn’s, colitis, IBS and other digestive issues. Constant stress boosts your heart rate, constricts your blood vessels and increases your blood pressure, so regulating the HPA pathway can lead to decreases in the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Thing about sitting quietly in a calm space is that a lot of us, myself included, will fill that space with thoughts that just cause more stress. Luckily for us anxious folk, meditation exists and is quite literally the culmination of millennia of smart, dedicated people trying to solve this exact problem. There are tons of resources online where you can learn how, many of them are free. They’ll teach you how to detach from stressful thoughts and situations, how to stop agonizing over what’s already done and being terrified of what could happen and just acknowledge what’s going on right now. Try it. If I’m totally wrong and you hate it you’re only out 15 minutes.
Tldr - stress hormones make your whole body go into emergency mode. Emergency mode is good during emergencies, but not good all the time. Bringing your body out of emergency mode when there’s not actually an emergency helps pretty much every part of you be healthier. You can bring your body out of emergency mode with 15 minutes of sitting quietly in a calm space. Meditation can help you establish that calm space.
Is it the quiet that does or the time to meditate? I have found in my own experience I can calm down and rest with music that is aggressive and chaotic. I think for me I find it very soothing to find the structure in the chaos.
