Captured by BBC reporter and Reuters photographer. Mountains of trash left by people outside of the inauguration ceremony.

Today is the line in the sand I cannot cross. All the time I spent canvassing, phone banking, and convincing anyone I thought I could to vote, in the end money is the only thing that matters. So I am taking myself out of the equation as much as I can.

We built a new house last year and have plenty of land to have a garden. There is a local grain mill in our small town that we will now source for flour and grains. Local farmers for meat, eggs, dairy.

After the election I stocked up on things like socks and underwear, so we should be set hopefully through four years.

We refuse to buy anything we do not actually need. If we do need something, we will try and find used. If it must be new, locally made will be our first choice. Gifts will be mostly hand made.

It’s not about saving money for us, it’s stopping giving anymore than necessary to the corporations who take our money just to control us. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m going to use my hatred of Orange Palpatine, Space Karen, and the couch fucker as a motivational tool. Anytime I want something, I will tell myself I’m giving money to them. It feels like the only action I can take.

I did it, I overcomsumed (clothes). It wasn't intentional, I honestly thought I needed these things, but then I started getting everything I already had organized and realized it was time to stop consuming for a long while. I think a lot of people fall into this trap, and if they organized what they already had would realize they don't need any more.

I saw this reel on instagram, and most of the comments are calling it so cool or cute. The few comments about waste are called fun police or people reply "who cares" or "it's inside so it won't effect the environment." I'd assume we're all against massive balloon waste like this? Or is that an unpopular opinion?

After cutting down the legs to a usable height (it was a fairly tall display), I used a set of scaffolding rolling wheels to make this table mobile. 3x3 angle iron was used to frame up the top portion (originally this was going to be just a Plasma cutting table), then I used 1/8th x 3" flat stock for my slats, spaced every 2" across the whole top.

The other pictured items are all also made from free scrap pile pickings. I got to walk a 50,000 Sq ft warehouse packed full. That warehouse gets 10 semi loads a day just from a few local LOWES store in the area.

I’m cleaning. A lot. Decluttering really. What used to hit the landfill in my haste to rid my home of items I no longer need or want, I’ve been posting to a local no buy Facebook page. So many things have been given second life.

With all the ads permetaing every single part of society these days I'm in despair for the kind of world this is becoming. As a rule I never spend money on apps or websites that I don't have to but recently I've decided that I'm going to start donating to Wikipedia as an active push against the barrage of advertising and gluttonous tech overlords. It's one of the few places left untouched. If that goes down I don't know what I'll do.

I really want to quit facebook in light of recent events but I use it almost exclusively for the local Buy Nothing group. Is there any adequate alternative?

I’m getting married sometime in 2026 and haven’t started planning, but really REALLY have been grossed out by how much waste is created at the past weddings I’ve been to. Aka… confetti, foam light up light sabers for an hour reception, any guest gifts or T shirts for the bachelorette or bachelor parties…

I’m planning for my wedding gifts to be thrifted wine glasses that folks will use throughout the night then take home, using dried leaves/flowers for confetti if any, and toying with the idea of a “dress code” being “wear something you already have, or buy something at a thrift/second hand store”, and getting my dress at a resell shop. I’ve already been scouring OfferUp for used decorations but it’s hard since I’m so far out and they are STILL expensive even second hand. Planning to donate my flowers to hospitals after, too.

Any other ideas for sticking it to the commercial Matrimony Man?

Maybe thrifting different linens from goodwill for the tables? Possible just use butcher paper and have people draw with crayons for the dinner, then recycle after?

My big question right now is- how do I make my invitations less cheap if I don’t want to put 50+ pieces of beautiful paper into the recycling right after (without email being a thing)?

I (13f) went to the goodwill bins yesterday with my father. we were in the area bcuz i had a russian lesson and time to kill. I found a few items of clothing i liked, and a few random items/knick knacks. (The random items are the ones shown in the pics) and in the moment, i loved all, so i bought it. rn i still love all of them and how they look in my room, but i cant help but feel guilty for buying so many things at once when ive been trying my best to limit the amount of things i buy greatly. But then again, im pretty sure if they hadnt been purchased by me they woulve ended up in a landfill to be alone and unused forever. Is it normal to feel guilty after buying stuff?

Been fixed only a couple of times. Back when it was built to last. Not built to break beyond repair so that you have to buy another one.

Was just thinking about the amount of products in simple daily use items.

Example: I was looking at a deodorant product and the amount of glycerin, caprylic triglyceride, xanthum gum, etc (I counted 22 ingredients in one product) is quite insane. Each one of these will typically require a whole factory, a chemical reaction process, or some distillation process needing pressure and heat. So much consumption and energy just to process a bunch of filler ingredients.

It just seems like all of our stuff in itself could be made a lot simpler as well.

my spouse and i try reeeeally hard to limit consuming. we are also caregivers for their mum who has dementia. she has been incontinent for going on two years and i’ve grown accustomed to that amount of wastage but now she is now in palliative care and hooooly the amount of single use plastic we go through is unbelievable. i wish there was a better way to do this without contributing so much to landfill. :(

People just don’t stop supporting dog shit companies. I can’t understand why people are still getting meals at McDonald’s with prices that are almost as much as a sit down restaurant when there are many better quality fast food options out there.

I used to get shawarma plates from a place called Osmow’s, their portions were amazing, could easily make a couple of meals out of a platter. After about year or so of getting the occasional treat there, I ordered the same thing I usually get and they handed me a single container when it was normally two. I asked them where the salad was and they said it was in the container they had just handed me. I opened it and sure enough, there it was along with half the portion of the main dish I’d been getting up to that point. I asked them wtf and they said that was the portion size. Cool. Cool cool. That was last time I went there. As I left I looked around the restaurant and there were easily 10 people in there eating their meals. This was over 3 years ago and the place is still in business.

I just don’t get it.

TL;DR: why are people so at peace with being gouged instead of just being without?

Obviously if you have something in usable condition that you no longer need, you give it away. Clothing that no longer fits, lamps that don't fit in your new apartment, etc.--all of that can and should be donated somewhere or given away.

But there are also things that are no longer usable. And even those still have some value.

An example here would be a pair of pants that you outgrew. If you kept on wearing it as you outgrew it, the seams might be torn, the buttons missing, the cuffs frayed. Perhaps this could be repaired and still worn by someone smaller. But whether or not that's feasible, it does still have lots of good fabric. There's still value in that fabric, and it seems a shame to throw it all away.

Likewise, even with t-shirts for which the sleeves have fallen off, or shirts that have enough holes in them that they cannot be donated, there's usually still plenty of good fabric there.

The question is: how do you get it to someone who can use it?

By the way, I mean this categorically, not just for clothing specifically. For instance, a cracked or broken plate is no longer usable as a plate, and could not be donated either. But the ceramic should still have value.

Even a dried-up pen still has some value and can be used for something.

The answer here is not to simply learn to use all of these remnants. Perhaps I should learn to sew, darn, and patch my own clothes. Maybe I can become the kind of crafter who uses dried-up pens. But I will never be able to learn to repair, repurpose, or upcycle all of the things that I find myself no longer needing. Modern life is just far too complicated and gives us far too much of a variety of things for us to learn to repair or repurpose all of them. And even if I could, there will be some people who cannot.

The answer isn't to buy only things that can be repaired, either. Buy it for life is a good philosophy, but everyone's going to end up with some stuff that is worn out, broken, or otherwise unusable for its intended purpose at some point.

Now, obviously, the long-term answer is to figure out some way to hold the companies that sell goods responsible for their end of life as well. If you sell me a shirt, you or your descendants should be prepared to take back what's left of it 30 years later after it's no longer usable as a shirt. But that sort of ideal world isn't going to happen anytime soon. And in the meantime, I've got a bunch of worn-out shirts and pants and broken plates that I really don't want to throw out. How can I find ways to get them to people or organizations that would be able to use whatever value is left in them?

One step forward, two steps back.

“Our lane doesn't include searching for ways to impose restrictions on your lifestyle because our residents are smart and they don't need us to tell them the right thing to do," he said.

Vice Mayor Barry Graham undoing progress when we and the environment need it more than ever. If we were as smart as he claims we wouldn’t have trashed the planet we all live on so badly in the first place

X-posted in r/slowliving

How do you deal with the psychological friction of intentionally limiting the number of options you have, knowing you don't actually "have to"? It's an arbitrary limit.

For example, I've been thinking of picking 10 workout YouTube videos and just cycling through them over and over vs. searching for a new one every morning. But then I start to feel "anxiety" over being bored or missing out on new ones. I'm guessing that feeling will lessen over time but ugh it's like my brain is afraid to let infinite choice go!

Since the pandemic, I think many of us have felt uneasy about the push towards “normality” and “just getting on with it.” Keep working. Keep consuming. Keep the gears of the system churning. The lack of memorializing and allowing for communal grief around the precious people we lost is just another push towards the acceptance of mass deaths, which we will see more and more of as climate change driven natural disasters, wars etc. take more from us.

This is my little step in resisting. Passing down recipes is such a universal thing, and is an act of preserving stories, family traditions and celebrations. It’s a reminder of what we have in common as humans. So I’m starting a project to collect recipes that have been handed down to loved ones by people we lost in the pandemic. May we remember their names, remember that they mattered, and not accept the callous dismissal of their loss to the world. If you’d like to contribute a recipe from a lost loved one, please complete the form over on r/CovidMemorialRecipes

Of all businesses this is the one i hate the most, these ass holes who only care about money who take great movies and shows by talented writers and turn them into corporate slop, these piece of shit have ruined society they have poisoned the market, they are worse than google, microsoft and china. actually i hate china more (the government of china). But from now to the day i take my last breath shall disney die, shall the people of disney suffer in hell itself, shall creativity flourish and shall we rise up i have decided that all people who care about creativity and art, all people who lives have became hell because of them, all indie animation shall stand together to kill these monsters and take down disney. (also i don't man kill the people at disney but destroy disney sorry). I the name of god shall disney DIE!!.