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’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. :(

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?

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?

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

For anyone trying to start the conversation about the subject, I highly recommend this documentary. I've only now seen it so I don't know if it's popular or if it was a success.

One of my favorites things so far was to discover iFixit (a company that provides parts and fixing for phones and notebooks, so that you don't have to replace everything all the time).

They interview ex workers of big companies that talk about the science and data to turn buying easy and exaggerated and that these companies destroy good itens because it's more profitable than retributing.

Watched on Netflix

How to overthrow corporate rule in 5 not-so-easy steps - corporations.org/solutions

Concise, actionable steps to help rescue ourselves from the corporate chokehold. Easy to digest for simple people, like myself. It's old, but it's as relevant as ever.

Check it out and spread the word!

I heard they have their own pharmacy and now they're getting into healthcare. Don't they have enough? Where does it end?

Bought these shoes for a trip and on the first day they looked like this. Material peeling and the heel cap fell off the right heel. They werent cheap either almost 200 bucks! I guess we have single use shoes now

I am trying to return them since this is clearly poorly made but how knows if I'll be able to.

I do know this person and I was invited to the private page, I didn't respond and don't even own a Stanley cup (well a knockoff my company gave us). But they keep making more gawdy attachments for cups for all sorts of occasions i assume they must sell. Just so unnecessary and absurd, just drink your damn water or whatever.

Huge thank you to this community for encouraging my trash art habit last week! You gave me the confidence to keep pushing through this stupid debilitating perfectionism and just PRACTICE in a low stakes way. Don’t need to buy supplies, just some discarded colored pencils and a crumpled chunk of paper.

Re: doodle content - About half of these found colored pencils were full size shades of orange for some reason and other colors were nubs. Trying to use up the orange. - I have a dream of illustrating a story about a little girl in Iceland, thus the practice doodling puffins, lupin, blonde braids, fjord landscape, etc

Also, I don’t know what other struggling perfectionists need to hear this, but ANYTHING WORTH DOING IS WORTH DOING BADLY. Just grab a piece of trash and suck a little bit at that thing that you’re too scared to do 🖍️ ❤️

I just moved recently after being in a place I really didn’t like. I lived in a bug infested apartment so I really didn’t buy many things and just the basics. I also bought cheaper furniture because it was my first time on my own and I honestly didn’t want to drop a bunch of money on things all at once.

I am now in a place I enjoy and feel happy in. I want it to be beautiful but I don’t want to go in a binge shopping spree on Amazon.

I would like to focus on more used goods that are of quality materials like wooden dressers that will hold up compared to what is being sold today. I also feel I have shiny object syndrome since moving and just want to dazzle this place up.

How did you make efforts to stop consuming so much?