Something happened yesterday that reminded me of this little snippet of my book No Impact Man which comes out in September and which you can pre-order from Amazon, BN.Com, and online from your local independent bookseller: I watched a video of Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun, discussing the reaction of New York citizens when the […]
Purpose and Meaning
Why living No Impact contributes to happiness
I have a college professor friend and today he conjectured as to the reasons why choosing a life with less impact contributed to my family’s happiness during the No Impact year. He said that important contributors to happiness are: Meaning: I got a lot of satisfaction out of living a life that seemed connected to […]
Is “green business” personally satisfying?
I was at a conference that largely centered on green business last week. This was a gathering of wonderful people–social entrepreneurs–who cared about the environment and various social causes. They wanted to advance their values and express their care for the world through business. It was wonderful and inspiring. But here’s the funny thing. I […]
Growing your own food, Japanese style
First thing, wanted to remind you that I also twitter here and I friend my readers on Facebook here. Onwards… As you may know, Japan has lower per capita carbon emissions than any Western European country. For that reason, I asked my friend, Sean Saskamoto, who recently moved to Japan and who blogs at I’d […]
Does life have meaning?
In Tolstoy’s A Confession (the autobiographical account of his crisis of meaning I wrote about the other day), he argues that, if what we seek to achieve does not endure after our death, then our life itself has no meaning. As Tolstoy’s reasoning goes, since everything he strived for in life–riches, fame, pleasure–would ultimately disappear […]
What is true progress?
Because of my stance on consumption, I get accused sometimes of being anti-progress. This is interesting to me, because I am very pro-progress. I want so much progress. It’s just that I’m not sure that the societally accepted definition of progress is correct. Heading in the same direction we’ve been heading for the past 100 […]
The difference between hell and heaven
My dentist Gary is one of my best friends, and I visited his office today. I joked with him, “Why do you have to make your living by tearing my mouth apart?” Actually, he’s great at his job, but that’s another story (email me if you’re looking for a great New York dentist). The point […]
The ridiculousness of relying on “market indicators” to run our planet
We’ve all heard talk of the efficiency of the free market. You know, as the idea goes, companies will only do what customer-citizens want them to do, because if they don’t, customers will sanction the companies by not buying from them. There are all sorts of reasons why this doesn’t work, of course, including the […]