The medical profession has long realised that prevention is better than a cure. For example, it is better to help people quit smoking than to treat lung cancer and it’s better to provide vaccines rather than get diseases like malaria, measles and influenza. We use seat belts, crash helmets and life-jackets to prevent injury. We wear sun … Read more
Double your valuable time by halving your useless stuff It is said that material possessions can be and often are an extension of a person’s ego. It is revealing that a person’s favourite things are not generally the most valuable, the latest or the most innovative but rather those things that have the greatest emotional … Read more
I recently moved house. Prior to the move I decided it would be a great opportunity to reduce the amount of personal stuff I have and my goal was to halve it. I started with clothes. I easily got rid of half. I used the old tenet that if you haven’t used a piece of … Read more
People tend to live life automatically. Our habits, as well as the habits of our culture, often stop us from being ourselves and from living fulfilling lives. We also fill up our attention with attitudes, behaviours and objects that don’t truly matter to us; we are therefore being wasteful and unsustainable. Whilst there may be evolutionary explanations for … Read more
Farmers Markets are evidence that bigger is not better – whereas smaller and simpler are. Farmers markets directly connect producers of food with consumers. These simple, effective transactions unwind the complex system of efficiencies and ‘economies’ which make modern markets unsustainable. Effectiveness versus efficiency The smaller farms are, the greater their yield. This discovery was … Read more
An article in Business Day calls into question what progress really is. The article highlights what progress isn’t: the strain of both parents having to work, rising debt and huge interest payments, increased environmental degradation from houses that are getting bigger and bigger, the stress of job security in an economic system that is based … Read more
The percentage of people in Northern countries calling themselves happy peaked in the 1950s – even though consumption has more than doubled since then. Indeed, there is no consistent correlation between income, consumption and happiness. A global comparison of measures of happiness, in relation to levels of income per capita, indicates that the richer the … Read more