A little stream of consciousness one for y'all
I am definitely going to start using y'all more often because I say "you guys" way too much and as a person that barely identifies as a "you guys" themself I should do a better job with my words
This one doesn’t have a “Week Whatever” attached to it, and I’m just going to jump right in. I don’t even want to go back and edit any of it, I’m just going to commit to my Finding Forrester moment and Punch The Keys For God’s Sake until it looks like there are enough words and I can call it a day. And for proof of that concept, that Finding Forrester line really sucks but I’m leaving it in there. Whatever happened to you’re the man now dog anyway.
Last week, if you live in the Northeast, you experienced a few days of unseasonable warmth. Or, as we will probably start calling it as the world continues to crumble around us: normal February weather. So I took advantage of the four beautiful days before the… *checks notes* foot of snow we got on Sunday, and I went outside for more than a few miles for the first time since last year. I think I ended up doing something like 55 miles in the four nice days, and for five of six of those miles I carried an empty glass bottle that was a kombucha I bought at a grocery store. I carried that bottle because what else was I going to do with it until I found a recycling bin. And it really got me thinking about things; things like purpose, and impact, and choices.
Clearly I haven’t sent out one of these newsletters in a while. It’s one of those things about writing for me, that whenever I’m doing worse mentally I always write more but it’s always worse and I end up hating it. So the graveyard of partially written versions of this has started to mount over the last couple of months, and then the versions of this that end up living in my head with sentence fragments in the notes app on my phone. I guess that’s kind of on theme with what I wanted to talk about here: little things add up. Good little things, bad little things, and the things omitted. A week or not writing anything quickly doubles, and then doubles again, and then here we are.
But it goes the other way, like the glass bottle that you recycle instead of just throwing away. Yeah, ultimately will that make any meaningful difference when airlines are flying hundreds of empty planes back and forth during a pandemic? No probably not. I don’t have my own airline so I don’t really get to make the airline level choices, I get to make the Ryan level choices and it’s probably as good a time as any to make better ones. Here are some, in a disjointed list that may or may not pay off:
Oat milk doesn’t suck that bad and it’s only marginally less healthy for me than dairy milk, but is my own personal environmental impact changing from that choice: maybe, I don’t know I should look into that.
Impossible makes chicken nuggets now and they’re only like three times more expensive than dino nuggets. But was I eating dino nuggets? No, not really so maybe saving the times I eat meat for when it can be done ethically and have an actual impact on the quality of the meal can be a net positive. Also if I just buy some, then the grocery store orders more, and then maybe ultimately the price comes down. And if one day they cost the same as dino nuggets it becomes less of a hardship on the people that would prefer to make a different choice but a $7 bag of like… 15 frozen nuggets doesn’t work for them.
Letting someone cross the street even though they didn’t have the right of way is probably actually a net negative because I’m helping to foster their sense of not giving a shit about anyone around them but themselves so maybe I should rethink this bullet point who knows. But maybe we can look at it from the perspective of if they’re having a shit day and a couple of people do a small kindness for them they could have less of a shit day. I can almost guarantee that it won’t be the case that this is what it is, but if I don’t have a somewhat sunny disposition about this I will keep making the less conscientious choice.
Not getting a lid of a straw when I go to get an iced coffee doesn’t actually change anything for the sea turtles because they proved that one wasn’t really happening, but it does actually help the bottom line of my local coffee shop because supply chain issues are making shit like that cost a lot more and they’re not raising their prices.
Speaking of the supply chain, I could just do a better job at getting things from somewhat near to me. Maybe I don’t have to suffer through oat milk if I just get milk from a local dairy. Honestly, someone please tell me the environmental calculus on that one because I don’t really like oat milk very much.
I didn’t expect this to be a bullet point kind of thing and some of them (most of them) aren’t very good, so this is going to be the last one.
I’ve been doing a lotof soul searching this winter, after all the upheaval my life has gone through over the last 16 months while also the world has had a hell of a last 24 months or so. And I think I’ve found an equilibrium as I contemplate my upbringing and my current identity (maybe not the kind of thing to talk about here but mostly it comes down to that I was raised Catholic by my parents despite also being Jewish by blood and named in temple, since the pandemic really put a hold on going to any sort of religious services on either side I have just been doing a lot of reading. also, moving to two completely new places in the span of even months and trying to start my life over in two new cities and then going through a pretty deep depression and a bought with suicidal ideation… it really forces a perspective on the fragility of life that you weren’t expecting. but I digress, this has been a pretty long aside.), life is precious… or maybe that isn’t the best word. Life is… inestimable, we literally cannot assign a value to what we barely understand. And to that end, in the absence of any sort of actual reward or punishment for the life that we live it has started to dawn on me that the most important thing we can do with our time is try to improve the time of everyone around us in any way that we can.
I have a quote that I put in my phone three months ago and it just says:
“if for no other reason, we have a duty to at least try to do the most good we can”
It’s not even a great sentence, but that’s fine I hope. It doesn’t have to be the overwhelming thought that drives every second of our day, but more of an overarching theme that drives the decisions that we make. Whether or not it comes back to us, be it through karmic retribution or what have you, is not the point. The point is that maybe if we lie that way, others around us can live that way, and we can all have a Reason To Stick Around.
Don’t worry, I know this had some tones to it like I was wrapping this weird writing experiment up, but I will be back. I have a draft about parasocial relationships that I want to fix so that way I can tell all of you about my one sided friendship with my favorite podcast, and also I’m trying to lose weight so maybe I’ll get excited about new clothes. Also who knows probably also serious topics, I want this to be something that actually does enrich those that read it in however small of a way that it can.