 | By Adam BerryFormer Communications Intern |
Becoming an environmentalist is usually a challenging transition. You start to learn what habits aren’t sustainable and how much change you’re going to have to make in your everyday life. When I started studying environmental science, I felt like everything was being attacked about my lifestyle. In reality, no one was forcing me to do anything, but having the awareness of what I was doing poisoned those old habits. I have found that there’s a learning curve to finding what changes aren’t as strenuous as others. The biggest changes I’ve made have been moving towards minimalism and zero-waste.
Minimalism is a response to consumerism. In high school, I read something that said 90 percent of the things you buy don’t last six months. Whether this is a universal truth or not, it wasn’t far off for me. It’s strange how a few words can lead you to a realization that turns you off to a normal habit in your life. That was the starting point of me being conscience about what I bought. As I’ve started college and half way done with my undergraduate, I’m now conscience of what I let myself have. I caught on to a minimalist movement. The focus of the movement is to have less distractions, not to let the things you own own you, and assigning meaning to people, ideas, and memories rather than things. I admire these benefits to the movement, but they’re more secondary to me. The most important thing to me is not having anything more than what I need and not having things I don’t use or that don’t work for who am I now opposed to when I got these items.
Of course I own things I don’t necessarily need, but I don’t hold as much meaning to them as I used to. This is an example of a change that did take time and was overall relieving. Living with a minimalist mindset has endless benefits. It makes new changes more accessible I think because minimalism has limited your distractions from not living the way you want.