Pro2 Day 72: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (IN THAT SPECIFIC ORDER)

Gonna be a bit of a shorty, my exhaustion for the week is bubbling up on me and I have a VR World-Builders assignment due tonight I haven’t started :upside_down_face:

Today I had a lovely call with @wildcat where we discussed this week’s findings on identity. There were a LOT of amazing points put forward by everyone (here are my notes as proof!), but there was one train of thought I plan to follow up personally….

The train of thought hit the following stops :train::

At the first stop :train:, @assia.k proposed the idea that despite being more technologically advanced today, humans as a species are losing our mastery over social skills such as empathy and decisive decision-making.

At the next stop :train:, @natashakuhn followed up with saying that modern society has lost the idea of community consciousness, where despite being more interconnected than ever, individually we are the most alone because we continue turning inward for social interactions. We rely on the spaces we feel safe and rarely venture out to meet and greet others, because why bother? Technology takes care of most of our needs anyway, not other people. But what about the the needs that technology can’t provide for with an Apple Store mobile app? We are losing control and meaning in our own inner world (love this phrase by the way :heart:).

@susanmclachlan rounded out this discussion with her last stop :train:, the idea that the original indigenous peoples of the old world had it right. They relied on each other as a community and especially the earth as it’s own personified entity, where indigenous people live with the land and take only what they need, not live on the land and take everything they want (hello, Industrial Revolution :wave:). When we lose social skills such as empathy that Assia pointed out, who cares about the earth? I just want to eat my Big Mac, Large Fries, and Diet Soda, wasteful packaging and all. Diet Soda I may point out, I care about myself and my health :upside_down_face:

The personal journey I plan to embark on is creating a character in my world of Tempest Crossing and El Valedor (the VR world I write most of my short stories in) who suffers at the crossroads between modern convenience and impending calamity. Their rise to enlightenment will require self-sacrifice and ridicule for going so out of their way to protect a planet and environment that is quickly losing its own voice, begging for salvation while being slowly strangled to death by the utter wasteful nature of modern humans.

On a similar vein, I was riffing with a friend 1FANCY about how lots of people think recycling makes you an environmentally conscious ally of the earth, and we both lamented how recycling sometimes takes MORE energy to recreate a product then just creating a new one outright. 1FANCY pointed out that the reason the phrase Reduce, Reuse, Recycle was marketed this way was actually in order of effectiveness:

1. If you don’t need something, it will not be created. No energy is expended to create a product.
2. If you need something and are able to use it more than once, no additional energy is needed to create a new product.
3. If you need something, reuse it as many times as possible, but eventually need a new product anyway, you CAN offer up to recycle the product, but this is an unclear balancing act. It may use less energy to recycle a product instead of creating a new one outright, but not always. Cue up my current moral dilemna of continuing to use notebooks and pen versus a whiteboard, wipes, and markers to catch my fleeting and erratic thoughts. What is less wasteful? :cry:

It’s insane to think how an intention so simple was interlaced with just the ordering of words presented. It’s even more insane to realize how many people don’t understand the true meaning of Re(duce)-Re(use)-Re(cycle) :joy:.

Bonus: A Teaser on Next Week’s Wildcat Topic

Next week’s topic deals with communication, and I stumbled upon a video forwarded to my youtube inbox thanks to the A L G O R I T H M:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2PKnJhFsnk&list=WL&index=59 More to come…

@sabweld @michellebasey @sydneydobersteinlarock @ParisaR @dragon @homeroom11