Disgruntled Life Coach Podcast

Episode Nine – Curb Your Expanding Waste

June 03, 2021 Coach Raoul Season 1 Episode 9
Disgruntled Life Coach Podcast
Episode Nine – Curb Your Expanding Waste
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode of the Disgruntled Life Coach Podcast, we’ll talk about how the unhappiness of waste. We’ll start off with quotations, as usual, then the main segment will focus on scaling down your waste profile, and we’ll finish off with a Disgruntled Nugget – a little piece of wisdom you can take with you, or not, I don’t care. Also thx to Audionautix and Partners In Rhyme for the music and sound effects.

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Welcome to the Disgruntled Life Coach podcast. It's time we all acknowledged the fact that governments are okay with poor being poor and encourage publicly run food banks to pick up their slack - it's tough work and it shouldn't be this way, but while it is, support your food bank. They can use money always to buy the staples they need, and take all kinds of donations. Call your local food bank to ask, specifically, how you can help, and then help. Do this one thing today please.

Today we're going to talk about waste - what it means to waste and why it's holding you back. You might think that being wasteful has no impact on you, but I'm going to show you why you're wrong and how to get you back on track. Firstly though, let’s get an adequate definition of waste and we'll go through the tunnel of wasteful quotations to give you some context.

According to the dictionary, as a verb it means "use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose." As a noun, it can be "material that is not wanted; the unusable remains or byproducts of something." But it's more than that, and, believe it or not, being wasteful can stop you from living your best disgruntled life. Let's look at how thinkers from history talk about waste.

Nicolas Chamfort, an 18th century French Playwright, writer, secretary to Louis XVI's sister, and of the influential Jacobin club that promoted the French revolution, had this to say: "The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed." I guess you had to be there to feel the laughter of what is now called the Reign of Terror that he promoted, but he's not wrong. We'll talk more about this later when we discuss wasted opportunities.

Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, a Canadian cognitive psychologist, linguist, author and an advocate of evolutionary psychology and, in 2004, was also named in Time magazine's “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today”. Well la-dee-friggin dah, there's more in that sentence then in my entire resume. Anyway, he had this to say about the darkness of humans: "No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be." Aside from the bleakness in that, the thing that I want you to take away is that wastefulness has a cost, often to others, and we should be aware of this fact.

Finally, Victor Hugo was a 19th century French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He best known for writing gargantuan books about hunchbacks and bread thieves. His contribution to the conversation says: "Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time." This wasting of time is familiar to all of us, and it's one of the reasons why you're listening to this podcast, Michael.

So we can look at waste from a lot of perspectives, in can be a noun and a verb, David, and it can be passive and active, but we're going to break it down to, wasting time, wasting opportunities, and wasting resources. All three are more complex than they sound, except time, wasting time is wasting time. Like this sentence. So let's get into it.

Clearly, I'm making arbitrary choices here in what is a waste of time and what is not. If watching television brings you personal joy or creates value in your life, great. But if watching television is something you're doing as an avoidance device - something to do instead of other items on your list that are more important, especially something that, if left not done, will have negative consequences to you or others, than you're wasting time. Arguing with idiot anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers will never change their minds, so doing that is a waste of your time on clown stilts. But, as mentioned already, I can't define these time-wasters for every person, or in every situation. I just used these examples because I'm so fucking tired of television and idiots who run my province, but wasting time is real, and you'll have to make that determination for yourself. We'll talk about that later, I promise.

The second on my list is called opportunities, but it might not mean what you think it means, and I apologize if I get a bit new age-y on you here. We're not necessarily talking about business or advancement opportunities, although don't waste those. What I'm trying to contextualize here is how to live your best disgruntled life, and to do that you have to see opportunities around you in a more metaphysical way. By that, I mean opportunities could include a chance to give back to your community or make someone else's day better, and if you can't recognize them, they're gone and you've wasted them. Sadly, these are things that, research has shown, can actually be a positive force in your life. In fact, a 2017 article published in the journal Nature Communications titled "A neural link between generosity and happiness" states, in part: "A commitment to generous behaviour can increase happiness and thereby provide a neural mechanism that links commitment-induced generosity to happiness." Listen to my episode on the Gold-plated rule for a better deep dive into this, and we'll circle around to this as well.

Finally, we have wasted resources. This is a big one because it could be a million things, and it usually is. Throwing away items and packaging that are usable or recyclable, and buying more than you need in an attempt to feel more complete - yeah, like that ever worked for you – is a bad combination of over-consumption juxtaposed with a complete lack of understanding of what resources are used within every acquisition or purchase. For great context, look no further than Nobel literary great John Steinbeck who said “American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.” This is actually true of the world in general, not just the U.S., but we owe them for setting the bar so high, I guess.

So, now that we know what kind of waste we're dealing with, let's look at ways you can approach this and, maybe, if you stop wasting your friggin' days, Stephane, we can find a way through the maze to a better life. That's what life coaches are for, I've been told. Let's get started.

Time wasting is a difficult thing to define and correct, especially now when wasting time is an approved coping mechanism to survive. But while just listening to music may seem wasteful to some, exposure to art in all it's forms has been shown to improve mood and brain function. Same goes for visual art, drama, literature, really any art. So, what I'm really talking about here is time spent not knowing what you're doing next. If you listen to Episode Four - Tools Rush In - we talked about this. Poor planning or no planning means you waste time that you never get back, and then rush around to try to get that time back, but you never can. It's gone forever like that nasty, explosive burp at your neighbours barbecue. This is the key: time is finite and it goes by incredibly fast. I'm not saying every day should be filled with tasks in a spreadsheet. I'm saying if you plan properly, avoid rushing around, and get the important things done, you'll have MORE time to recharge.

Opportunities is also difficult to define in terms of this pod episode, but it really comes down to awareness and, to a slightly lesser degree, empathy. If there's one thing that you know from this podcast it’s that empathy is key to your better life. The opportunities I'm talking about here can be as small as holding the door open for someone with armfuls of groceries. And it can be big like deciding that inheritance you just got would best be used by a youth organization to keep at-risk youth engaged and optimistic. Your fucking surround-sound home theatre and Tesla status symbol - which wont make you happy anyway - can wait. Opportunity is constantly knocking, and it wants you to give something back to the universe. And don't scramble to take credit for these good deeds, just do them and move on - the good part will catch up to you in its own good time.

Finally, can we just all agree we don't need so much shit in our lives. Just the packing boxes we've used in the past year could build a cardboard tower to Mars. Well, no, I don't know how much cardboard that would take, but just look around you. Every purchase on fucking Amazon costs resources, money, time, and wastes half of it in shipping and packaging, just so you could have the patio light system of your dreams. Really? Let's not forget the human resources you're using, other humans who work like slaves half way around the world just so you can have pretty lights at such a low price.

Pulitzer prize winning author Edward Humes, in his book called "Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash" puts it this way:
“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.” So what's the solution? Are you ready? Buy less. Use the things you own longer. Stop trying to buy status, earn it through opportunities. Plan meals and stop throwing food away. Farmers are heroes feeding all of us, every day, every meal - don't take their work for granted by wasting food. Happiness is not owning more, it's being more. Have more empathy, not more things. That's all.

Okay, so that's it for this episode. As always, I'll leave you with a Disgruntled nugget in a second, but first I want to thank you for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast, I’m on all the major platforms platforms, and please visit www.disgruntledlifecoach.ca for all my podcasts – www, it’s only three stupid letters. Please also follow me on twitter @lifedisgruntled, there's a link on my website and, if you DM me your address, I’ll send you a sticker or two. Also, if you like what you've heard today, tell your friends. If you think this is ridiculous, still, tell your friends, I mean how hard is that. 

Disgruntled Nugget
It has been said that "knowledge is power", but the knowledge that your battery is dead won't start you car. Better to believe what Einstein said "Any fool can know. The point is to understand." But that only works if you know in the first place that you don't understand what you think you know. It's more like what Confucius said "real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." So what we need is  stronger, higher knowledge of our ignorance so we don't know what we can't understand, or something, whatever ...

Again, thanks for listening, and thanks also to Audionautix and Partners in Rhyme for music and sound FX, thanks again to Neatnik for visuals, and thanks for your patience - see you in two weeks, or not, whatever...