Dreams

I rarely dream, or rather, I rarely remember my dreams, but last night I was woken up by couples fighting on the sidewalk outside my apartment, so I was able to retain brief snatches of this dream.

I dreamt I was talking to an elderly lady, maybe in her 80s or 90s, and we were discussing how much more disposable waste exists today. For some reason we were talking about KFC and their containers and such, and how their containers used to be made of a sturdy plastic that you could reuse, versus the flimsy plastic of today.

I know, I know. Who would want to reuse stuff that came from KFC??? Have their logo branded everywhere, not quite sure you could scrub all the transfatty grease off the bottom of your new "tupperware." But it was the spirit behind the message that struck me.

We do live in a throwaway society, with "durable" goods that have a shelf life engineered into them, whether through intentional design that sets a clock ticking in your product the minute you start using it [ever wonder why 6-7 years is considered "good" for a laptop? With all those engineering students we graduate each year, surely one of them must have found a way to make sure the whole thing doesn't fall apart on you before 7 years is up. Or wait, maybe they don't want to, because then you wouldn't buy more and they'd eventually be out of a job. Or so the thinking goes. There are other business models that work, people!], or through planned obsolescence where your product becomes outdated and no longer syncs with anybody else [like Microsoft 98 ... you are almost compelled to update to XP/2000/Vista because everybody else is using it], or just through plain marketing that appeals to our side for something new and shiny.

At the rate we're going, and with other countries racing to catch up to our standard of living, just when will we finally realize that this Earth's resources were not intended for such strain? The thing about living in a cyclical ecosystem is that if we break these cycles, if we do not take steps to replenish what we have taken, eventually the system collapses.

We forget that we used to improvise. Make do. You don't always have to buy your way out of a solution with fancy gazebos or one-use-tools; you can improvise, you can create. Necessity is the mother of invention; "create" and "creativity" share the same root. Next time you need something, can you improvise a solution, use your creativity and imagination to use the resources on hand to make do, rather than going out and buying your way to a quick fix that leaves your house even more cluttered? Whether it's the metaphorical KFC containers of my dream or a household appliance, every little thing we do matters.