Tag Archives forConsumerism

Two Different Kinds of Healthcare – Part 2

Two Different Kinds of Healthcare - Part 2

Part 2 of 2; Part 1 is here | Approximately a 6 minute read

How did we become dependent on the doctor visit and the prescription? What happened to the ways we cared for our families before modern pharmaceutical medicine?

When the globalized economy replaces local ways of living, people exchange broad skills and community-reliance for specialized career paths.

Instead of sharing time and resources with family and neighbors to meet everybody's needs, people start to work jobs to pay for basics — and also for new commodities that are assumed essential to living a modern life.

Paying for your needs with money means you need not rely on friends and neighbors, so families and communities are no longer so tightly bound together. Instead of relying on themselves and each other, families now rely on corporate providers and outside experts.

Local knowledge fades away and the understanding of natural remedies grows dim, all but replaced by the profitable kind of medicine that only experts know.

Re-examining Freedom

(Approximately a 4 minute read)

Up until around the time we became parents, Alain and I never questioned our assumptions about freedom.

The story of our time says this is normal:

to be chained to debt and to schedules,
to have little or no control over where our food originates,
to be walled off from nature,
and to be more connected to each other via screens than in person.

This post describes how we began to question that story, and to re-examine what freedom means to us.

(This is Part 3 in a Series about our family's journey towards real and green.)

Ditching the Supermarket

Approximately an 8 to 10 minute read

Usually when something seems too good to be true, there's a catch. The supermarket catch is a big one, and multifaceted.

The choice to shop at the supermarket really seems to be a no-brainer. You can get everything you need at one location, including a pre-packaged dinner. You're back in the car before the kids get to melt-down stage, and it’s cheaper there than anywhere else. It seems too good to be true.

In this article we’ll sniff out the real story behind the cheap convenience on the supermarket shelves.

We’ll look at the complex web of connections and consequences that attend our supermarket choices.

And we’ll uncover the reasons why reducing your dependence on supermarkets could be one of the most powerful things you’ll ever do to make a difference – for your own family’s health and for the health and resilience of your local community and the ecosystems you rely on.

Thinking For Yourself

(Approximately a 6 minute read)

Thinking for yourself, to me, means understanding what influences your thoughts, questioning everything, and then making your own informed decisions with consideration for the short and long-term consequences to yourself and other living beings.

Aside from building more autonomy and self-reliance into your life, this kind of thinking will help dismantle the existing growth-at-all-costs system that relies on consumers who don't think for themselves.

An Illusion of Independence

(Approximately a 4 minute read)

In the modern world, independent individuals and nuclear families are artificially sustained by a fossil fuel dependent, growth-at-all-costs system that cannot last.

The alternative that most appeals to me is a world in which we live interdependently – in direct relationship with each other and with the web of life that can sustain us indefinitely, so long as we care for it as the extension of ourselves that it really is.

Growing Up - For Adults

(Approximately a 6 minute read)

Growing up for adults is choosing never to stop growing.

It's what you do if you decide that rather than live a life and think thoughts prescribed by the circumstances of your upbringing and by the prevailing cultural norms, you’re going to live a life designed by YOU.

Expanding Awareness

(A 3 to 4 minute read)

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

The fabric of wholeness that once gave us a sense of purpose and belonging—connecting us into a web of responsibility, relationships and health among family, community and nature—has come undone.

In this post, parenthood prompts me to explore this unraveling, and to begin a search for the solutions to it.

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Tag Archives forConsumerism