Sustainability?

Sustainability is a nice, feel-good word. We do a little and we feel good we did something for the planet, or some such.

Pause. Answer this.

What’s the opposite of sustainable?

Unsustainable. Right?

If your position/role isn’t sustainable, you’d be applying elsewhere real quick.

If your finances aren’t you’re looking at bankruptcy.

Basically, it’ll stop working. It won’t continue. It’ll go bust. It’ll STOP.

That is what we’re up against, and trying to fix — and the little half hearted measures towards being “more sustainable” won’t do much more than slow things down a teeny little bit, unless we make big changes.

It’s far more useful to think of “how can I/the kids/we/my home/my water/my food/my job/my air/etc” be more resilient.

Short term resilience is often done through hoarding. It runs out. Something else has to kick in once that happens.

Long term resilience is in regenerative, circular processes and loops that do not leave “much lesser waste”, even. That’s already broken thinking and merely buys time. It’s dumb, on the long term scale.

In whatever you do, think long term resilience, not sustainability. Else it is essentially unsustainable. It’s a binary. “More” or “Less” doesn’t really cut it.