Use Less Stuff Day

There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little.

Jackie French Koller

It seems like every day that passes results in us accumulating more and more useless detritus in our lives. The newest tech toys, the newest kitchen gadgets, the newest whatever, all got to be in our hands and there for us to use.

Worse, we tend to use a lot of disposable containers and paper towels and just…well… stuff. All of this adds up on the environment and the world we live in, and Use Less Stuff Day encourages us to take a critical look at these behaviors and do what we can to cut back.

History of Use Less Stuff Day

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy.

Richard Foster

Use Less Stuff Day was established as part of a campaign working to save the environment, and to save the world. Of course, what really needs to be understood is that we’re not saving the world, we’re saving ourselves. The Earth as it sits will spin on its merry way no matter what we do to it, and life on it will just adapt to the new environment we created.

Every year we use literal tons of plastic bottles, we have microbeads from our shampoo and facial scrubs that find their way down to the ocean, we burn our way through massive amounts of resources as we continue to upgrade what we own and throw away last season’s model.

Organizations like Greenpeace have jumped on board to try to encourage us to work to save ourselves, from ourselves, and one of the best ways to handle it is by controlling our consumption of resources.

How to celebrate Use Less Stuff Day

Have you been using plastic bottled water? Get a filter for your tap and bottle it yourself in glass bottles instead. Do you usually stop and get a coffee in the mornings in a disposable cup? Brew yourself a pot at home instead and save some trees.

Check your shampoo and facial cleanser and make sure it doesn’t contain any plastic microbeads, as these wash down to the ocean and build up in massive volumes, and for Pete’s sake grab yourself a bag from home and use it at the grocery instead of using the ones they provide. That’s what Use Less Stuff Day is all about!