I have spent too much time buying new clothes lately. It wasn’t because I needed them but because my look needed to be right. I am speaking specifically all the activities around my renewal party that we had. For my re-proposal, I was instructed to wear a white flowing shirt with jeans, which I didn’t have. I had to get a new wardrobe to wear to the party as well.

I don’t want to make myself sound better than I am but the truth is I have gotten too fat for much of my current wardrobe. So, the reality is I have been sucking it in for the past year as well as enduring bulging shirt buttons. Getting some new cloths was a opportunity to breath a little (and get fatter). I have probably gained 30 pounds since I started working again. When I was delivering packages for Amazon, I was logging 30,000 steps a day. Now, I am sedentary and I also generally hate exercise. I like a eat and drink too.

So, gaining weight is a me problem. If I really wanted to change that, I could get serious about it and I should before it is too late. I have unfortunately always been a yo-yo person. I am not naturally skinny and I gain weight until I can’t believe where I am at and set about changing that.

But I have also spent too much time in various malls lately. I shudder when I go in. I see a lot of people wasting away their lives looking for things to buy. We colloquially call it shopping. It is not just buying things we don’t need but it is spending money we don’t have which I think is more damaging. What makes me shudder is rampant consumerism for the sake of entertainment.

I do pretty well financially, but I think about the waste and resources that it takes to make things that we buy just to make us feel good about ourselves. With the rash of visibility in homeless, I see piles of trash that just follows their movements. It makes me think that items like clothing are literally disposable. I would say that it is so ubiquitous and inexpensive that it is really valueless.

Recently, I took the whole back of the car to the donation center. Yes, it was clothes my kids outgrew and that I have no fault. But is was also unwanted bedding because the color palette changed, same with the drapery of the whole house. It was many items of clothing for whatever reason. It was decorations that were used a couple of years and now no longer have earned our fancy.

The whole thing just kind of makes me sick. I know that these organizations are cherry picking out of our donations. That means the rest of it just gets thrown away. So while we fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing something good, the net result is still the same, waste.

I suppose that I would be remiss that it is not just home goods or clothing but a lot of our lives. Our cars get too expensive to fix, appliances have dated colors, TVs are not flat enough, curved enough or large enough and don’t have places to plug in more things that aren’t flashy enough. We are so busy looking to buy things that are enough today that we only have enough time to consume things made in factories to save time so we can look to buy more things.

Clearly, we are not all going to be in a position to grow our own olive trees and make our own oil or thresh our own wheat to make flour so that we can bake our daily loaves of bread. But surely chicken fingers and diet soda is not a proper human diet. In fact, it is a diet that actually adds vitamins an minerals to deliver any sort of nutrition at all.

End Your Programming Routine: This probably warrants more work on what should be done to lesson the environmental impact and be good stewards of the land. We live in a modern world with modern convenience. We can eat world cuisine because the ingredients are available. I can purchase an entire set of clothes in 30 minutes instead of waiting days for it to be made, that’s a good thing in my book. Let’s just make wise and future thinking choices.