Silent
Silent provides the tools for seekers to recognize their path and enables self-reliance for spiritual and magickal growth.
Seekers gain insight from his work and find their inner calm from his ability to listen and help others reflect.
Be a Conscious Consumer
Silent • November 20, 2023
Make it a lifestyle versus an excursion.
Over the coming weeks, you will be bombarded with many shopping requests. I invite you to join me in a thoughtful approach to consumption.
You will be asked to buy nothing or recycle. We live in a heavily consumeristic society where purchases more often rule us than not. Multiple sources sites (National Retail Federation, eCommerce News), Retailers make 30%+ of their annual revenue over the next six weeks.
Consumer spending is 69% of the staggering $23.2 trillion U.S. economy. If you commit to conscious choice, thank you. However, your intentions and righteous action… make no difference. Those choices are not a rounding error of spending in the local economy, let alone the national one. It's essential to recognize that while individual choices matter, they are but a fraction in the grand scheme of the economy. Despite this, it's not about the scale of impact but the intention behind our choices.
I'm not saying you shouldn’t make conscious choices but know that a single purchase or drive to a pick-it-yourself farm will not make the difference you hope.
We can start by lowering the barriers to sustainable living. This includes supporting local businesses and choosing not to impose our beliefs on others, despite our personal commitments to sustainable practices like vegetarianism. Local shopping not only reduces environmental impact but also strengthens community ties.
Embracing local markets, dining at restaurants that source locally, and visiting regional stores and fairs can transform conscious shopping from an occasional activity into a lifestyle. Online, consider platforms that support small businesses. This shift in shopping habits not only benefits the environment but also nourishes local economies.
In the end it is a numbers game.
What can you do? More importantly, what should we all be working towards?
Disagree, but don't be disagreeable.
The first step is to lower the social barrier to sustainability and support local shopping. For example, refusing to eat with friends who do not purchase 100% sustainable groceries makes you insufferable over time. As a vegetarian, I often face the inevitable eye rolls, "but you eat fish…" or "Hey, there are left-over leaves at the bottom of my calamari" comments. I don't compromise, but I do not force my choices on others. Local shops and stores have a lower environmental impact. See "Sustainable Connections."
Routinely support your farmer's markets, dine at restaurants that work with local farms, and shop at regional stores and fairs.
Make it a lifestyle versus an excursion.
If you consciously commit to shopping, please consider using #ShopLocal and #ShopSmall. If you shop online, consider marketplaces that enable small businesses.
Finally, remember the human element in your choices. Deciding not to patronize large retailers or online giants affects the livelihoods of many who may be in your community. Each choice we make sets into motion a series of events, some within our understanding and others beyond it. Let's strive to make choices that we can look back on with pride, knowing they were made with awareness and a sense of responsibility towards our community and planet
Choice sets in motion events known and unknown. I want you to know that you have the satisfaction of knowing that you were aware of the intentions you set forward.
Make ones you are proud to have as memories.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Restructuring sounds operational. It isn't. At the whiteboard, it's clean: new structure, realigned roles, redeployed capital. Logic holds. The math works. But you're the one who has to tell someone who's been with you for eleven years that there's no longer a place for what they do. You're the one who has to walk into a room and say the version of this company you all built together is ending, and here's what comes next. And then you have to go lead the next thing. That's not a strategy problem. That's a threshold. Leaders who get this wrong don't get it wrong because they lacked the right framework. They get it wrong because they're making permanent decisions from a state of depletion, and there was no honest space in between to process what was actually happening to them — not just to the business. Reinvention extracts something from a leader that the org chart doesn't account for. It asks you to hold grief for what's ending while holding conviction for what's being built. Simultaneously. In public. Most leaders do this alone. They call it "staying focused." Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just the only option they can see. Spiritual direction doesn't tell you what to do. It helps you tell the truth about what's real — including what it costs you to do the right thing, and whether the version of yourself making this decision is the one you trust. Not every leadership problem is a strategy problem. Some of them are located inside the person who has to execute the strategy. If you're in a season of hard reset and carrying more than you've named yet — I'm available for a quiet conversation. No pitch.
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