Can you cut 1 Tonne of carbon pollution out of your life?
Take the challengeJeff Wilson lives in a dumpster. When you hear this, your mind might automatically visualise a homeless man, or so I assume. But this is not the case, Jeff chose to live in a dumpster to escape his conventional, consumerist and comfortable lifestyle.
According to the Washington Post, before his dumpster days, he was living in a comfortable, 3,000 square-foot home in Texas, with a walk-in closet, a grand and accessible bathroom and a $1,600 monthly mortgage payment. He worked as a professor at a state university, he commuted one hour to work everyday and had "a matrimonial social arrangement with a fellow professional."
And now, he has none of those things and has never been happier! So what changed?
He received a new job as an associate professor of biological sciences at Huston-Tillotson Univsersity in Austin, and lived in a dumpster on the college campus for a year until he vacated last month.
“As a way of having a better life, I decided to move into a dumpster.”- Jeff Wilson told the Post
He decks out the dumpster pretty well, complete with air-conditioning, a mailbox and false-floor storage space. The challenge was done to prove that people don't need a big home packed with endless possessions to be happy, and they exist!
The immediate benefits were obvious to Wilson, they included lower rent, lower utility payments, less time spent doing chores, shorter commute (90 seconds on foot) and less money spent on unnecessary possessions.
Because of his much smaller living space, Wilson told the post that he spent a lot less time at home. Instead, he hung around on campus ACTUALLY speaking to people and interacting with other human beings.
According to the Washington Post, "There are all these studies that say the broader and deeper your social network is, not only does it create more happiness, but it increases your life span," Wilson said. "In the modern home you can have a cradle to grave experience. Your doula can pop you out in the living room, you can get an MIT education online, order food from outside and then work from home until you die in the living room watching your flat screen TV."
Wilson had to give up almost all of his possessions. Among the few possessions he purchased while living in the dumpster were a garden gnome and a small air conditioning unit, as the dumpster reached scorching hot levels inside.
From his dumpster experiment Wilson also learnt the detriment of noise, and how it keeps us from looking for a meaningful life.
"You can't be aware enough to watch for meaning if you're buried in e-mails or facing a barrage of direct messages on Twitter," he told The Post. "You don't have the bandwidth or the time or the attention to watch. You're looking, but watching is a different exercise."
The dumpster project allows all of us to really think about the stuff we own and what we rely on, or what we THINK we need. If we take a leaf from Professor Dumpster's book then we can see just how little we need to be happy, and that human interaction and experiences are what create purpose... not things.
Images credited to Sarah Natsumi More and Jeff Wilson