Life in 2020: Moving towards sustainable production and less consumption

2020 has been a wild and sobering year.

It has made me aware of things that I have taken for granted for years. From thinking that I have a really difficult and challenging life in the past to consider myself privileged and blessed for all the things I have had at my disposal and the luxuries I have been enjoying my ENTIRE life without acknowledging and being grateful.

Eating the finest cuisines when I wanted, drinking exorbitant wines, and then hear my friends argue that the cheese we get in India is so much worse than what you get from this particular shop in Italy, Order food at any point of time and still complain how it took 45 minutes to deliver a pizza at 3:00 am.

Everything was just an app download away until it was not.

When this lockdown started, I was not sure what to expect and I was hoping to get a break from hectic work and travel schedule I had for the last three months. 10 days into lockdown and I was unable to manage everything by myself and meet the basic need of making three meals a day and probably because I have been used to live my life without actually doing any chores. It acted as a catalyst to change the lifestyle I was living.

I have been aware of my lifestyle and was cutting down on a lot of unsustainable products and services for quite some time but I never experienced and contemplated the number of objects I use daily, the amount of waste generated from my consumption, and the resources that go into fulfilling it.

Fast forward two and a half months after evaluating all the pros and cons, I moved to a farm which is now also an R&D center for PhyFarm ( more about it in separate posts). It has been a week since I moved here and I now finally have a stable internet connection today to get back to work from Monday.

Living here gives me a lot of time to work on my personal goals as well ( Climate Change ) which also aligns with my work at PhyFarm. We started PhyFarm with a mission to create a sustainable and efficient food system and it has evolved from being a professional aspiration to a personal lifestyle choice. Initiatives on sustainability and organizations talking about it are increasing, which is good but not good enough. Ask anyone who has worked on it they will know how hard it is to implement in real life to even make the slightest change in various systems of production we have as of now.

The fastest way to bring that change is to make progress from both end consumption and production. There are so many organization and individuals working towards it and it gives me hope for the future and one particular movement which can have the biggest impact on the consumption of resources and everyone can contribute to it is the Zero Waste Movement and an image to summarize my thoughts on it.

No one knows the future but one can always take small steps to create a future they want. This blog is one small step to spread the word on things I wish to see happening in the future.