How to Give a Shit
A practical, uber-modern family journey to social good, mindfulness, and giving all the damns.
Big changes can feel like a video buffering — we can get that same disjointed feeling where the display is frozen or glitchy and hasn't quite caught up to the audio. Then suddenly the two are back in sync again.
Other times change can happen in an instant. We realize immediately with some events that life is different on the other side of a moment.
Motherhood has been a change of the first kind. I don’t realize the little course corrections that happen throughout each day, week, or even month. They happen in a blur that feels like running in water, but a blink and 15 months later and I feel radically more communal, conscious, and empathetic than I started.
The awakening that began with pregnancy for me started a domino effect of exponentially increasing social awareness which has left me a primarily organic whole foods vegan minimalist, Democratic Socialist, idealist, urban hippie activist. And that’s a fucking annoying sentence, isn't it? That obnoxious string of things is nearly synonymous with hipster — the parody of enlightened, yet angsty youngsters who are considered tragically empathetic, but in reality are primarily only tragically consumerist — always donning the latest duds from Urban Outfitters (not that I haven't shopped there) and ironically maintaining entire record collections in new “Mid-Century Modern” furniture. It’s the same generation rapidly losing its religion as I suspect many are experiencing a shared sense of disillusionment and subsequent “unplugging from the Matrix” (if we want to be dramatic, and we almost always do). This sometimes annoyingly idyllic generation of which both my husband and I are a part has also brought armchair activism to the masses and has given new life to the hippie movement toward natural food, sustainability, and environmental awareness.
Some hipsters are acting on this newfound social consciousness. But within the culture, there’s a tendency to be conscious as a trendy sort of thing — and perhaps the cost of trendiness is small if it eventually leads toward social good. But since the hipster movement also includes an unnatural obsession with bacon (Uh…doy. It’s delicious.) and the meat industry is a front runner for destroying this beautiful planet we all share, it’s easy to see how watching Food, Inc. and giving a damn about the environment have only permeated so far into our actions. The unfortunate truth of our culture of convenience is: Inertia has set us up to be part of the problem. If you're like me, you grew up believing babies were just born in hospitals — that’s just how it is. If you're like me, you grew up believing the Bible is the absolute, literal word of God — because it just is. And if you're like me, you grew up eating at restaurants at least half the time and microwaving meals another 30% of the time and never learned to cook as a result. We just didn't know better. But now we do. There’s something particularly numbing about having social consciousness be part of your daily vernacular and yet not part of your daily action. Hypocrisy breeds apathy with awesome skills like how to lie to yourself and how to choose selectively supportive media.
You might be one of those people. I know I am. I make many small efforts to live with mindfulness. I volunteer for a few organizations with some regularity, I try to buy consciously (yet I have made more than zero purchases from H&M and other fast fashion retailers this year), and I try most of all to treat all people with dignity and respect. But I don’t make a difference. Not really. It doesn't help that I'm not really part of a community. Communities — like the social good communities around a few religions and many nonprofit organizations — can allow you to assume the group’s achievements as your own. If you're part of a community focused on increasing funding for STEM Education and a new budget is released with more funding, whether your group was responsible or not, you get some vicarious sense of accomplishment along with your general victory that you were part of the solution. On your own, you're left to string together the sad macaroni necklace that is your philanthropy. A donation here, a bag of clothes there, a meal for that guy, a few dollars for animal rescue, a handful of hours volunteering and what does it all mean?
15 months ago, my son was born at home. There’s a before and an after not just the arrival of my son, but his actual birth as well. It was the first time I had ever broken the inertia completely absorbed by fear, yet armed with science. It was the first time I became aware of my mortality (and that of those I love) without God. Since losing my religion, I find knowledge, experience and intuition are my critical thinking comforts and the decision for me to birth at home was based on all the science I could absorb in ten months. And when it came time to call the midwife, my Yankee, city family and I were changed by the experience. For me, it was an empowering one. However, in my research, I was disturbed by the dogma surrounding the way we birth and that this deeply intimate experience for women has become politically charged. Why has birth become such a polarizing, even taboo topic of conversation? And the answer in the case of birth is the same as with many things — money. Follow the money.
In the case of birth, money has led the medical industrial complex to betray their primary oath — to do no harm. Fear of malpractice claims, the rejection of natural medicine, and the high cost of giving birth in hospitals are leading to a relationship of intrinsic conflict between expecting mothers and their practitioners — but many women don’t know this. Many women don’t know that inductions highly increase your chances of having a C-Section. Many women don’t know about the benefits of breastfeeding, despite it being such a natural, common-sense practice, because of misinformation campaigns that were run aimed at our mothers and grandmothers — for money.
But this isn't about birth. Or, at least, it isn't just about birth. It’s about information and the way we use it. For me, birth was the first time I put my practical, science-based knowledge to work and found that it was best for us to “go natural.” Then came the unraveling of everything about the way we participate in “the commons.” The way we consume and discard. The food we eat (and waste), the cigarettes I cling to, and the fast fashion industry we are guilty of supporting all have to go. Drastic change is necessary — in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, these huge problems of inequality, the enslavement of the developing world, and wasteful consumption can’t continue. It’s a blight on our landscape. It’s a shame we're writing today in the history books our children and grandchildren will read — the way America and the rest of the developed world knew better, but didn’t do better.
And the further down the rabbit hole you go, the more it becomes clear that you can change things — even small things — and make a huge impact. You can dramatically increase your chance of living a long, healthy life by changing the way you eat and exercise. You can dramatically reduce the amount of waste your family produces. You can dramatically reduce the number of unethical brands you support with your money. It’s in your power. And it’s in ours.
We've taken on a new credo: Know better, do better.
“Do the best you can do
until you know better.
Then when you
know better, do better.”
-Maya Angelou
My family is on a harrowing path to clean up the way we live — including the way we eat, consume, and participate in the commons. If you want to go along for the ride with two rational skeptics and a baby trying to do life differently, that’s what we'll be sharing here for the next few weeks: How to give a shit.
Our goal is to transparently and hopefully hilariously share the information that changes our minds and calls us to change as a result. And regardless of what you think of the information we share, we're trying to participate in something truly American: Freedom of informed choice.
