Going on a Quest

I’m starting a worm bin soon. Well, I have started a worm bin, because I drilled some holes in a big plastic tub and put some shredded paper goods in it, but there’s no worms in it yet and I’m going to make an order for my new friends in the next week or two now that the frozen tundra hellscape is thawing. It’s one of my resolutions for the year, and actually one that I’ve rolled over from previous years because I didn’t quite have the space or lifestyle to support it. Now I have a basement to put it in, and I eat enough vegetables that I can sustain a worm crew with my scraps!

The point of it is to cut down on the amount of organic material going into my trash. My household is just me and my cat, and we just don’t generate all that much garbage in a week. My trash bag options are to use one “kitchen” sized bag all week, that I might manage to fill up, or several of the little crappy grocery bags (which aren’t supposed to be used here anymore, but I get groceries delivered so there’s not really a better way to handle it, or at least my store hasn’t come up with anything—so I have a secret supply of the dinky bags). If I don’t use the little ones that I have to take out every few days, the big bag gets sort of gross from the potato peels and whatnot. This is, admittedly, not a big deal. But I care! Plus I want worm friends. And I can use their poop in my garden.

Ordering a bucket of live worms on the internet is kind of insane. In the past year or two I’ve really buckled down on using non-Amazon websites for the little bits of online shopping I do, and you can actually see counts for how many orders you’ve made each year—last year when I got into it in earnest, I only made 2 Amazon orders. 2024 I had 16. Previous years I averaged 25-35ish, so a few a month. For this order, I’m wondering if I can make it the only one for the whole year. I had intended to stop completely, but then I came into a couple of gift cards that didn’t have any better options, and it’s free money, so oh well. I’m buying worms online.

Way down the rabbit wormhole, what really bothers me when I begrudgingly click Confirm (or Buy Now or whatever it is these days) is knowing that some people are doing the same thing every day for total garbage. Flimsy clothes made out of plastic, dipped in lead for flavor before they get wrapped in more plastic and shipped overseas. Doodads, also plastic. Books to weigh down their shelves so they won’t grow legs and go anywhere. I love reading, but the library costs free fiddy and I can get ebooks and audiobooks in the middle of the night and I never have to load them into boxes to move house. I know y’all are not reading all those books.

There are all kinds of numbers available for how much stuff Amazon sells in a year by weight, monetary value, CO2 emissions, and so on. We all know it’s a crapton. Half my job is carrying the boxes full of it on people’s porches and hearing them pop out 3 seconds later because they got the delivery notification and it’s all they’ve been thinking about all day. I hear “What did I even order? …Oh, I think I know what this is…” with alarming frequency. How are we hitting the Buy button so thoughtlessly while we’re wearing our winter gear indoors?

The stats I think about all the time are these two:

50-60% of people can’t afford a $1,000 emergency (this link has a ton of interesting data, but that stat comes out every year and it’s usually right around 60%).

The average savings rate in the US is around 5%, and only spiked to record highs in 2020 because a certain something happened that made people hesitate before blowing all their discretionary income on trinkets. Obviously a $1,000 emergency is less than 5% of the average household income, but I suspect the savings rate includes people making the employer match on their retirement plans (which a shocking number of people still don’t do!).

I feel like an alien when I drop three boxes of mystery crap on somebody’s stoop and think about these things. How have we decided that consumption is more important than meaning? How do we claw ourselves out of the constant online shopping pit? How are we supposed to have non-shopping hobbies without buying hobby supplies???

My ideas:

I need to find a volunteering outlet. I’ve been fooling around looking up different organizations around here, and it’s time to actually do something. Or several things. Quitting is free. I made plenty of excuses to put it off last year, and I did have some things going on that made it hard to find time. But spring is right around the corner, and I’ve got my ducks in a row, and I gotta get out of the house more.

I already use my library’s online services a lot, but I may check out the programming or just go sit myself down at a table to write there for a change of pace. Libraries have all kinds of non-book stuff to lend these days and I don’t even know what I’m missing out on! Plus, there are several universities a couple train stops away and they’ve got buildings for the public to fart around in too.

Walking around. This is harder in other places, but I can strike out in any direction and get to something interesting. I might start picking up trash too, because it’s a major issue in Philly.

I’ve gone on long enough, but I’m certainly not done, so we’ll continue this later.

Homework for you:

Delete your Amazon account. Haha, just kidding, unless…? But as a start, take a look in the order history tab and see how many orders you’ve made each year. Maybe go through the year with the most orders and see how much of the stuff you still own and actually use. If you really want to hurt your own feelings, calculate the money you spent on stuff you got rid of within a year. Plug that into a compounding interest calculator or just browse the flights or hotel stays you could’ve paid for instead. Ouchhh.

If you have a 401(k) or similar retirement plan through your employer, for the love of God, make sure you’re contributing enough to get the full match from them. It is part of your compensation. If you’re not putting in that 5%, you are giving your boss a 5% discount on your time.

Do you have a library card? You need a library card. Now log in and poke around at the services they offer—ebooks, audiobooks, music streaming, tools, seeds, classes, museum and zoo and arboretum passes, newspapers, movies…you don’t know what’s there until you look.