The generative possibilities of "no"
Plus: Next retreat date and registration!
Though I don’t have TikTok, my sources say there’s a new trend there: #underconsumptioncore, which tries to highlight how less can be more.
I am, obviously, hugely here for it, since over the years that’s a philosophy I’ve shouted from the rooftops of this newsletter and beyond. Let’s share, let’s recirculate, let’s repair and restore, let’s abandon our carts and go look at some flowers. Let’s celebrate libraries (modern miracles) and buy nothing groups and all the creativity and skills that can give something a new life. Let’s prioritize experiences over things, people over stuff, memories over mementoes.
But sometimes in beating the drum of less less less, I think I’m guilty of overemphasizing the no of it all. Because no, while useful and important, doesn’t scream fun.
Every no, though, can also contain a yes. Multiple yeses, usually. Saying no to whatever tempting product is stalking you on the internet is also saying yes to more money in your bank account, which can mean greater economic security; yes to healthier ecosystems unimpacted by the creation, distribution, and end-of-life of the product; yes to physical space in your home.
A no is not just denying yourself something: it’s saying an enthusiastic yes to other things.
One of my favourite reads of the year so far is Kate J. Neville’s Going to Seed: Essays of Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work, and I appreciated her nuanced explorations of giving something up:
To meet the ecological and social challenges of our time, philosopher Kate Soper suggests that we need to embrace an “alternate hedonism,” where limiting consumption and accumulation is experienced not as self-sacrifice but as pleasure. An enriched life can arise from certain forms of restraint. . . .
We often have an idea of sacrifice that is onerous and heavy, involving self-denial for some greater purpose. Consider any practice steeped in restriction and, often, abstraction — accepting limits is so often presented as a diminishment of life, a gnawing hunger and attenuation of possibility. Posed as difficult and depressing, these acts tend to be seen as something for those who view rewards as occurring only in an afterlife, another realm, or a different order. But sacrifice is rarely so straightforward a form of loss; giving up one thing often involves gaining another. We can follow more expansive ideas about sacrifice, those that upend a simple account of denial, hardship, and penury. We are always sacrificing something, explain environmental politics scholars Michael Maniates and John Mayer: our time, energy, or attention; our space, environment, or freedom. But in the process, they continue, we are always gaining something else, whether money and material goods, or prestige, relationships, and experiences. . . . Chosen sacrifice can be fulfilling, providing a source of purpose and meaning. It allows us to make an offering, of sorts, to something beyond ourselves and, in return, feel not loss but gain.
This principle also extends to how we fill our time. For someone who cares about sustainability, I sure have a tendency to treat my life as a site for extraction. I am a planner, a relentless optimizer, a checklist junkie. And while this can have some benefits, it is also the capitalist brainwashing of productivity, the glorification of the hustle and grind, which can be especially severe for those in marginalized groups who must do more for less.
To counter this strip-mining-of-self impulse, I’ve been focusing lately on trying to create space. This can be as basic as resisting the call of a podcast or an audiobook while walking, deleting social media for a day, taking the less efficient way home, or prioritizing play, whatever that looks like. This is basic, but not easy, and goes against so much of the deeply internalized more-is-more programming of our world.
At one climate retreat, an attendee shared her practice of carving out a period each week for herself that she could not schedule or plan (even under the auspices of enjoyment or self-care), but that required her instead to tune in to what she wanted in the moment. She was modelling not only holding space, but listening to her needs and desires, something we so often override in our quest for optimization. At Plum Village, the famous monastery started by Thích Nhất Hạnh, every Monday is “Lazy Day”: the monks are freed from their demanding schedules to honour their own needs. Because it turns out even monks need a bit of freedom.
But this kind of space and rest isn’t just self-serving indulgence. Back to Neville:
Perhaps the idleness of at least some of us sometimes — whether holding back, or slowing down, or pausing, or fiddling on a summer afternoon — constitutes an offering to each other and to the besieged world that still sustains us and our neighbours of many species. If we reconsider our furious action, slow down our production and consumption and extraction, perhaps others might regain the space for their own labours. We might orient ourselves differently within the world.
We might orient ourselves differently within the world. I can’t think of a more important calling in these fraught times, to challenge existing narratives and trajectories and instead orient ourselves.
Neville explains,
Being constantly occupied, whether in waged labour or in commercialized forms of leisure, leaves no space to form our own values and views and ethical judgements, and so leaves us ill-equipped to contribute to a collective social and political life. Instead, we are too harried to mount any challenge to inequity, servility, creeping authoritarianism or even its fully fledged version. Idleness, then, might be a crucial emancipatory project.
This all reminds me of Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry, which facilitates art installations, workshops, and community gatherings that prioritize rest as a form of resistance to capitalism and white supremacy. As a Black woman, Hersey is keenly aware of how these exploitative systems, both external and internalized, strip us of our humanity and also are difficult to challenge. In her book Rest Is Resistance, she writes of having found some essential peace just by letting her mind wander as she looked out the window on her commute. Of the restorative possibility in taking even a minute to close your eyes at your desk. We may be in the thrall of these exploitative systems, but our bodies can be liberated and transformed into sites of resistance. Hersey urges,
Rest is a portal. Silence is a pillow. Sabbath our lifeline. Pausing our compass. Go get your own healing. Be disruptive. Push back. Slow down. Take a nap.
Space, then, can be radical. First for you, then for the world.
I think most of us want more space: in our homes, our schedules, our buzzing brains. And while we can sometimes get that by addition — which usually means more work to buy us time to rest from waged or unwaged labour — let’s not underestimate the elegant simplicity of subtraction. A no can be generative, generous, liberating. No can bring forth new worlds.
Speaking of space . . .
The Climate Feelings Retreat Returns This October
One of the reasons I created the Climate Feelings Retreat was to make space: allowing busy adults to step away from the daily churn and focus on something else that matters to them. We keep our phones stashed away, we spend time talking and listening and reflecting, we walk in the woods, we do gentle yoga under a black walnut tree. This is a space for connection, rest, recalibrating the self and its relationship to the world. And speaking of space, it’s in a very special location, thanks to our generous hosts, with the warmest and most welcoming vibes of any place I’ve ever been.
This year, it’s happening after the hurly burly of late-summer chaos: Saturday, October 19. We’ll lean into changing leaves, warm beverages, and all the fall catharsis of “All Too Well.” (The greatest Taylor Swift song, and once upon a time I literally co-wrote the book on her, so trust me.)
Parting Wisdom
Two things for you today because I write less often and encounter so many good things:
#1 I loved Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World, which was clear-eyed, data-driven, and often hopeful. (I’ve relied heavily on the work of Ritchie and her colleagues at Our World in Data in many issues of this newsletter, and Ritchie has her own Substack, Sustainability by the Numbers.) For me, one of the most useful insights of the book came from her colleague Max Rosen:
The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.
This kind of nonbinary “yes and” thinking is essential. Multiple things are true, and our task is to hold that complexity and find a place to act within it.
#2 Longtime readers will know I’m always down to read something about hope, and for her newsletter Ann Friedman organized and synthesized over 3,000 reader submissions on how they find hope. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s one of my favourite sections:
Go outside! Hope is sunlit. It is tiny green shoots after a hard cold winter. Tulips. Fresh vegetables. The mountains over the water on a sunny day. The baby squirrel we saw today. This warm breeze blowing across our face. Nature absorbs us. Disappearing into the forest. Listening to the birds. Thinking about the cosmos. Sticking our hands in the earth, even if it’s just a pot on a balcony. Making a habitat in our tiny yard, watching every year as more creatures take refuge there. Seeds still grow and turn into tomatoes even when the world feels like it’s falling apart. The first warm day after a Midwestern winter shows you: The sun always comes back. Fungi. Perennials. The path of totality. Life and the universe are not supposed to be static.
If this post resonated, I’d love to hear from you! This newsletter is free and is powered by human connection across virtual spaces. The best thing you can do to sustain its existence is leave a comment, drop me a note, or share it with friends.
Wishing you space and rest in these mid-summer days,
Jen
Five Minutes for Planet is written by me, Jen Knoch, and edited by Crissy Boylan. All photos by Jen Knoch.