#11: Stop justifying your actions based on money already spent

It's how consumerism wins. Plan your next step based on joy. On doing what you’re drawn to. Spend your money on what you love, and love the crap out of it as long as it and you last.

Roberts’ Green Letter: An idea a day to transform industry. 
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Dear friends and colleagues,

I ate the two eggs over easy.

I sopped up the yolk with a few bites of biscuits and gravy. Here at the Blue Ribbon Diner in Wauseon, Ohio, Deb kept my coffee mug full. I drained it as I left.

But as I left, I walked away from most of my biscuit, and a whole lot of gravy.

I walked around back to stretch Oliver’s legs, and mine. I don’t think they compost at the Blue Ribbon Diner.

My uneaten food, delivered by all the energy-intensive modern means, is going in the dumpster and then the landfill. Its hydrocarbons will break down while starved of oxygen. It will emit methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

If it’s captured and used to produce power, it will be considered renewable energy.

If not—total waste.

I feel bad about my consumption. I’m on a 2,000-mile road trip, and like a good environmentalist I think about every impact of it, down to the micro-plastics of my tires being blown into the Ohio corn fields.

But I also haven’t stopped consuming. And I question whether environmentalist messages that encourage me to feel bad about consumption are doing any good.

Could there be another way?