Is the Kubo Rich Life Green?

Here at the Kubo, we’ve been what might be labelled frugal for quite a while. For the most part, Kubo King doesn’t care for a closet full of clothes or the latest iPhone, and I’ve been a penny-pincher since I went away to college and had to start paying my own rent. Over time, our natural tendencies to resist being consumers have been reinforced — by learning about investing and financial independence on his part; and by learning about the minimalist movement on my part. At the intersection of these two movements, we have found common ground on handling our money.

In 2018, though, a third motivation to reduce consumption was brought to our attention. In her excellent book Your Money or Your Life, Vicki Robin discusses the limited resources of our earth and just how much we’re overdrawing on them in developed countries today. We all know that fossil fuels are a non-renewable energy source which will eventually run out. We all hear about global warming and factories polluting the air and the water. But what I never really grasped before is the fact that in industrialized societies we are simply producing more and more things, so that we can buy more and more things, so that we can make the economy grow to produce more and more things… ad infinitum, while the raw materials making up those things are used up every year and the byproducts of producing them trash the earth. As Robin writes near the beginning of her book:

Every year, in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund, the Global Footprint Network announces Earth Overshoot Day, the annual date when we’ve collectively used up the resources our planet can renew in a single year before going into ecological debt. In 1971, Earth Overshoot Day fell on December 21. Ten years later it was November 12. Then October 11 in 1991. In 2001 it fell on September 23. On and on, earlier and earlier. In 2016 it was August 3. Check it out. What is it now?

I just checked — for 2018, it was August 1.

Environmental information like this (if we believe it at all, as discussed in a previous article) can fill us with a sense of hopelessness and make the problems we face seem overwhelming. How can any of us as individuals begin to solve such global problems? I usually see technology pushed as the answer. Fossil fuels going to run out? We’ll build more Teslas. Emissions causing global warming? Don’t worry, there’s technology to pump the CO₂ underground instead — or eventually we’ll figure out how to suck it back out of the sky or something. And sooner or later clean energy will catch up and fill the gap.

However, Vicki Robin’s book changed my perspective about the potential solutions to our planet’s problems. It also made it easier for me to consider what I can personally do for the environment. It gives me a sense of hope, because it lets me relate taking better care of the planet to the personal values I already have anyway: financial responsibility, family over possessions, and the appreciation of simple joys every day. I see a way forward for people to become less wasteful without even sacrificing our best sources of happiness.

In America, we’ve always been taught that we have to buy things to make the economy grow. We’ve always been taught that the economy must grow to make us prosper. Ergo, we must buy things to be more prosperous and happier. Now we’re seeing that people can’t keep buying more and more things forever, because of the environmental consequences. That seems to face us with a dilemma, and technology seems to be the only way out of it.

But I personally question whether buying things always makes us happier and whether a growing economy always makes us more prosperous. I also question whether technology can solve our environmental problems if our current lifestyles continue. I won’t pretend to be an economist, or to have answers to these questions. But here at our Kubo, we’re all about looking for happiness in places other than consumption. And we’re not the only ones around (look at minimalists, the FIRE movement, the people of Bogotá who redesigned their city to be more friendly to people than to cars, and so on). Personally, I would be willing to gamble that our lives will be just fine if we slow down our consumption and stop growing our economy so fast. I’m so confident in that gamble that I’m writing on this blog to encourage you to slow down your consumption too, and to search for happiness elsewhere.

All this is to say: maybe the search for the Kubo Rich life won’t just bring you more fulfillment and happiness. Maybe it will help us solve the global problems we face too. I don’t know, but I have some hope that it can.