In this guest article, Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini writes a self-critique and contemplates our consumerist society and waste.

A long time ago, inspired by a blogger from Australia, Sash Milne, I started a Nothing New Project, i.e. I tried not to buy anything new for a year, to decrease waste and increase living. While back then I felt quite virtuous about living that way, there was nothing too virtuous about the way I live now, as if back then I stretched myself too far and snapped like a bandana that children get for the Remembrance Day in the UK. When you do a project like that, that forces you to reduce your buying and question every moment when you open your wallet and reach for a coin not out of poverty but out of restraint, you either learn to love yourself as you are, without the gadgets and extra consumption and you learn to live differently or you feel somewhat destabilized because you locked yourself out of participation in the prevailing culture, i.e. the culture of consumerism. Oh, and one more thing, you can also develop the maturity to make yourself accountable for the trail of waste that falls behind you but, in all honesty, this wasn’t the learning outcome that I have satisfactorily reached and consolidated. To consistently swim against the current, you have to decide to consistently swim against the current and that is hard.
What the Nothing New project showed me is that I by and large go through life inattentively, to the shouts of waste that brutally lurk in the shadows of my life or blatantly ‘shine’ on display in my house – as if the psyche couldn’t quite handle the tension between wanting more and needing less. I go through life with an ecological heart that is neither pure nor faithful to the principles of ecological teaching, but I still have hope for myself and the humanity – that we will make progress.

Before I started writing this article I asked my son to do an exercise. I told him to create a table with two columns and title the first column: ‘I want more..’ and the second column ‘I waste..’ and then list at least four things in each column. Do the same exercise before you start reading further. Give yourself 10 minutes on it. What do you see? What have you noticed? Any parallels? Yes, at least two of the things will repeat themselves in both columns because usually what we waste is what we want more of and what we want more of, we waste. Good living, therefore, is as much related to managing surplus, as it is about managing waste. Waste is often surplus and our irritation related to managing this waste is actually our irritation at managing wealth as much as we fear to admit it. It is easier to get angry at ‘all this waste’ than to make wise decisions about it. What would you like to turn your surplus into..
I will try to turn some of it into art.. this is what this post was meant to be about but I got side-tracked a bit.. as usually inattentively to the art around. My next post will be about it..

Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini, a Creative (Photographer, Writer and Educator), March 2024