Sustainable Lifestyle 101

Sustainability is the new trend here, and it's here to stay. From environmental sustainability to lifestyle, it's becoming a hype now that we use resources and produce so much waste.

The waste we're talking about here isn't on the environment. It's about the waste of resources. Here's a thought-provoking article about the subjectivity of reality plus an image about environmental sustainability to help you feel good.

Now, jumping to the main topic of waste, it's about your resource waste. By resources, I mean time, money, and satisfaction. Which relates deeply to the definition of a sustainable lifestyle itself.

What is Sustainable Lifestyle?

Speaking in plain language, it's an optimum lifestyle that you can enjoy as long as you are capable of. Just like a balance sheet, it goes deep into the form of revenue - expense. Except there are two other dimensions other than money (that is, again, time and satisfaction). Does this confuse you yet? I know, it's a lot to take. Let's break it down into smaller chunks.

Let's say that you are earning $100k per year. If you use it entirely and not saving any of it, you can travel twice a year, splurge yourself every month, and have a pumpkin spice latte every day.

But what happens when the money stops rolling? Surely you can't have that much expense again? Besides, you think, it's too much for you. You don't need a pumpkin spice latte every day, and once a year travel is enough for you. When you do that, you double your lifestyle time reserve into two years, plus you have more satisfaction on those travel and pumpkin spiced lattes because you know, the law of diminishing returns a.k.a having too much of one thing reduces its satisfaction.

by having a sustainable lifestyle, you hit the sweet spot of satisfaction and the maximum time you can enjoy those satisfactions in life. For sure it's easy to say but hard to do. We'll dive deeper into it below.

Who is Sustainable Lifestyle for and when?

Might be you, might not be you, but definitely not for the hedonistic YOLO type that wants to maximize pleasure RIGHT NOW. This lifestyle fits you if you understand your own optimum satisfaction point, and if you understand at what point you feel enough. You don't know yet what you like or what you want from this life? No worries chap, we're here to help you figure that out.

How do we achieve it?

Plenty of calculations for sure. Break it down to the ground level, the formula would be

Your savings / expense = the year of joy

As with any thing in life, we can see thing from the optimistic view, or from pessimistic view. The optimistic view will see this as "That means if I save more / earn more / spend less,  I have longer time of joy". Not so fast, Sport, no. What if I tell you that earning more / spending less might hurt your satisfaction? Or from pessimisstic view as "Bah why should we save, we could be dead by tomorrow either!". True, but there's no guarantee either that you're gonna be dead and at peace (hopefully so) by tomorrow.

Nothing good comes from either extreme. The point here is balance, and that's a thing that only you can figure it out. Other variables play parts as well, such as your location. The thing that makes it rather complex is the measure of sustainable lifestyle is different based on your geographical location (hello, high living cost of Singapore).

Why Sustainable Lifestyle is important?