Now we’ve firmly entered 2016, how are your New Year’s resolutions holding up? If you’re bored of the conventional “join your local gym and re-label carbs as the devil”, perhaps you might want to try adopting alternative habits and lifestyles that – who knows – could make a real difference to your life. It just so happens that they could be good for the planet too. Win.
Rethink the resources you use every day and be happier and healthier by taking inspiration from the five lifestyles below (and the people who adopted them.)
Want a healthier life? Give up money
“I’ve never been fitter, I’ve never been healthier, I haven’t been ill,” says Mark Boyle, aka the Moneyless Man, about the three years he gave up the sterling stuff, living in a caravan he acquired from FreeCycle. Not everybody is raring to trade in their semi-detached, but the “sense of connection to the land around me, the wildlife around me, the soil, to the air, to the stream I drank from, to the birds, to people in the local community” sure sounds idyllic. If you feel like relying on money a little less would be kind of cool, the Moneyless Manifesto might be a good place to start. And it might save that trip to the gym, eh?
Want to be a more creative cook? Give up plastic
Fancy yourself a budding Jamie Oliver? “You walk around the supermarket and everything’s in plastic. And you wonder how you can live without it,” says Tom Lawson, freelance writer and assistant editor at Positive News, who gave up plastic in the first six months of 2015. One surefire way to tackle this challenge is to make things from scratch – no packaging required. Giving up plastic meant “being way more creative with food, especially with snacks – because it’s really hard to find snacks without plastic,” he says. Lawson reels off a repertoire of homemade treats like flapjacks and savouries such as crackers, sausage rolls and veggie burgers. He also buys bread fresh from the local bakery, has milk delivered in glass bottles, oh – and he still has the same metal razor from the beginning of last year.
Want more meaningful connections? Slow travel
If you’re keen to see more of the world this year, slow travel – ie spending more time in one place – might be the way to do it. Jasmine Irving moved to Réunion Island in November 2014 and spent seven months au pairing in exchange for food and board – a place she now considers “a second family on the other side of the world”. A year on, she’s still there working as an English assistant living in a houseshare. She describes WWOOFing (that is, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) as the perfect way to travel. “You get the time to really be emerged in a place, to discover it by living communally with locals,” not to mention exchanging “something far more meaningful than money and that’s human connection.”
Want more money? Buy second hand
Between September 2012 and August 2013, blogger and writer Jen Gale reckons she saved about £1,500-£2,000. Why? She embarked on 12 months of buying nothing new, and as well as saving money, Gale picked up plenty of practical skills and gained a sense of empowerment. Take presents for kids’ birthday parties: instead of spending around £10 on a card, giftwrap and a purchased present, Gale made a snail racing kit (with printed instructions and a racetrack), and bought a bag of marbles from a charity shop, which she put in a pouch bag with the child’s initials on it that she’d made. “I…realised the wealth of places there are to buy things other than heading to the supermarket or IKEA.” Post-experiment, Gale is considering a buy nothing month (apart from food).
Want to slow things down? Live off-grid
Journalist and filmmaker Leah Borromeo realised that slow life (“pickling, baking your own bread, making your own oat milk, walking”) needn’t be that time consuming. She spent seven days living (almost) off-grid in London, cutting out electricity and gas, and simultaneously the binds (and comforts) of our 21st century convenience culture. “If you hit it right, you can get on with a pretty busy urban life and still have time to do things that don’t cost the earth.” She recommends the experience simply to reassess what we stroll past each day. “I have a salad bar in my courtyard and never knew it,” she says.
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Philips, sponsor of the circular economy hub
