If you are like most people, chances are, you have things in life that you're dissatisfied with.
For example, you may be struggling a bit with your health, experiencing a bit of problem with your relationship, or you could be a bit short on the financial front.
And then, there's also the things that are outside of your control. For example, you might disagree with the way your city or your country is run, find our way of exploiting the planet deplorable, or you might find the current state of social inequity distasteful.
Indeed, with everything that's happening around us, it's often easy to resort to blame or, if you're more proactive, activism, to get things changed. After all, our organizations and surrounding are chiefly responsible for the state we find ourselves in today.
For example:
Except that none of that is exactly true. In fact, sustainability actually starts with you.
Sustainability Is An Inside Job
Think about it for a moment: when you're unsustainable yourself, your problems and self-concerns are already keeping you strapped on time, so how much more time can you dedicate toward helping others before you run out of fuel?
Similarly, if your income is barely enough to cover all your expenses, how much more money can you allocate toward helping out families, charities or other organizations before you end up being homeless?
Moreover, if you have a series of unsustainable traits and habits, wouldn't you just be propagating them to your community and organizations if you continue as usual? How exactly will that make you or the world a better place?
If anything, just like it'd be awkward to promote environmental protection when you yourselves have little connection to the wild, it'd be equally awkward to talk about the larger sustainability issues when your personal sustainability is at stake.
Whichever way you think about it, the first principle here is that you ought to be sustainable at the personal level, so that one day, you can stop spilling your problems to others and hopefully carry on the weight of your community — and then extend that to the larger world.
Taking Care of Yourself vs. Taking Care of Your Surrounding
Now you might be asking: "isn't blatant self-interest the primary reason why we have so many problems in this world?" And in many cases, you'd be right.
For example:
But because of that, you now have a good reason to pursue a goal that is a bit grander. Namely:
Not only do you need to make yourself more sustainable, but you also need to do it in a way that does not degrade of your surrounding as well.
In other words, yes, you need to help yourself, and yes, you also need to move beyond your narrow self-interest. So you need to do both.
But either way, your priority remains in making yourself to be as sustainable as possible. After all, your actions — be it your habits, your consumption pattern, your lifestyle or your diet — are a big part of why the world is what it is today.
Honing Your Craft
Once you realize the importance of sustainabilizing yourself without destabilizing your surrounding, there are a few things you can do to start moving towards that goal:
Even as you do so from day to night, you still need to continue to educate yourself and culminate your true know-hows — so as to not fall victim to ignorance, pseudo-solutions and tempting ideologies.
But once you're able to act sustainably, you'll be able to take care of others and propagate your messages of sustainability to the outer world — in a way that truly benefits the humanity.
And as you do, you'll progress from being a wandering, self-focused being to a self-loving and selfless being. You'll acquire a global consciousness that allows you to "transcend" from being an individual to an entity that is more globally informed.
But if you ignore it, you could end up like a blind leading other blinds on how to behave and act, propagating mistakes, short-term thinking, wrongdoings and half-truths to the world.
After all, being sustainable is all about having a solid foundation, and that solid foundation starts with oneself.