When Less Isn’t a Choice

 The planet is collapsing under too much, while millions still wait for just enough.



If you haven’t checked out Blog 5: The Tech Fix Mirage, you might want to. In that piece, I looked at how even our best technological fixes—electric cars, smart recycling, solar roofs—often avoid a deeper truth: maybe we don’t need all this stuff in the first place.

But this one’s a little different. We’re still talking overconsumption, sure. But quieter kinds. Everyday things that we don’t even realize add up—like the guy who once casually told me he drinks a gallon of milk every day. His doctor apparently said it was okay. Honestly, he didn’t look okay.

We all have something like that—extra helpings, second fridges, three cups of rice at dinner instead of one. Even online searches, something we barely register, have a hidden cost. One deep search can use enough electricity to power an LED bulb for about 17 minutes. That’s no big deal, until you realize that in some homes around the world, that might be the only light a kid gets to study by.

But here’s the tension I keep coming back to. While I genuinely believe we need to radically cut back what we take from the planet (and I do believe that strongly), there’s this uncomfortable other side: billions of people still haven’t had enough food, clean water, or electricity to begin with.

The numbers are staggering—over 800 million people still going hungry every day, more than two billion without safe drinking water, hundreds of millions still in literal darkness every night. And it’s not just distant places. Even in the U.S., over 17 million households face food insecurity.

So now what?

Because meeting these basic needs—feeding everyone, bringing reliable electricity, clean water—means more infrastructure, more resources, more consumption. That’s the tension: while some of us learn to scale back, others genuinely need more. And both demands land on the same planet.

I don’t have answers yet—no tidy solutions. Honestly, anyone claiming to have an easy solution probably isn’t looking hard enough. This one is messy. It’s complicated. It’s exactly why we need to talk about it.

We'll dig into this deeper next in Blog 7: Enough, For Whom?, where we'll unpack what it means to balance planetary limits with human needs.

I’d genuinely welcome your thoughts — whether you agree or disagree. But if you feel like sharing, I’m especially interested in your personal reflections… how you navigate these questions, if they matter to you. And if this resonates, feel free to share it with others who think or wonder along similar lines.

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