Taking a Leap with The Great Green Life

MATT & VASU:

Hey everyone!

Welcome to our first blog post and a community that we would like to call The Great Green Life.

On Earth Day 2019, we start our journey as a couple that hopes to make the transition to a more sustainable and eco-friendly living. We know how sad and depressing it is to live in a world where TVs and social media feeds constantly throw at us the bad news on climate change and how we seem to be failing our planet. As millennials, it doesn’t help to know that our future is heading towards rising sea levels, food insecurity, extreme weather, species extinction and environmental conflict. We know that we have all dreamed of a peaceful and stable life, where we can own homes, raise happy children and have fulfilling careers – just like our parents.

Unfortunately, in this tumultuous world, that stable “boring” lifestyle is not a given anymore. The reason why we chose to start a community on how to make life more sustainable, was this uncertainty in how our futures looked and why we need to do our part by reducing this “climate anxiety”. We know it is easy to sit back and complain about how only governments are in-charge of big changes or why politicians need to care more, but the real transformation is already happening when we choose to make small yet impactful changes in our day-to-day lives. It is our consumption, our travel, our food and our lifestyle that gets added up (x7 billion) and affects our planet.

So on this Earth Day, we are choosing to live a less consumptive, less carbon-intensive and less toxic lifestyle instead. Come join us in our journey as a couple that has decided to go green and we hope that it inspires you to make those changes in your life as well. We welcome guest blog posts (so feel free to write to us with your own stories of green living)!

Matt wrote the following story about how we spent Earth Hour earlier this year, and how that got us thinking about living more sustainably and eventually getting the inspiration to start this community.

Spending Our First Earth Hour Together

MATT: With Earth Hour being on a Saturday this year, many ideas come to my mind about fun and interesting things we could go out and do. But being March, it meant going out involved using some kind of power (it is cold and dark out here in Canada, and we would have to drive to our destination which meant using fuel). So instead, this year we decided to stay in and play some cards (decided on UNO) by candlelight and have some Rosé.

Spending this uninterrupted time together (without phones or lights) turned out to be better than anything going out could have provided. Earth hour, as advertised is only one hour, but the time flew by and we played for much longer. Vasu jumped out to an early lead, but we ended up both winning three games. Both our competitive natures came through, but the whole experience itself was great fun. The time spent together, not worrying about what’s happening on social media or the internet was a nice break from the usual routine.

Sometimes we forget how fun just staying in and not doing anything that involves electricity or some kind of power, is sad given how much more enjoyable life can be without it. We automatically think that for something to be fun now we need to be doing something exciting or ‘like’ worthy, but we forget that the best times can be had with those around us and it doesn’t involve our phones, computers or TV. Earth Hour reminds you that the most important things are not electronic, they’re right there in front of us and one doesn’t need power or electricity to enjoy it. That’s what we’ll try to explain with this blog, that you don’t need to always be focused on what’s going on where you are or what trend is popular at the moment – life is always better when you enjoy it with people close to you. And sometimes disconnecting and spending quality time with those close to you is what often gets overlooked when it comes to changing our lifestyles.