Five Minutes for the Future

Right now, I’m waiting for someone to hop on a call who said they would be ten minutes late. I burned five of those minutes twiddling my hair, scrolling through LinkedIn, and letting my brain just sit for a minute.

Now there’s no harm in a moment of meditative meandering, in fact there’s research to show it’s crucial to brain function! Being said, I would like to advocate for a new kind of time waster in an era of idle games, doom scrolling, and boredom snacks.

I want us all to start practicing a new kind of mindfulness — a materials mindfulness. When we need a mental break, I suggest we all play a game of I Spy with My Little Eye on the things we use everyday. You’d be surprised. Some of the big uglies, like petroleum and palm oil, are in unexpected places. Your hand lotion, for example, more than likely has petroleum in it. Read the salad dressing label. Does it say propylene glycol? That’s petroleum.

Breathing and noticing… the elephant in the room. Petroleum is involved in everything we touch.

You might be feeling gross now knowing you’re eating petroleum, but I can promise these things are quite safe. The issue is that we need to aggressively cut back on our petroleum use if we want to hit the emissions targets required to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change.

It’s not just burning petroleum that’s bad for the planet. Every step of the way, from ripping it out of the ground, to shipping it around the world, to processing it into the stuff that ends up in everything from nail polish to Windex (looking at you Sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate), causes massive amounts of GHG emissions.

As a founder, I meet lots of founders who are trying to get rid of petroleum. There’s lots of really, really cool solutions out there. The issue is none of it matters unless we put pressure on the companies that use petroleum in the things we use everyday. Today, my message is of empowerment. You have the power to end corporate complacency by simply noticing what’s around you. Much like body mindfulness can help us treat our bodies better, five minutes of materials mindfulness can help us treat our world better.