⚡ How to live more sustainably in the digital world: Sport, Education, Art, and anything in between
7 min read
For thousands of years, humans have mostly lived in the analog world, we communicate, trade, interact, and do any other activities that we can think of only physically. With the invention of the telegram, the telephone, radio, TV, and most importantly the Internet, we have evolved to live in a multidimensional life which our forefathers would never have imagined.
From hunters and gatherers in the wild, to become farmers in a village, and finally a virtual cowboy in the wild wild web. In the last decades, the word digital has changed our lives for the better (or worse for the legacy system). As a kid, even though I enjoyed watching tons of cartoons and playing video games, most of the world around me is still revolving around physical things such as the morning newspaper on the breakfast table or waking up 1 hour early to go to school.
From the concept of sustainability that I have learned so far, most of the idea focuses on the incremental reduction of resources as it's currently being used and not much on the exponential changes, such as completely moving digital, from atoms to bits.
So before questioning how to change the world, I would start on 3 topics that I am passionate about.
💪🏼 Fitness studio to Peloton rodeo
Fitness studio, which started as a testosterone jungle for a bulky bodybuilder, has become a lifestyle for most people. According to Statista, currently, there are more than 200,000 fitness studios around the world.
Wait, what does a beach body have to do with sustainability? Okay here are some reasons to talk about:
(1) Electricity, an average gym with fancy machines and LCD screen consumes around 1.4 million kWh of electricity (equal to 131 average American household consumption).
(2) Air pollution, according to a recent study, air pollutants (CO2, VOC, etc.) in fitness studios exceed the acceptable limit, giving a hard choice to choose biceps over lung cancer.
(3) Diversity & inclusion, even though most gyms have moved away from an alpha male environment, the problem of diversity is still not solved yet, which can be seen by the growing trend of female-only gym (too many weirdos in a regular gym🏋️♂️).
Some companies tried to answer these concerns with home workout solutions to save people time, carbon emission, and maybe even lives (think air pollutants, germs, and viruses avoided by staying away from gyms).
Peloton is one of the pioneers, not only providing a well-equipped cycling machine, it gives users a ticket to enter a virtual fitness world hosted by an instagrammable trainer streamed directly from your living room, it's like Netflix but no chill.
Another company, Tonal, claimed that its smart cable equipment uses machine learning to personalize the training needs of its user, backed up with the support of qualified online trainers. However, these fancy equipments are still too expensive for most people.
Maybe it's even more sustainable to use our own body, such as the home workout classes provided by Beat81. Nevertheless, innovation of online workouts might reduce the environmental and social impact of traditional fitness while transforming more couch potatoes into a sweet potatoes 🐖.
📗 From lecture hall to video call
Most of you reading this article might still remember how it used to feel going to a big concrete building full of kids, called school. Since the time of the Greek philosophers, the concept of education is 1 teacher surrounded by a limited number of seated students.
After a couple of millennia, the number of students only grew by quite a bit. Remember big lecture halls where a professor used a microphone to shout at hundreds of students in a lecture hall as large as a basketball court?
If we want to increase the education of billions of people in the world, it's not sustainable to think that we need to continuously build millions of new schools and fill them with hundreds of thousands of teachers.
The first issue is scalability, due to geography (the average walking distance to school is around 5km in some parts of Africa) or limited availability of teachers (According to the World Bank, by 2030 an additional 69 million teachers are needed globally to teach in primary and secondary school alone).
The second issue is inclusivity, it's not a secret that high quality of education is mostly accessible for students in developed countries or a portion of high-income earners in developing countries.
One answer to the problem might be the shift towards online education. What if rather than focusing the limited funds and resources to build a school in a remote village (or a fancy cafeteria of a private school), good quality internet connections can be provided to hundreds of kids in the area, enabling them to have the same quality of education as an American suburban kid.
A highly qualified teacher could leverage their skills and teach an endless number of students through the conventional video call lectures or tik-tok📱 (here are examples of teachers using tik-tok to teach maths and grammar).
Additionally, open education portals such as Khan Academy or Saylor.org (Founded by Michael Saylor of Microstrategy) have democratized knowledge transfers that were previously limited to the lucky few.
💍 Gold ring to digital token
A sophisticated piece of jewelry is scarce in nature or limited in quantity, that's why it's valuable. The most common reason is due to the dependence on extractions activities of finite natural minerals such as gold or diamond.
However, the mining process of these beauties is full of controversies. It is estimated that to produce one gold ring to propose/ proposed by your future partner on valentine's day, it's creating 20 tons of waste in the forms of damaged rocks and soils (if you have 2 partners it means 2 x 20 tons).
Not only that, most of us have heard about the term blood diamond, a social issues topic that is still highly debated. In recent years, the mining practices of mining have been improving thanks to customers demanding more transparency in the supply chain.
But what if we re-tune our brain (and heart) to shift from physical to digital art and craftsmanship. The concept of buying and collecting digital art exploded this year, such as the sales of Beeple - Everyday JPEG artwork for more than 69 million dollars at Christies 💰.
People then started to pay attention to the use of NFT (Non-fungible token) to own digital assets using ethereum. Yes, there are some critics of its carbon footprint, but this is just the beginning. Edison’s first light bulb is not energy efficient at all, but it replaces a lot of candles to be burned.
The digital art space will eventually improve itself and one day might replace our desire to dig up a big hole in a green mountain just for the sake of finding eldorado (for more references, read my article on bitcoin and the environment here).
💡 Conclusion
These are just some examples of how to live sustainably can mean pushing the boundary of what we are used to. Perhaps there might be more exciting topics combining the digital world that I have seen in my first playstation and the “real life” I have seen growing up.
Natural resources are scarce, but the most scarce thing in the world is time. As the great Naval Ravikant once said, “Innovation frees up resources and time for people to create new solutions and exciting stuff”.
Riding a horse that runs on organic grass sounds cool, driving with electric cars may be better, but living in a metaverse might be the future (Mark Zuckerberg is moving social network to the metaverse world).
We will see more waves of innovation coming to your living room sooner or later, hopefully without another pandemic happening. One of the most inspiring books I have read on sustainability and innovation is from the founder of Patagonia titled “Let my people go surfing”.
Now it might need a second version called “Let my people go surfing - on the internet” 🏄 🖥️.
Thanks for reading this article. Stay healthy, stay online, and never let the gravity of normality pulls you down.