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Convenience rules our lives. No-Buy-Friday battles the Queen of Convenience — Plastic! [1]

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Date: 2025-05-29

Convenience rules our lives. No-Buy-Friday battles the Queen of Convenience — Plastic!

Recently, a politically savvy and very supportive friend, texted me with a smart idea for a future NBF diary, revealing yet another facet of the seemingly endless benefits cutting consumption offers us.

She wrote: “…a strategy to rid the planet of microplastics, is to cut down on packaging which equates to buy less stuff”

While public knowledge of the plastic crisis has rapidly moved from desert to deluge, it has been unable to best the speed with which micro plastics have managed to permeated anything and everything porous in our environment. This now includes our brains and perhaps more disturbingly for the ‘bros’, their manly ‘junk’. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/microplastics-human-testicles-study-sperm-counts#

Not many years ago, plastic started turning up in seafood (both in their stomaches and the parts of them we put in ours), as well as the entangled, strangled and plasticized corpses of both aquatic and airborne species, creating speculation that this might soon encompass 90% of all ocean dependent species. One has to wonder whether it hadn’t already done so and that was simply the way the news was broken to us, because, in what seemed like no time at all, it was found to be contaminating everything in the biosphere.

Such seemingly ‘disjointed’ developments are most likely due to the manner in which ‘facts’ are determined in science, as ‘excavating’ for them is a slow process; employing a somewhat compartmentalized methodology. First, a set of data is patiently collected, then meticulously analyzed, written up and peer reviewed before attaining the certitude necessary before public release. This process can create the appearance of statistical gaps, undermining the perception of steady incremental change when reporting on such developments.

But this does not explain the the relatively recent revelation that while irresponsible plastic disposal has been going on for the past seven or eight decades, during most of that time, the public was keep in the dark about the full extent of its environmental impact.

Not that long ago information surfaced that we’ve even been lied to regarding plastic recycling and recyclability. This subterfuge was aided by the sad truth that, as ‘stuff junkies’ most of us didn’t really want to know what happens to waste in the first place. For consumers all that matters is convenience — and plastic is the Queen of Convenience

Despite my attempts to minimize it, whether purchased or gifted, food related plastic consumption remains the bane of my domestic life.



Taking all of this into account, it would seem that plastic particles have been infesting the biosphere for much longer than what might be inferred from the ‘oh-by-the-way’ thunderbolt belatedly tossed out by the ‘gods of commerce’ controlled press.

I remember when I first heard about the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’,

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Wikipedia

(after ‘news’ of it was finally released to the world), how shocked I was to learn that it already covered an area four times the size of California.

I guess at three times, it hadn’t yet reached the calculated threshold necessary to be deemed newsworthy.

Following the same lurching pattern of disclosure, ‘breaking’ news appeared within the past year that micro plastics were already in babies — (Exxon and Mattel are currently fighting over the patent rights). https://scitechdaily.com/startling-discovery-scientists-find-microplastics-in-infant-organs-at-birth/

And here’s where I get to the part about plastic in the brain.

Well after the need to address it, data has surfaced that there has unexpectedly been sufficient time for our brains to absorb enough plastic micro particles to equal that of a disposible spoon

(7 grams). Not a spoonful, but rather the spoon itself.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/29/2319598/-A-Plastic-Spoon-in-Every-Brain

Although I’ve done my best for decades to avoid using these ubiquitous sloth-favored utensils, I would still like to apologize to anyone now burdened with providing lodging to a spoon that may have been briefly mine. If it’s any consolation, rest assured that your sacrifice went towards making my life momentarily more convenient.

~~~

Although adhering to No-Buy-Friday will play a small part in impeding the steady flow of this ‘ease enhancing’ detritus into our choc-a-bloc toxic environment, we will only make serious inroads once we collectively take a hard look at the true value of convenience. While at this point, it appears we are willing to sacrifice anything to our creature comforts, it is clear that ‘delirium desirous’ has

as much as to do with this preference as man’s current blasé attitude toward survival.

Like with any intractable addiction, a more aggressive corrective therapy is usually advisable, which here translates to cutting our ‘fat’ consumption and embracing a leaner life-style. We’ve been conditioned to take our rampant bingeing as normal, and must relearn the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’, if we are to defuse the volatile political-economic-environmental bomb

we keep kicking down the road.

After all, if “want” meant the same thing, we would no longer need “need”.

A great deal of my determination to promote NBF, comes from seeing it as a stepping stone to ‘buynott’, which I prefer to the term ‘boycott’. Although in many ways it’s pretty much the same thing, it benefits by coming with less narrowly targeted punitive connotations and broader survival applications.

Many of the readers who have contributed to the comments portions of my diaries report back that NBF has the latent ability to spread like a ground crawling weed into the other days surrounding it,

becoming more freely applied, while being liberated from time constraints.

The financial-industrial-construct that feeds us, and feeds off of consumption, is not unaware of this threat and they fight back using disinformation and media silence as ‘herbicides’.

It is my hope that despite the enabling of their efforts through the auspices of consumer dependency, NBF will continue to take root, making deeper inroads into ‘zombie consumption’.

https://apple.news/AlMgAjCYYTfK_8MDM3iiS9Q

At the very least, this experiment in controlling our spending, will help prepare those that embrace it to cope better with the deprivation of impending economic collapse.

Ironically, as we head in this direction, it appears increasingly likely that economic hardship will curtail the use of plastic, long before we would get around to kicking the consumption habit without the plug being pulled.

Without resource, desire gets trashed.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/29/2324895/-Convenience-rules-our-lives-No-Buy-Friday-battles-the-Queen-of-Convenience-Plastic?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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