What modern conveniences are the least we need?

[hunter]

72. It's nearly impossible for an affluent person to reduce their environmental footprint.

If they're not spending their money on one environmentally destructive thing they are spending or investing it in another.

The smallest environmental footprint I ever had was as a mentally ill dumpster diving homeless person.

A PTSD Vietnam War veteran took notice of me and let my feral human self live in his garden shed. There I cooked up rice and whatever else I could scrounge up on a little electric burner. My environmental footprint was still small.

Then I got a job that paid enough to fix my broken down car (even then I was a pretty good mechanic), returned to college, got even higher paying jobs and returned to my environmentally destructive ways.

My wife and I live in a high population density neighborhood, we drive a car that gets 40-50 mpg, my wife is vegetarian approaching vegan and I'm mostly vegetarian, we've rarely traveled by air, etc.., but our family income is higher than 99%+ of earth's human population and that makes our environmental footprint huge.

The core problem is the way our economic system works. What we commonly call "economic productivity" isn't productivity at all. It is, in fact, a direct measure of the damage we are doing to earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

It's an unfortunate reality that most of us suffer work that is not making the world a better place.