Reduce,

We’ll start with the easy one. We’re good at reducing! We’ve cut back so much already. Air quality. Polar ice caps. The winters where no one’s grandma freezes to death. What if we try reducing working hours? Preventable illness? How about stress, strife, human suffering?

Or we can start smaller. The blaring, rectangular eye in your pocket, the one that stares back into you if you stare too long into the raging assholes and targeted advertisements and machine-generated morass it offers. Imagine tucking it to sleep, nestled in its charging cradle; imagine the backlit, bloodshot eye drifting closed. Imagine, further, not missing its company. Because you’re otherwise occupied, with everything else that’s blossomed into that newly diminished space. Reading a book, perhaps. Peering at a painting. Sleeping, dancing, fucking, eating sliced cucumbers.

Then again, you could keep shining that eye out over the swamp, fishing for unfindable answers and unwinnable fights. Just remember: you’re the bait.

Hey. It’s okay to start small, when the alternative is not starting at all.

Reuse,

Now, look: we’ll never figure out a way to not need anything. But it’s apparent that many of us would need a lot less if a few didn’t have the absolute most.

You can take a moment to check the math on that one.

We don’t have to literally eat the ultra-rich. There aren’t that many of them; it’s not like the calories would get us far. But there’s more than one way to crack a nest egg.

The first thing we’ll gobble up? The extra extra in-case-of-emergency backup tablets; the unloved e-readers wedged under tasteful ecru couch cushions; the smart TVs, smart blenders, smart training potties; the GPS in that personal submersible. Rare earth metals don’t grow on trees.

First dibs on devices go to kids who used to be banished into the lightless mines where such rarities got excavated. (Kids in mines should’ve been, minimally, on the top ten list of things to reduce.)

Reusing the mines would be nice, too. But since they’re already there, some of the billionaires might need someplace new to live.

(No one should feel obligated to actually eat the rich.)

(Some of us are vegetarians.)

Alternatively? Leave the kids in the mines and the billionaires in the submersibles. The system is working as intended. Besides, you wouldn’t want to miss a call from your boss while you’re busy ripping the CPU out of a smart pet dryer.

Recycle,

A plastic Ronald Reagan action figure lies at the bottom of a dusty cardboard box waiting to be collected and chemically pulverized back into its component polyvinyl chloride #3 parts. Statistically speaking, twelve PVC molecules from Ronnie’s meticulously sculpted hair are embedded, along with several billion more bits of microplastics, in the current President’s body.

Can we just leave the damn doll there? Please? This particular cycle has already had too much re in it.

. . . Fine. Fine! Obligation requires that you be presented with the equivalent future, the one where we take the shitty doll out of the bin and press the button on its necktie, and make it say in a grandfatherly voice: supply-side economics or welfare queens or the nine most terrifying words in the English language are—oh, fuck me, no. I can’t do it.

In case of emergency, break cycle.

Revolutionize.

Because a revolution is coming. But you need to decide what sort. Either it’s the kind where we go full-on dropkicking heads into baskets . . . but for disability justice and transportation policy and the military-industrial complex and urban sprawl?

. . . Yeah, sure. “Metaphorically.”

Otherwise, it’s the kind where we simply crank out yet another trip around the sun, under which there is nothing new; the kind where the big wheel keeps on turning and you and everyone you care about and a whole bunch of people you don’t all get ground into a fine gooey paste on the road underneath.

It might be overwhelming. It often is. But remember—it’s okay to start small. Join a union. Amend a tax code. Chain yourself to an inconvenient microphone. Get to know your neighbors. Small steps still get you somewhere. And since the alternative is here? Well. Let’s get moving before we—

Oh. Sounds like your assholes-and-advertisements box is vibrating. No, no, it’s fine. You don’t have to decide right this second.

Well. You do. You’re constantly making choices. And not deciding is the easiest decision of all.

We’ll reuse the same words next time around, once you’ve scraped yourself out from under the tire-treads of this life. The thing is, though? Each time through means the number of possibilities is also reduced.

Someone’s going to have to decide, first, what’s worth saving.

Are you?