Monday’s post outlined how environmental destruction could disrupt the valuable ecological services we currently get for free from Mother Nature. If Nature goes on strike, our lives will suddenly get very uncomfortable. 

Less consumption is the single best way to address this problem. And luckily, a sustainable lifestyle offers much more health, wealth, and productivity than the consumerist norm. 

Health and wealth were covered over the past two days, so we’ll explore the link between sustainability and productivity today. 

The double benefit of a more creative life

The pursuit of happiness can be broadly split into two classes: consumption and creation.

• Consumption typically offers plenty of short-term pleasure and serious long-term problems.
• Creation is much more effective in creating lasting life satisfaction and can also be surprisingly pleasurable in the moment. 

From an environmental point of view, the consumption pathway contributes to the problem, while the creative pathway often contributes to creating solutions. 

Thus, while a creative pursuit of happiness will certainly reduce your environmental footprint, you can further increase the benefit by creating sustainable solutions for society. 

Sustainability and productivity

Both consumption and creation require time and energy. The more we create, the less time and energy we have left for consumption. 

In addition, both a creative and consumptive lifestyle tends to reinforce itself. Consumerism typically traps people in the vicious cycle of debt, work and consumption shown below. 

The creative alternative to this cycle is shown below. The only danger with this virtuous cycle is that you can become so caught up in your creative work that it affects your health and relationships. But this is issue fairly easy to identify and manage. 

Sustainability, contribution, and happiness

Creators simply have less time and less drive for environmentally destructive consumption, automatically making their lives more sustainable. They also continuously contribute to society, which makes them happy, both in the short term (flow) and the long term (esteem and self-actualization). 

So, just like health and wealth, productivity contributes strongly both to sustainability and life satisfaction. Go on, embrace your creativity. It might just save the world 🙂