Season 1 of Supermorning concluded with the main objective behind this entire exercise: getting more life from less environmental impact, a.k.a. life efficiency. 

The key message behind this blog is that sustainable living is not a sacrifice. Not even close. In fact, sustainable living offers a direct pathway to a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive life. 

Saving the world

The idea that we can save the world by genuinely bettering our lives is deeply liberating. But still, change is difficult. To get started, it really helps to understand why sustainable living is so important. 

Here’s the short version: Human impacts on planet Earth are damaging nature’s ability to provide myriad free ecosystem services. These services are worth about twice as much as all human activities. Losing even a fraction of these services will mean a huge hit to our quality of life. 

So, what can we do? Here are three ideas:

• Save the world by looking after yourself. Food production represents the single largest impact on our environment. Displacing the typical excessive meat-rich diet with a moderate plant-rich diet is a great way to help yourself and your planet. 
• Save the world by building wealth. Consumption can only directly address basic human needs like food, shelter, and security. Satisfying higher human needs like love, esteem, and self-actualization is much better achieved by saving and investing rather than spending. 
• Save the world by embracing your creativity. A creative life automatically crowds out consumerism and offers a direct route to esteem and self-actualization. 

Ecological footprint

To make this more tangible, everyone should know their ecological footprint. I strongly encourage you to take this quick and simple test to see where you stand.

The best ways to shrink your footprint look like this:

1. Food. A plant-dominated diet is the best place to start. Other influential factors include the amount of food you buy, the distance your food needs to travel to you, the amount of packaging it needs, and its impact on your health. 
2. Home. The size and type of your home is the main factor, with smaller apartments being much greener than large homes. In most countries, heating and cooling offer the greatest potential for cutting your home footprint.
3. Transportation. The daily commute from a large home in the suburbs has a very large footprint, particularly if done in a big SUV or truck with only one or two occupants. The air travel footprint also quickly adds up.
4. Stuff. The high stuff turnover rate resulting from planned and perceived obsolescence creates great ecological damage. Solutions include, in order of usefulness, embracing creativity, simplifying life, and committing to always purchasing high quality. 

Ecological footprint is a major moral and ethical issue because those with the largest footprints are not those suffering most from the damages. Shrinking yours emerges as the right thing to do from every conceivable angle. 

The transformative power of life efficiency

As discussed in the second chapter of Supermorning, our primitive emotions are ill-suited to modern living. For decades now, individual success required a longer-term mindset. 

But today, we need to step it up another level to a global mindset where the impact on society strongly influences our individual actions. Thanks to the great benefits of sustainable living, this shift may just be achievable. 

But it will remain difficult as long as GDP growth is the main indicator of human progress. We need a new measure that accounts for the fact that our end goal is greater health and happiness, not more consumption. 

“Happy life years” is one such measure. With a little bit of math, this shift of focus clearly reveals life efficiency as a critical lever for achieving a sustainable society. 

The best thing about life efficiency is that it can be deployed very quickly. Unlike other sustainability solutions, life efficiency does not need to deploy lots of new capital. 

All it needs is a mindset shift. And if this shift goes viral, sustainability can happen surprisingly quickly. Those who build life efficiency now will benefit enormously as this shift gathers momentum. 

In conclusion

Increase your happiness, health, wealth, and productivity, secure your long-term future, help save the world, and reduce massive social injustices. 

All these benefits come from the direct pursuit of life efficiency. In my mind, there is no more important priority in the world today. 

Thank you for doing your part!