Love it Mike, good way to live! Had to say goodbye to my 15 year old car last week after the head gasket failed. Had to also say goodbye to my new guitar fund to buy a replacement. Still, I have an exceedingly beaten up old guitar in the meantime and the best instrument is the one in your hands!
It seems to me that you’ve given a good example of seeing, or at least trying to see, the big picture - though, of course, the small things that we do matter in a cumulative type of way too.
Locally I prefer to cycle rather than drive, but you do what is both practical and possible. Perhaps more important than what we do as individuals is how we influence others to (also) adopt greener ways of living.
Looking at cars I too tend to keep them a long time and when buying the last one - second hand, of course - sought to purchase something practical to use, fuel efficient, durable and affordable. On my last long trip the car returned 55 miles per U.K. gallon, which is somewhat greener than the 30 mpg vehicles I was driving a few decades back. On that trip I was reminded of just how busy our roads are and how much pollution the working population, just by carrying out their daily lives, put into the atmosphere. I look at that life structure, including the daily commute to distant work, and wonder how we can help society restructure towards living in greener ways - splitting work between days working at home and days working in the office is perhaps an example of one step forward.
In #17 Counter said “The problem is refrigerator manufacturing creates jobs (albeit currently in China until Chinese workers also want new refrigerators and become too expensive as a workforce and manufacturing moves to Ethiopia or wherever is the next supplier of dirt cheap labour), so until we all find a way of living happily as a low consumer society we are stuck in an ever decreasing circle.”
I think that that is somewhere near correct in that we are focussed on jobs and on profitable selling without seeing a bigger picture, however I move the emphasis a little. It is important that people live well and an essential part of what makes that possible is employment and profitable trade, but the ways in which we work, the products which we make and the way in which we trade to circulate wealth need to change to support a more sustainable way of life. The more people that seek change and the more voices that ask for change the better things will become.