I really enjoyed how Dan Philips started off with his project, by explaining his various houses, and what he’s done to make each one recycled and reused. I think that this was a brilliant segway into getting into his main idea: the sheer amount of waste in the building industry, that comes from this mindset in the global age of materialism where everything must be perfect. I loved hearing about the different things that he’s made, or what ideas he’s gotten, and by accessing his audience through this fascination that I personally felt, he is able to continue into the large problem area extremely easily. He makes it relatable for the audience.
He first explains that the housing market today is a commodity, because of the human perception of continuity. If one little thing in the house doesn’t align with that continuity, then it gets thrown out, and it’s no big deal; it doesn’t affect the buyer’s life at all. He also blames these two different mindsets for this waste: Dionysian and Apollonian. With the perfectionist Apollonian mindset, it creates “mountains of waste”, and this cycle of perfection where everyone wants these things that must look perfect or it’s garbage. Having a Dionysian mindset would create mountains less of waste, because it focuses more on the gut instinct that all of us have.
We also tend to create this wasteful cycle of perfection through our ideas of how we think other people expect us to live. This happens to everyone; we all in some way are bothered by how other people think of us, and so we try to live up to their imagined expectations. In reality, that’s impossible, but we still do it. I thought that this living up to expectations was a really interesting point in the cycle of waste. I’ve never thought of it as such before, but it makes perfect sense: if there’s something wrong with your house, you fix it so that your neighbors don’t talk about it. And that’s called waste. It’s a hard thing to move past, but if we want to fix our environment, we need to stop throwing away all of this material just because we can. The amount of consumerism that occurs globally only helps this cycle along, and so the only solution we really have at the moment is reusing all of that broken material. It’s there, what else are we going to use when it all runs out? We need to stop living up to each other’s expectations in order to preserve our global environment.