The Meaning of Life

Shanon introduced me to Steve Pavlina's writing a while ago. I've talked about him too previously in this post, "a chatterbox's pensieve: Steve Pavlina's Interesting Thoughts", that I wrote in Oct 2007. Since then, I've been meaning to complete reading his series of posts, "The Meaning of Life":
* The Meaning of Life: Intro (Jun 2005)
* The Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live? (Jun 2005)
* The Meaning of Life: Discover Your Purpose (Jun 2005)
* The Meaning of Life: From Purpose to Action (Jun 2005)
* The Meaning of Life: Transitioning (Jun 2005)
* The Meaning of Life: Conscious Evolution (Jun 2005)

Today I finally did. Gladly did.

The below paragraph written in his final post of the series is circling around in my head at the moment.

"Consider something as simple as diet. The environmental consequences of the Standard American Diet are severe — to say it wastes resources and pollutes the environment is a gross understatement. The U.S. government subsidizes most of it, which hides the true costs. It takes 18 times as much land to grow the food for someone eating the SAD diet compared to someone eating a vegan-plant based diet. If someone eating the SAD diet were to eat vegan for just one day, they’d save more water than they would by not showering for a year. Your decision to eat a burger for dinner is not merely a health choice — it’s an environmental and political one as well. In fact, virtually anything you might do environmentally or politically in your lifetime is irrelevant compared to the simple decision of what to eat each day. You could devote your entire life to Greenpeace, and it will only amount to a puny fraction of what you’d accomplish by living as a resource-guzzling playboy who happens to be vegetarian."
Note: SAD = Standard American Diet

That is NEWS to me. Seriously.

I know that some people are choosing to be a vegetarian/vegan, but the argument that I've heard has always been the animal loving thing. I totally did not know that it has that massive impact to the environment. I'm not saying that I will now stop eating meat because I know of this environmental impact, but I definitely will consider that option more.

The other thing that it does, is that it makes me realise that there are so many things that I can learn about and then help do to improve the quality of life (for me, for others and for the next generation). If I could think that way, and act accordingly, and then help influence other people to realise these facts; it would make a difference. Wouldn't it?

Anyway - I will give this and my own meaning of life more thought.