How Your Daily Habits Can Affect More Change Than Voting

There’s a quote that I heard a long time ago that says something to the effect of, “success is simply the accumulation of daily habits practiced over a long period of time.”

For the past few years I’ve taken the “daily habit” approach to my health and life in general.

The idea is that you adopt a new daily habit every few weeks. Ideally the daily habit is something that doesn’t take very long to do (flossing your teeth is a perfect example). It’s a great way to bring about change in our lives. The reason why I like it so much is that it involves something that is easy to do, yet not time consuming. On top of that, it’s about adding something into your life verses focusing on something you’d like to change or remove from your life (like drinking a beer when you walk in the door from work).

Adding healthy daily habits (whether they be food choices or anything else) is always a better option than trying to break a bad habit.

The title of this article is called How Your Daily Habits Can Affect More Change Than Voting. I look at voting every four years like letting your house get messy for 6 months and then one day spending hours upon hours cleaning it up. If you were to simply do just a little bit of clean up each day, you would never have to spend 10 hours and a full day focused on clean up. Plus you’d save yourself a big headache of stress and worry in the meantime.

Real change happens when we change ourselves and how we interact with people. A polititian isn’t going to change much, mostly because they’re bought and paid for. If we stop relying on government to try to change our life for the better and focus on our daily habits and making the world better, change will happen naturally.

The game is rigged and the infrastcture is built on sand. Our healthcare system is fundementally flawed. Our financial institution is a house of cards waiting to fall. The power that we have involves the use of money. If we were to not buy a certain type of oil for gas (eehhem BP!) for 2 weeks we could cripple a business like that on a world wide level.

In order to really change industry and in turn political policy, we need to vote each day with how we spend our money. Some would even argue we ought to wean ourselves off using money all together.

How can we get out of using money? Well, it’s almost impossible but I can think of a couple ways to reduce our dependency on the collapsing dollar.

Barter for things when you can

Bartering in my opinion can be one of the most honest and ethical forms of human transaction. It’s because it simply involves a reciprocal exchange of equal value in the form of that which is tangible. If I need some eggs, and you need help with fixing your car, why not just trade? Those are two real things that are traded which benefits both parties equally (if agreed upon prior to the exchange by both parties).

The only thing that is exchanged is perhaps a little bit of time, some effort and a little sweat.

Why do we work all day for something that’s constantly being de-valued and inflated (which in reality has its effect on your value, skill-set and hours you put in each day at your job) in order to use fake pieces of paper to trade for something tangible? Why don’t we trade for equal value, two real things? I fix your car and you give me some eggs, that way we don’t have to exchange paper currency.

If you get a chance to do a barter that makes sense, always go for it.

Grow some food

The more food you grow the less money you’ll need to spend at the grocery store. Let’s say you’re able to save $150 dollars a month by growing your own salad greens, fruits and vegetables. If you did that for 5 years you’d end up saving $9000 dollars. Now what if you put that money into buying some gold or silver?

The money you save from buying food could go towards a vacation, tithe, savings, debt, clothes or anything else. When you start freeing up some of your money by growing your own food, suddenly some of the stresses of life become less asphyxiating.

Imagine being able to get out of debt using money you once spent on food?

Ride a bike more often

If you live in a small town, riding a bike can not only help you get more exercise and become healthier, but it can save you tons of money in gas each month. Any way you can to free up money from the expense column is going to help you relieve stress. When you lower your expenses, you to not have to work as hard (or as long for that matter) at your job. Instead of putting in 50 hour weeks to pay the bills, suddenly you have more money when you work only 40 hours a week. Now you can spend time with your family. What a freaking concept.

Not only do you have more free time for fun and family, you can work on that dream business you wanted to start.

Once we realize that we have power and we can cause massive change by how we spend our money each and every single day, then we can start to see some real change in not only our country but in the world.

When money stops flowing, suddenly the corporations who lobby our government for policy change, will take notice. More social change can happen, if we were to simply sit down and make some real ethical choices about how and where we spend our money.

Don’t buy for convenience sake. Support your local farmer or local business and encourage others to do the same.

In my opinion It’s well worth it to pay a little bit more but to support a struggling single mom who has a home business rather than buying the same thing at Walmart because you could save $1.98 on the item.

Dollar bills on printed paper are simply a representation of an energy exchange for the creation of value between two parties. When we realize we can create that value (by learning trades or skills), we can trade it for other value, we can eliminate the middleman all together, which is paper money.

When we do not have to spend our paper money, not only do we get to keep more of it for us, but it doesn’t go into the pockets of major corporations, who use it to lobby for laws you might not even agree with. It doesn’t make sense.

By bartering and growing your own food, and not supporting corporations that exploit underpaid workers and rape the environment, we can effect change in the world, get out of debt and have fun all at the same time.

Why vote every four years when you can vote each and every single day by how we spend our money?