The Joy of Garbage Day
There’s a weird joy I get during garbage day.
Or recyling day. Or cardboard day. It rotates week to week where we are. As I haul out our family’s waste, it allows me a chance to reflect on what I ordered, what I ate, what went to waste, and what were the hopes and dreams during the past two weeks, what new habits am I forming. There is some catharsis in letting those things go and feeling gratitude for them no longer clogging up my domicile. It’s also a bit magical that this orchestration exists for a person in a truck to drive past my home and someone else takes the bin and empties it out… and they do this every week for every home. What fortune!
There’s also some gamification during Garbage Day.
How much waste can I divert from landfill? Can I go with never exceeding the pickup limit? Can I put out to the curb all the recycling without there being an iota of recyclables left in the home? Will I ever go a week with no landfill garbage?
In the mid-nineties, as a young teenager, I attended a seminar on Java. Java was fresh and the only thing I really understood in those lectures was that Java offered automatic garbage collection for memory management. This provided some stability and less work to manage Java-built applications. Garbage Day had come to programming.
Garbage collection, recycling, and the likes fall into the realm of “maintenance” and while we all hail innovation, maintenance and the ability to sustain a stable environment form the basis for future work. It helps a start up go from flash in the pan to unicorn and helps unicorns turn into blue chips.
