Wake Up Call

At the most basic level, what do we really need in our lives to survive and thrive as happy and successful humans?

• Air (oxygen)
• Water
• Food
• Shelter (warmth)
• Safety / Ability to protect ourselves

I would also add:

• Sunshine (Vitamin D)
• Movement / Exercise
• Human interaction (we literally go crazy without it)
• and a sense of purpose (using your strengths & talents to help others).

You DO NOT need a cell phone, or a laptop, or a tablet, or a TV, or a bluetooth speaker, or earbuds, or a drone, or a virtual reality headset, or (fill in the blank), in order to survive and be happy. And you ESPECIALLY do not need social media! In fact, I would argue these things are slowly killing us and making us much less happy and healthy.

So can someone PLEASE explain to me why we feel the need to constantly innovate at an ever increasing pace? Why do we have to keep producing new "gadgets" with more features, and constantly strive to make everything bigger, better, and faster? I can tell you, it has a whole lot to do with GREED. We're destroying ourselves and our planet because we feel like we constantly need more, More, MORE!

We don't need these things, we want them. Again, greed. We are greedy for fancy new "things" (to impress people we don't even like), and others are greedy for our money, so they will keep producing the things we want.

This video will get you thinking about the true cost of our unhealthy desire to constantly consume, consume, consume...

Wake Up Call from The Gaia Foundation on Vimeo.

Find out more at www.gaiafoundation.org/wakeupcall/ …& join the conversation: #WakeUpCall.

Have you ever felt like we're living through a nightmare of consumption? That you wish you could un-hook yourself and reconnect with a life that is somehow more real and vivid? Then perhaps you're ready to heed Earth's Wake Up Call.

Today we live in a time when there is little to no understanding of how the goods we consume and take for granted came into being. Without this we lack the knowledge to understand the true costs of our consumption, and the power to take action. As a result we have become disconnected from Earth - the origin of our health, wealth and all of the 'things' we depend on.

Wake Up Call takes us on a fast-paced, animated glimpse of the true costs behind some of our most prized possessions - our electronic gadgets. Joining the dots between the stages of extraction, production, consumption and disposal, it reveals that, although our gadgets appear sleek and shiny, their appearance is misleading.