“Buy, Buy, Buy!” said Madison Avenue on the heels of the Depression and two world wars. Driven by the scarcity model, that’s what Americans did. So much so that we’ve become professional hoarders. In fact, each of us takes up 3 times as much space as we did in 1950, and we’re filling these spaces at breakneck speed; a fact made clear by the $22B personal storage industry that houses our excess. Wo
rse, since 1950, our lives require 6 times as much energy and 24 times as much personal debt. Our behavior is bankrupting ourselves and the environment. With all this, you’d hope we’d be happier. We’re not. Instead of more happiness, we have more pollution, bills and headaches. This way of life isn’t working for us. Something must change. Enter life. Launched by Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger.com, the world’s leading environmental news-site, LifeEdited is a movement whose mission is to save us money, lower our environmental footprints and give us more time, freedom and happiness. Our movement includes:
Architectural Design. Using smart spatial design to get more out of less space. Product and Service Design. Creating quality, multifunctional, space-efficient objects and using sharing systems to move from ownership to access. Behavior Design. Teaching how to edit your life and how to keep it that way. LifeEdited begins with two tiny New York City apartments and an off-grid home, followed by various other demographic-specific renovations. Eventually we see developing holistically designed apartment buildings that maximize the use of sharing systems. Behavior change happens when the alternative to the status quo is too attractive to ignore. LifeEdited is building that alternative. We present that alternative by pulling together existing solutions and building or catalyzing the creation of missing ones. We actively share our solutions via traditional media, web, video, books, curated dinners, conferences and tours, as well as renting out and selling LifeEdited spaces. We show people how they can easily design an edited life for themselves. We prove that businesses can profit from building and designing the offerings of an edited life. We show governments that they can please the public by conceiving policies that support this way of life. We show how editing individual lives benefits life for everyone. Editing. The skill of the 21st century. Join us.
