Source: Return to Minimally-Processed Food

Official link: sustainabilitist.com/free-handbook

Source: Return to Minimally-Processed Food

Hello folks, I wanted to share a breakdown of a book that takes a unique angle on the betterment space. It's called The Personal Sustainability Handbook: 60+ Practices to Sustainabilize Your Health, Finances, Relationships and Beyond by Thomas Lu.

If you are facing some life conundrum or are simply seeking to improve your daily practices, this book may help. The author has background in sustainability and describes himself as an "unsustainability survivor," and the entire premise of the book is about treating your life as an ecosystem.

That is, instead of pushing for a temporary need at the cost of some aspect of your life, it focuses on building sustainable practices to ensure your life doesn't fall apart. It's a dense, actionable read that breaks down what the author calls personal sustainability into five pillars.

The 5 Pillars of Personal Sustainability

Instead of generic advice like eating better or saving money, the book presents a framework of 60+ practices across five foundational areas of life.

• Physical Health: Optimizing your physical baseline and environment, such as tuning your sleep environment and adjusting waking frames to fix circadian rhythms (among other practices).
• Diet: Improving the constitution of your food and feeding schedules, such as reevaluating the 3-meals-a-day paradigm and finding an eating window that fits your true needs (among other practices).
• Mental health: Developing constructive ways of thinking and psychological space, such as cultivating acute mind-body awareness and using mortality for decision-making (among other practices).
• Personal Finance: Securing financial stability and moving toward financial independence, such as shifting from a net consumer to a net producer and focusing on the hourly rate (among other practices).
• Relationships: Curating one's network and interacting with others with high emotional intelligence, such as letting go of your persona and surrounding yoursefl with true supporters (among other practices).

Key Takeaways

Approach-wise, the book is precise and comprehensive relative to other betterment books. Here are a few points that may strike a reader while reading it:

• Systemic Thinking: The book argues that a failure in one pillar eventually compromises the others, like how a high-paying career (personal finance) means nothing if it destroys your body (physical health) or alienates your loved ones (relationship).
• Action and Inspiration: It reads like a mix of a philosophical manifesto and an operations manual. Each section outlines a problem, explains the structural unsustainability of some habit, and hands you a behavioral framework you can readily act upon.
• The Broader Philosophy: It positions personal sustainability as a part of systemic sustainability in its official framework, with the message being that in order to make the outer world sustainable, you have to get the personal foundation dialed in first.

All things considered, I think it's an ambitious book covering a lot of ground without being too long. If you love books like Atomic Habits for its practicality or Antifragile for its systems approach, this fits right into that slot and reads like a standalone manual for living.

Source: Is Bill Gates Going to Save Us?

Source: Recommended Resources

Source: Sleep Optimization

Source: Sustainable Diet

Or as some famous bigshot put it, "the mind can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven."

Yes, many of us want to try to make the world a better place. While that may be considered commendable and respectable in some way, if you can’t manage your own health, finances or relationships, I'll be blunt—you have no business trying to fix the systemic problems around you.

The truth is, a lot of people use activism as a coping mechanism to avoid personal accountability. It’s way easier to yell at a corporation or protest than it is to look in the mirror and... fix their sleep, adopt healthy habits and pay off their debts.

Heck, if your lifestyle is so chaotic that you're constantly burnt out and unhealthy (or unhealthy with others?), you aren't saving the world but being one of its liabilities. As this article argues well, true sustainability is an inside job, so maybe consider cleaning your own house before trying to save our civilization.

Source: Use Death as Your Starting Point

Source: Health

This is a book that offers a framework for solving most health, finance and relationship issues. The official site also gives the first 15 chapters away for free.

Source: Sustainable Diet