Dec 05 2007
About
Hey, I’m Andy Whitfield and I’m the geek in 1 Geek, 1 Earth. I’m a web designer at the Fuqua School of Business, which is the business school for Duke University. I’ve been married to my beautiful wife for almost 10 years now and we have a 5 year old daughter. And this blog is the chronicle of how I learn to become eco-friendly.
I’m a huge geek - I still play pen and paper role playing games of all varieties. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously. I play video games of all shapes and sizes. And I play poker. Heck, I’m even in two fake sports leagues, where we obsess over teams of fake baseball and football players (Front Office Baseball League shoutout!) But pretty much for most of my life, I just lived it. I’d hang out with my wife and daughter. With my free time, I’d play World of Warcraft or watch movies. I just existed, which isn’t a bad life in and of itself. But in October of 2007, I was working on trying to figure out how to save some money and get myself and my wife out of debt. I was reading a lot of financial blogs (which I still read, btw) and The Simple Dollar was reviewing or had just reviewed the book, Your Money or Your Life. It tells you how to get out of debt and get a flow of passive income going so that you can reach the point where you don’t have to work again and you can devote yourself to your dream, to your cause.
Dream? Cause?
I suddenly realized I couldn’t tell you what my dream was and I certainly didn’t have a cause. For a while, I tried to convince myself that it really didn’t matter if I didn’t have a dream; that the life I was living was just fine. But the more I thought about it, the more it created a pit in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. I needed to give myself a cause, something meaningful (other than my family) that I could do with my time, so that I wouldn’t wake up and find that I had wasted my entire life playing video games.
So, how did I end up with environmentalism?
Well, first, it had always been one of those causes where I had thought, “That’s a really great cause, I should do something about that!” and then would promptly proceed to forget about it. Second, it fits in with my second new life task - becoming frugal. A lot of the things that I can do to become eco-friendly also end up helping me become frugal and get myself out of debt. Third, it is admittedly trendy, which means that it will be easier for me to find information on environmental change and eco-friendly products. And finally, at least for right now, it can be self contained. I can work on changing the way I am and the way I live my life. And maybe down the line, I can work on changing other people or changing policy. But it can start with an internal journey of self discovery and that suits where I am in my life very well.
