Trashed

Roughly a year ago I was in Las Vegas. I was there by myself playing in a series of poker tournaments. I am definitely a product of the Rounders/Moneymaker generation. If you have to Google that I don’t blame you, and if you don’t I’ll probably see you on the felt at some point.

Anyway, I was on a break and I called to check in with my wife, who has been amazingly supportive of my hobbies throughout the years. I could tell immediately by the sound of her voice that she had a rough day. She is an ICU nurse in a transplant center, so a bad day for her usually entails someone dying. This is something I have zero frame of reference on, as a bad day for me at the office usually entails a presentation going poorly, or missing on a KPI. Not the same.

Most of the time all I can do in these situations is listen with a sympathetic ear, remind her that I love her and that I am there for her, and let her get it out. However this time her bad day seemed to have triggered something from her past life. Before she went back to school to be a nurse her first degree was in environmental science. She is and always has been an ocean lover and passionate about the health of our planet.

I listened as she spiraled down a rabbit hole about how micro plastics are permeating nearly every corner of the environment. How they are being linked to health problems, a rise in cancers and other diseases and how they are being found in every link of the food chain. She mentioned how this made her feel helpless and gave her an existential fear for our future child or children, we had just started trying.

Unlike in previous similar situations, this time I felt like maybe I could offer something more than just a sympathetic ear. I told her that maybe taking an action, even a small one, might help alleviate at least some of this tension. I made her a promise that in the future when we were walking our dog on the beach we could start picking up some of the ever present plastic trash instead of just walking by it.

I didn’t know it then but this conversation would send me on a journey that would change my perspective on pollution, the environment, and who I am as a human being.

True to my word the next week when I got home we took our dog to the beach, something we do nearly every day, and along our walk I started picking up plastic. The first thing that struck me during that initial session was just how much plastic was on the beach. Prior to that I would notice it occasionally, a bottle cap or two, maybe an old plastic water bottle, but I would rarely pick it up. At most I would maybe think to myself, “man what a shame there is trash on such a beautiful beach.” I now see clearly the irony of that thought. Like so many things in life, it wasn’t until I actually started looking for it that I really saw it.

During that first walk I filled 2 dog bags with all sorts of small indiscriminate plastics shards, about 20 or so plastic bottle caps, straws and coffee stirrers. It seemed every few feet down the sand there was another collection of multicolored waste, mini mosaic’s formed from the remains of decades of pollution.

It was from this first, purposeful walk, that the idea for #Trophyplastic was born. The mission was clear and simple. Every time I walked the dog I would take an extra dog bag, we now use compostable ones, and the goal would be to just fill up one bag with plastic trash. It became immediately evident that trying to pick up every piece would be overwhelming, and now walking by all of it seemed preposterous, so I settled for an achievable and sustainable amount. I would then take a picture of the trash, write a blurb or a haiku about it and post it to the account. Maybe if I added a little more awareness to my small sphere of influence a few more people would pick up a few more pieces and in a small way I could contribute the the solution, instead of being a bystander to the problem.

It has now been over a year since that first time and I have continued to pick up trash every time I walk the dog. When I started out I thought maybe it would be cool to count the number of pieces, or weigh the bags and keep a tally. However after awhile it dawned on me that the amount didn’t matter. This wasn’t going to be a finite game, there was no way to “win” at picking up trash. Therefore there was no point in keeping score. Instead of clinging to a meaningless metric, to boast about a number that really had zero context in the larger picture, the real win would just be to keep doing it, to play it as an infinite game.

Yes I read Simon Sinek’s book The Infinite Game, yes it one of my favorite books of all time and yes that was a subtle reference to it. However until that moment the concepts in the book were just concepts to me. Interesting ones to be sure, but I had little or no context for them. Like many of you I had spent my life playing finite games. Games where you kept score, either with points, or chips, or numbers. I understood the idea of infinite games, but not the power of truly approaching a problem through that lens.

By taking away the score, you take away the barrier to entry for participation. It doesn’t matter if you pick up one piece of trash a year or 1000, it just matters that you play the game. You also neutralize all of the counter arguments from pessimists telling you that what your doing is to small to make a difference. You can continue comfortably in the knowledge that size is a score associate with a game you are not even playing. Your game, your goal, is simply to keep doing it, and you are winning every time you do.

I still post to the account, but its not nearly as many times as I pick up trash. I have also had many people tell me that what I am doing has inspired them to participate. Friends and family have posted pictures of themselves and their kids picking up trash. I have have seen strangers out on the beach doing the same thing and secretly hoped that maybe its because they saw my page.

The thing is I don’t check how many followers I have, its probably not many. Nor do I really promote the page outside of continuing to post to it. In hindsight its easy to see, the account was simply a catalyst. What started off as something intended to influence others, ended up as something much more valuable. A tool that kept me accountable to a promise I made.

If you are the type of person who walks by trash and thinks “what a shame there is trash on such a beautiful beach,” I don’t blame you. I don’t think it makes you a worse human, I am not here to judge. All I am saying is that I am no longer that person. I am now someone who will, more often than not, pick up trash when I see it. I am now someone who is playing an infinite game against plastic waste and that makes me feel good.