Could you live without your fridge? I heard a woman talking about doing exactly that during a PechaKucha talk.
She didn’t live fridge-free as an experiment. It wasn’t a 30 day or 365 day challenge. No. She lived fridge and freezer free in the UK for years. There were audible gasps around the room when she told us. How? How can you do that? Why would you want to?
Some things are so ingrained in our way of life that we don’t think to question them. I went on a rail journey down the east coast of America with my husband a few years ago. As part of the trip we decided to walk from Lexington to Concord, where the first battles of the War of Independence were fought. We got a bus from Boston and then asked in Lexington where the start of the walk was, explaining we were on foot. “Drive to…” began the response.
The woman who lived fridge-free pointed out millions of people around the world live without electricity and therefore don’t have access to high powered refrigeration. She had gone to live on a narrow boat and they couldn’t power a fridge without a noisy generator. She also wanted to reduce her carbon footprint.
Having taken the leap, she found it quite easy to live without a fridge. It meant some simple planning to ensure perishables are eaten quickly. She also pointed out the large number of preserved goods we don?t need to store in the fridge but most of us do because, well, that’s where we’re told to put them.
Now circumstances mean she has to have a fridge at home and she finds herself buying more food than she needs because she has two empty shelves to fill.
Why am I telling you this story? Partly because I think it’s interesting that you can live without a fridge. But really because content creation reminds me of the fridge.
It’s on all the time, whether you want it or not. It guzzles time and effort. It makes noise constantly. We create content because we’re told we should. You can broadcast 24 hours a day. Twitter allows you to comment on the minutiae of your life or share pointless feel-good quotes every minute. We’re told you need a blog, email marketing, to generate video, that SEO dictates your content must be several hundred words long for it to surface organically. So we keep stocking up more content, generating more than we can possibly consume.
Think about your content creation strategy: are you keeping too many things in the fridge?
If you’d like help with your content strategy then let’s have a chat about what you need to be focusing on, and what you can leave out.
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2 Responses
Interesting piece Rachel – thanks for sharing. Can totally relate to the US-car obsession too. A few years back my wife and I were backpacking in LA. We had a pretty meagre budget (but lots of time) so walked to lots of places. People literally stared, slack jawed, as they whizzed past in their huge 4x4s. We became quite a novelty. People just *didn’t* walk in that area.
We went to Washington later in our trip and we ended up getting taxis from the city centre back to our hotel because it was so pedestrian unfriendly!