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Boast Magazine | Our Soul

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Sustainable Life. But What Kind of Life Is It, Exactly?

By Monika Szijjártó – English teacher and educational coach

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Sustainable life and modern burnout

Sustain. From the Latin sustinere — to hold up, to bear, to keep from falling.

The question almost nobody in the sustainable living movement is asking is this: hold up what, exactly?

Because if the answer is “this” — this pace, this noise, this particular arrangement of obligations and distractions we have agreed to call modern life — then sustainability becomes a much stranger project than we thought.

The Psychological Footprint We Never Measure

We have a precise vocabulary for ecological damage. Carbon output. Water usage. Biodiversity loss. We have metrics, targets and annual reports for every aspect of eco-friendly living.

But we have almost nothing equivalent for the interior life.

“We have optimised for not-dying.”

No unit of measurement for how much attention we traded away this year for content that left us emptier. No index tracking the slow erosion of our capacity for boredom, which is quietly the same thing as our capacity for original thought. No audit of how much we consumed in the name of self-care that was actually self-numbing.

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A modern family shares the same living room. Yet, each is absorbed in a separate screen — a quiet portrait of disconnection in the age of constant connectivity, reflecting the unseen human cost behind sustainable living ideals.

Call it the psychological footprint. It is real, it accumulates, and unlike carbon, nobody is measuring it for you.

Perhaps this is one of the hidden costs of modern sustainable lifestyle culture: we carefully measure what harms the planet while ignoring what slowly harms the person living on it.

The problem is not laziness. The problem is that an honest inventory is frightening. Once we truly examine what we are sustaining — which habits, relationships and versions of ourselves — we often realise that many of them were chosen for us long before we consciously chose them for ourselves.

Sustaining Versus Truly Living

There is a difference between keeping something alive and allowing it to thrive.

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Indoor plant in a dark corner

A houseplant kept in a dark corridor is technically alive. It is sustained. It will not die today. But it will never flower either.

A great deal of modern life — even what we now call sustainable living — looks exactly like that plant.

We have optimised for not dying. We track our sleep, manage our stress and schedule our joy. We compost our coffee grounds and return home from jobs that hollow us out. We choose organic cotton and spend our evenings too depleted to be genuinely present with the people we love.

The planet might survive this arrangement. The person inside us is less certain.

This is not an argument against caring for the environment. It is an argument that the environmental crisis and the crisis of modern burnout are deeply connected.

A person who has never asked what their own life is truly for will not suddenly find the clarity to ask it about civilisation. Self-knowledge is not a luxury that comes after serious work. It is a prerequisite for it.

This is why conversations around intentional living, mental well-being, and conscious lifestyle design matter just as much as conversations about sustainability itself.

The Sustainability Paradox

We know transformation is necessary at the level of the body, a career, a relationship or even a city we once loved.

And yet the dominant conversation about sustainable living — the one with the tote bags and carbon calculators — is still built almost entirely on the logic of preservation.

Which is, at minimum, an interesting contradiction.

The Century That Doesn’t Believe in Staying the Same

Here is the paradox nobody has named clearly enough.

The sustainability movement wants to preserve. Hold up, bear, keep from falling.

But every serious thinker of the 21st century — from complexity science to developmental psychology — tells us something different:
Living systems do not thrive by staying the same.

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Forest

They thrive by transforming. By becoming something they were not before.

A forest after a fire is not a failure of sustainability. It is sustainability working exactly as it should — through loss, disruption and renewal.

We understand this about ecosystems. We are simply reluctant to apply it to ourselves and to the reality of modern working life stress.

What If Sustainability Is the Wrong Question?

Perhaps the problem is not that we are sustaining the wrong things.

Perhaps the problem is that sustain is the wrong word entirely for a life, a culture and a century that are asking something more demanding from us.

Not: what do we keep?

But: what do we become?

These are not the same question.

The first looks backwards toward protection.
The second looks toward something that does not yet have a shape.

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mountain stream

It is less comfortable. It offers no checklist. But it may be the real question hidden underneath today’s conversations about sustainable living, self-awareness and conscious modern life.

And perhaps true sustainability is not about holding things up forever.

Perhaps it is about creating the conditions in which something healthier, wiser and more human can finally grow.

About the Author

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Monika Szijjarto, English teacher, education coach

Monika Szijjártó is an education coach and English language teacher, and an expert contributor to the Boast Magazine Contributor Programme.

An interview with Monika is available here, where she shares more about her work and professional journey. You can also learn more about her work on her website.

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