KommunityKoin, KoinPurse, TheKoinBlog

Hello, I'm Chelsea. And I believe we can create a greener future without sacrificing the things we love (even if that thing is cheese). Join me on the quest to find joy in sustainable living.

Lowimpact.org is a workers’ co-op on a mission to help you gain skills to produce things for yourself, your family and your community.

In our co-op, we have learned something simple but often forgotten. People stay motivated when their efforts matter. Not in some abstract sense or as part of a quarterly report, but in a way that feels real and visible. When they see that what they do changes things. When a mother finds care for her

Once upon a time, we paid for things with money. Now, increasingly, we pay with ourselves; our thoughts, our habits, our desires, our attention. The modern economy isn’t just selling us products; it’s selling us back to ourselves, in a more controlled, more predictable, and more profitable form. Surveillance capitalism, a term coined by Harvard

In the course of my life, I have witnessed the broad spectrum of human fortune. I have seen men adorned with riches, and others clothed in rags. I have seen palaces filled with idle discontent and modest homes suffused with intellectual joy. It has become clear to me that poverty, as society defines it, is

It has been said, often by those who profit by it, that competition and self-interest drive all human progress. I have never been quite convinced of this doctrine. Indeed, I am inclined to think that a world driven purely by self-interest must, at some point, begin to eat its own soul. Take, for example, the

I think we live in a time that measures success in strange ways. Square footage. Follower counts. Air miles. A growing list of things that are easy to count but hard to care about. Somewhere along the way, the quieter idea of eudaimonia got pushed aside. The ancient Greeks, Aristotle especially, had this word for

I talk a lot about the evils of wage slavery, about independence, being your own man, etc.. So, here's a little "devil's advocate"; just to keep things balanced. By the time someone refers to their job as “wage slavery,” they’re not just being dramatic, they’re reflecting a deeper cultural fatigue. The phrase has become common

There is no system that has not, at some point in history, betrayed the dignity of the human soul. The state becomes oppressive; the church becomes corrupt; the revolution becomes its own tyrant. Capitalism, too, is no exception. Yet unlike the systems that explicitly rule by authority or dogma, capitalism claims no moral authority at

I often wonder, as I watch a man dart across the street, phone in one hand and coffee in the other, whether he is chasing time or running from it. We are in a strange hurry these days, as though something vital lies just around the next corner; if only we might refresh the page

There’s a strange mood in the air; like the moment before a summer storm. The skies look fine, but the light feels wrong. We live in a time where so much is accelerating (data, money, artificial intelligence, social unrest) yet something else seems to be winding down. Capitalism, or at least the version of it

By the time Thomas Paine published Agrarian Justice in 1797, he had already helped ignite revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Common Sense had roused American colonists to shake off British rule. The Rights of Man defended the French Revolution and dismantled the aristocratic order with Paine’s typical firebrand clarity. But Agrarian Justice, a

There’s a phrase that’s been tossed around so casually it almost sounds harmless: underachiever. The word lands like a diagnosis; mildly disappointing, but not fatal. It conjures the image of someone who could have done more but didn’t, someone with “potential” left unrealized, someone whose mediocrity, we’re told, is largely a matter of personal failure.

I have noticed that many people go through life much as one might pass through a foggy field at dusk; head lowered, steps mechanical, muttering to oneself about the damp. They exist, yes. They awaken in the morning and pull on their shoes. They mindlessly discuss the weather and taxes and work. They accumulate trinkets

We are surrounded by so much, and yet we enjoy so little. Our homes are filled, our calendars are full, our options are endless. And still, many of us sit in front of our televisions, flipping through a thousand movies, only to sigh and say, “There’s nothing to watch.” We stand in our kitchens, staring