I shouldn’t have. Colin Beaven’s personality just rubs me the wrong way. He might have done some good things, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a better person, and it doesn’t make me want to listen to him disjointedly preach at me for an hour and a half.

Here are some of his own words, to justify my dislike:

“It’s not meant to be scientific; it’s just meant to be philosophical.”

“When I started this project, I just thought I was just going to, like, make less garbage, not travel so much, and wouldn’t I be a hero?”

“My mind wants to tell me that I’m the only one that’s important, so I have to keep teaching myself over and over and over again that that’s not true.”

Everything he does seems like a publicity stunt. Instead of failing to make a pot-in-pot refrigerator (which if he’d done some research he would have known wouldn’t work well in our relatively humid and cool environment), and then mooching ice off his neighbors, wouldn’t it have been better to downgrade to the smallest possible refrigerator and then discuss how to preserve foods without refrigeration? Considering that many people in the U.S. still have second refrigerators or freezers, that would probably have been more useful (and less off-putting to the general public).

Speaking of mooching, Beaven’s approach didn’t seem take into account anything he did outside his home. Turning off the electricity, but then using it at an office (and to, you know, write a blog)—doesn’t that seem hypocritical? We all do this to some extent, whether it’s eating at a restaurant or enjoying the AC at a movie theater, but his bombastic claims make it seem worse. To me, Beaven is the modern-day Thoreau, who wrote about simple living while sponging off his buddy Emerson.

The exaggeration is the worst. The only way he could actually have no impact on the environment is if he killed himself—and even then his funeral would consume resources and pollute.

Okay, off my high horse now. Next time I have the urge to watch something I know I’m going to hate, please stop me.

We tried to be good beforehand by packing lunch, snacks, and water bottles for the ride up. That also made the trip faster, because we didn’t have to stop along the way. But once we got up there we didn’t even have the energy to think about the environmental impact of the things we did.

The whole thing has made me realize that part of the reason we can reduce our footprint is because we have the time and the money to do it. Making our lives less stressful and saving money are actually environmental goals, because they free us up to focus on how our habits impact the environment. From now on I’m going to try to keep in mind that our actions are all interrelated—if we improve in one area, it helps in others, too.

And I’m going to try to get some sleep.