Sharing Is Good

Sharing allows us to create a new definition of value, not based on currency but on how much a thing, action, or person enriches our lives.

The sharing economy has given birth to an entire generation of business people who think it’s more important to fill a need, improve a community, solve problem, or reduce waste than it is to make a profit.

Sharing may not be a new idea as a personal behavior, but that doesn’t mean it’s not revolutionary.

Sharing food doesn’t only mean giving and receiving food stuffs from other people.

Social activities are an integral part of cohousing communities, so neighbors know each other very well.

Sharing your time helps people save money, eliminate multiple car trips, and support the local economy.

Peer-to-peer errand and task networks make it easy to hire your neighbors to complete short-term projects.

When people share their time, new skills are learned, new connections forged, and self-sufficiency gained.

The sharing of skills, knowledge, and time is a very important part of the collaborative consumption movement.

We should try to put a ‘shared-item’ in the hands of someone who needs it and will use it immediately.

To be a good citizen of the sharing economy, you must have an adventurous spirit and be willing to blaze a new and wonderful trail.

Sharing may not be new, but adopting a lifestyle centered around collaborative consumption is still uncharted territory for many of us.

Businesses, especially locally owned, small- to mid-sized businesses, have a huge capacity for sharing.

The best way to deal with a lack of trust is to be trustworthy yourself.

Crippling trust issues that prevent you from interacting with your community are bad.

It might be a little cynical, but most of us just don’t like the idea of other people touching our stuff.

People are forgetting is that money isn’t the only way to measure something’s value.

In short, sharing means being flexible and trusting our fellow humans, and this too can make us feel unsafe.

We like driving our own cars and buying brand-new things because it means we’re in control of the situation, and we know what to expect.

It’s not that we don’t have enough time, it’s just that we’re not using that time efficiently.

We don’t like change. It’s new and scary and has the potential for failure.

We gauge our success in life by the type and number of things we possess, and constantly compare our things to our neighbor’s things.

We see sharing as cheating by those who don’t work as hard as we do.

As we get older, the concept of sharing becomes more complicated.

Many parents teach their children to share without reservation.

Sharing sounds so simple, even childish.

The “sharing economy” is based on the principle that the world already contains all of the supplies and resources we need to survive.

The early currencies teach us an important lesson about money and value, namely, that currency only has value if we say it does.

Through simple barters, people could trade items of value to obtain things that they needed.

Sharing isn’t new, but the way we’re doing it now is unlike anything we’ve attempted in the past.

New technologies and cultural networks now allow us to share in ways and on a scale that has never been possible before.

We are programmed to share, but as a society, we’ve worked hard to forget it.

Think about beehives or ant hills, where tasks are divided among different members of the community so the entire population can grow and thrive.

It turns out that sharing is deeply intertwined with successful evolution.

Sharing isn’t complicated. It means giving others access to what we have so that they can fill a need.