Navigating a busy life full of distractions and disappointments, it's easy to forget about the world around you. Unwholesome diets and lack of empathy for the environment plague society today because of grueling work hours and the desire for a fast-paced city lifestyle. As a result, consumption itself is now controversial. I'm aware of my wastefulness and often feel a strong desire to change. So why haven't I? Restructuring daily routine can feel like a break-up. Ushering out comfort and familiarity is harsh, but sometimes it's necessary - a hurdle I've often struggled to leap. Throughout my daily routine, I consume a lot of stuff. My day begins with breakfast: Nutella on toast, a smoothie, and a banana. The Nutella spread comes in a glass container and the smoothie in a plastic bottle. I then brush my teeth using toothpaste encased in a plastic tube, spray myself with antiperspirant from an aerosol can, comb mousse through my morning mop from a plastic container

I expect that many young adults today, like me, often lie awake at night worrying about their place in the world. It seems the older we get, the more information we soak in, endlessly shaping our perception of reality and fueling our desire to be recognized and appreciated. Trying to interpret the grand scale of life in the modern human world, in my opinion, is what often makes us feel irrelevant, insignificant and unworthy of existence. Here's some food for thought: Growing up, Generation Y absorbed an immense amount of information as a result of the Internet. You’d think that with this revolutionary tool, people would band together and achieve extraordinary things. In many so ways we have. There are endless opportunities for betterment that come with the emergence of the Internet of Things. Yet in everyday society, social pressures continue to turn us against one another. With a rapidly increasing human population, the fight for significance is higher than ever. Image craft

"A white has no superiority over a black, nor a black has any superiority over white, except by piety and good action." - Prophet Muhammad. NO PLACE FOR BIGOTRY First impressions lay the foundation for any potential relationship. Everyone is different, with a unique perspective on life. But if there's one trait that never fails to dampen my first impression of a person, it's racism and discrimination. From a millennial perspective, I am tired of bigotry and its detrimental drain on society. It feels outdated, like it should exist only in history, yet it continues to flourish more than ever, especially in social media today, which has given bigots a platform to spread hatred with guaranteed anonymity. Facebook and Twitter have become tools for discriminatory expression. The recent terror attacks in Belgium, Turkey, France, Burkina Faso and Pakistan – not to mention the endless horror inflicted on the people of Syria and Iraq on a daily basis – hav

DIFFICULT TO DEFINE One thing I will always remember about being a kid, was my insatiable appetite for familiar comfort. I despised being pushed out of my comfort zone, and wanted everything to remain the same. I didn't enjoy branching out and meeting new people, and "sick-days" at home from school were cherished. As a teenager, I even mastered the ability of deceiving the receptionist at school and calling in sick, just so that I could sit at home and bask in the comfort of familiarity. Being sent off to school camp used to terrify me, as did spending the night in a strange bed at a friends house, or having to showcase my amateur athleticism. Something always pulled me back to simplicity and comfort; a place people often refer to as 'home'. At twenty-four, I haven't really changed, except for the fact that my comfort zone has vastly expanded over the years, and for the most part, I've come to understand that distance from comfort is the essential i