October 20, 2025

Polyester clothing vs. natural fibers

My senior year of college, I worked on an engineering project for Hanes attempting to create waterproof clothing by melting plastic nano-spheres onto fabric.

The technology kinda worked — water did technically bead off the surface. The problem was those plastic beads came off during wear and washing, entering water runoff and adhering to people's skin.

It occurred to me then as it does now: if experimental plastic coatings leach into our bodies, what about the plastic clothes we're already wearing every day?

Unfortunately, research confirmed my suspicions: synthetic fabrics (aka polyester, nylon, spandex, acrylic) continuously shed microplastic fibers that penetrate skin and enter our bloodstream.

Beyond microplastic absorption, synthetic fabrics have other problems. Polyester becomes notoriously smelly because bacteria thrive on the petroleum-based fibers and the fabric traps heat and moisture against your skin. Additionally, the chemical treatments applied to synthetics — fungicides, flame retardants, antimicrobials, waterproofing agents — add additional toxic load as they off-gas and absorb through skin contact.

Natural fibers function entirely differently. Wool possesses remarkable properties: it's naturally flame-resistant (chars rather than melts), temperature-regulating, and odor-resistant (you can literally wear wool for weeks without it developing the stench that polyester generates in hours).

Hemp, on the other hand, is known for its extraordinary durability, and minimal pesticides requirements during cultivation.

Plus, all natural materials are biodegradable, breaking down harmlessly rather than persisting as environmental pollutants for centuries.

Practice
​Step-by-step instructions to turn theory into healing.

• Audit your wardrobe: Check clothing labels for fabric content. Aim to identify what percentage of your wardrobe is synthetic (polyester, nylon, spandex, acrylic) versus natural (wool, cotton, linen, hemp, silk). This awareness is the first step toward transition.
• Prioritize base layers: The clothing touching your skin matters most. Replace synthetic underwear, undershirts, and socks with natural fiber alternatives first. These items have maximum skin contact and are relatively affordable to replace.
• Invest in quality wool: Quality wool is expensive but lasts for years and requires less frequent washing.
• Choose natural activewear alternatives: While synthetic "performance" fabrics dominate athletic wear, merino wool and bamboo offer comparable moisture-wicking without plastic exposure.
• Wash synthetics separately and less frequently: If you can't immediately replace synthetic clothing, minimize microplastic shedding by washing these items less often and using a filter bag designed to capture microfibers before they enter waterways.
• Buy secondhand natural fibers: Thrift stores often contain older clothing made before synthetic materials dominated manufacturing. Vintage wool sweaters, cotton shirts, and linen pants are frequently available at fraction of new prices.

Illusions of me

The human mind is remarkable for its propensity to create meaning from patterned bits of information.

The words you're reading right now, for instance, are technically just flashing pixels arranged in particular patterns. There's nothing inherently meaningful about these shapes — it’s just that your mind generates the meaning by recognizing patterns and applying learned associations.

Optical illusions reveal this pattern-making machinery in action. Look at the images below. Is it two faces or a candlestick? A vase or two profiles? Your mind toggles between interpretations, unable to hold both simultaneously, desperately trying to resolve the ambiguity into something.

The mind can fall for anything that resembles a recognizable pattern. It sees a billboard advertising a juicy burger and immediately overlooks it's just paint on canvas, not actual food.

But optical illusions and advertising tricks are the tip of the iceberg. The deepest illusion of them all is the feeling of being an individuated self — a "you" set against the backdrop of everything else. That “I’m over here, while everything else is over there” feeling.

Thoughts are arranged in such a way as to create this illusion. They are the metaphorical squiggles that your mind interprets as a face — as a "me." The constant mental narration, the recurring preferences and aversions, the memories strung together into a coherent story — all of these create the convincing impression of being a separate self.

Just as you can shift your perception to see the vase instead of the faces, you can learn to see through the illusion of selfhood. Viewed from the “right angle” — particularly during deep meditation — the pattern dissolves. What seemed like a solid, separate ‘me’ reveals itself as another trick of pattern recognition, another meaning imposed on formless experience.

This isn't nihilistic or depressing. It's liberating. When you see through the illusory self, even momentarily, a tremendous weight lifts. You discover that what you are is not the pattern — you're the awareness in which all patterns appear and dissolve.

Practice with me below.

Meditate
​Bite-sized audios to help you become the master of your mind.

“Attention. You. Right there. The one who’s having secret thoughts behind your eyes. This is a reminder. That you are not inside your face.” — Mindchatter

When you place 100% of your attention on your left foot, what happens? Give it a go.

For the briefest of moments it feels like you are inside of your left foot, yeah?

In other words, you probably have this certainty that you're "behind your eyes and between your ears" simply because your attention is habitually placed upon what you can see and hear.

Alternatively, if you were to shift your attention more and more to your heart, you would immediately get the sense that you reside there, too — that your essence is contained within that expansive field of gratitude and compassion.

Neither of these locations are precisely true.

Awareness is formless, dimensionless, and uncontainable. Whatever arises from attention is an object, not the space itself. You are not inside yourself; your self is inside You.

By the way, I got this quote from this song — it’s one of the more creative ones I’ve heard in a while.

Journal
​Contemplative questions on the nature of inner freedom.