Big Questions? Choices. Lifestyle. What is the "Good" Life?
Some Canadian researchers figured out that to support all the world’s people at the U.S. level of consumption, we would need four Earths, not one.
Average American throws away one ton per year.
Each ton produced requires (=costs) another 20 tons in raw materials.
Consider your values and habits and how they affect the Earth.
What activities really bring you pleasure? Most people say:
- Contacts with nature
- Relationships with people
- Creative activities
What is the “good life”? What is your personal “American dream”? Most people (without giving it much thought if any) assume these things mean making a lot of money and spending it. Result is: addiction to STUFF. In the end it is just as expensive, unsatisfying, destructive, and dead-end as addiction to heroin. The only difference is, it’s legal. Even expected (if there was ever any such thing as a drug “pusher”, Madison Avenue is it). The cure is just as hard and the rewards just as great.
Make a goal of scaling down, being efficient, wasting less, buying as little as possible, simplifying your life . . . you can see it as beating the system, or as honoring a bigger, older, more universal “system”.
Get things repaired instead of getting a new one; support local small business. Mend clothes. Drive as little as possible (every gallon of gas creates 5½ lbs of CO2). Walk. Bike. Find ways not to have to commute.
How many pairs of shoes do you need? Think about what your life to be about, what gives your life a purpose. Having the most stuff? More than one person has figured out that what really meant something was: understanding love, being of service, feeling whole and complete, leaving some kind of useful legacy, being part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
Think about what “quality of life” means to you. More stuff? Or beautiful surroundings, serenity, plenty of leisure, doing work you like, having something to believe in, having loving relationships with other people—and not necessarily only people, making a difference in the world, being loved.
Most people say that they would be happy if only they could make twice as much money as they make. Why then are these people no happier than people who make only half as much? We look suspiciously like hamsters in a treadmill—the faster we run, the faster the wheel makes us run. Don’t you ever wonder why it now takes two incomes per household to afford a roof over your head where it only took one breadwinner in your parent’s time? And who benefits from all that extra labor if it isn’t you?
Do you realize that you could have just as good a life, or better—and a lot more time with your family—by subsistence-farming on a few acres as by staying on the double-income commuter treadmill?
We feel sorry for Third World people living in grass huts and call them “poor”, but are they any less happy than you and I? There is certainly no question that their lifestyle is a thousand times more environmentally friendly than ours.
We see the world (and treat it) in the wrong way, as a one-way flow, from raw material (always extracted from nature in one way or another), to producer to consumer to landfill, and the faster the flow the more “healthy” we claim the economy is. Is this sick or what?
We are brought up to believe that shopping, consuming, spending money and acquiring things are the ways to reward ourselves and get satisfaction. We are easy prey to Madison Avenue because of our pre-programming from millions of years of hunting and gathering (what else is shopping, after all?) makes us absolutely compulsive about this kind of activity—going out, searching, investing effort to acquire something of value, then bringing home our prize. Our lives have always depended on this behavior.
Now, this is probably a subversive idea, so don’t go spreading it around, but just between you and me, there is an even better way to satisfy the universal hunting/gathering/shopping compulsion—better because: 1) you don’t have to spend a dime, and 2) the inventory is endless, and 3) you get fresh air and exercise at the same time, and 4) you get the added dimensions of beauty, awe, wonder, mystery, and the thrill of discovery, and 5) you never know what you will find, so you also get the gambler’s fix of anticipation and reward-rush into the bargain.
To get the most from this kind of shopping it helps to prepare yourself a little by studying up ahead of time to know what you might expect out there and to know what you’ve found when you’ve found it. But this isn’t necessary—you might be the type who likes to start from scratch, to be intrigued by the basic, commonplace things at first and then gradually move your way up to the rare and exceptional. If you haven’t figured it out long ago, this kind of free “shopping” requires you to go to your nearest marsh or patch of woods or meadow or creek and just start looking. If you think this sounds boring it is only because it is all so foreign and new to you (so far) that you don’t have a frame of reference. Nevertheless, be assured that two million years of ancestry have equipped you for exactly this kind of shopping, and you will catch on quickly.
Anyway, isn’t the traditional kind of shopping just a little bit boring when you come right down to it—if predictability is any measure of it?
I think it is exactly because this kind of shopping is free that we hear so little about it. Nobody advertises it. Nobody directs our attention to it, teaches courses on it, makes movies about it. Silence. I think it is the best-kept subversive secret in our culture today.
How does our other big compulsion—religion—enter into the picture? Our modern ethic says “consume more and thou shalt be happy”. One minister says, by contrast: “Honor God (by honoring his creations), take care of creatio, share your bread with the hungry, and joy will come as a by-product of service.” We miss the boat by having the goal of “first pursue joy . . .”
Luxurious living requires exploitation. Period. Whether out of sight and mind, or not. (We are very careful to keep the ugly side of consumerism out of sight, both the pre-consumption phase when both labor and land are raped, and at the end of the cycle, when we conveniently throw it all “away”—out of sight, out of mind.) I often think we would be a lot more careful about our habits if we had to get all we needed from our own property and (especially) if we had to dispose of all our waste on our own property, like most farmers have always done.
Which brings up another issue [Talk about the one-way stream of soil and food down the sewer pipes and down the rivers; vs. simple recycling—making an asset out of a liability].
Thoreau: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
Mark Twain: “What is the chief aim of man? To get rich. What is God the one and only tree? Money is God.”
Frugality had its waves of popularity (occasionally enforced as during the Depression), from early Puritan settlements on the East Coast to the Utopian communes of the 19th Century to the Back-to-the-Earth Movement spawned by the 60s. but the more flashy approach of Madison Avenue always won out in “middle America”.
“Post-materialists” of Northern European countries hae led the way in:
economic security, meaningful work, a meaningful life, environmental improvement
Neighborhood “eco-teams” in Holland.
Full closets and empty hearts.
How little can you get away with? Even in such things as toothpaste and shampoo.
Credit card debt, bankruptcies rose dramatically in U.S. “80% of Americans don’t understand basic financial principles.”
Kids and advertisers—the evil conspirator twins.
A lot of this from “Escaping from Affluenza”, Bullfrog Films, 1998.
