Just Say "No!" to More Stuff
There's that old bumper sticker which says: "He who dies with the most toys wins."
It used to be good for a quick chuckle and a sardonic smile. Now it's not worth spit.
I was building two 4-foot square wooden frames for my square foot gardening project several weeks ago. I'm not much of a handyman, but I know how to screw pieces of wood together. I had a drill and drilled 48 holes. That was the "easy" part - "easy" in the sense that little "labor" was involved and it "didn't take much time."
Then came the actual screwing of the screws. (I don't know how else to word that so it will have to just stay in the post.) The screws were about 2" long and 48 were involved. I knew I had a screw driver (powered by me) and I thought that it would be efficient if I had an electric screwdriver. A debate followed in my mind as to whether this was a good time to buy one - after all I would be able to use it to assemble the frame "in no time at all" not to mention how I could use it for all those other projects which are always around the corner. Or was this another invitation, an opportunity to do it simply and to not buy yet again another some-thing which will eventually be sold at a yard sale, but not until it has collected dust for several years.
It turned out, I am pleased to say, to be an easy choice. My pockets remained heavy, no gas used to go to the mall to buy the gizmo, no time "spent" traveling (traversing would be a better word) to and from, no throwing away of more plastic and cardboard and paper, no warranty form to fill out - oh, did it feel liberating.
I got down to the business of using the screwdriver. I knelt and stretched. I used my fingers, my wrist, my forearm, my elbow, my upper arm, and then switched arms. When I got uncomfortable I stopped for a few minutes.
My son Andrew stopped by and I said: "hey, you wanna give me a hand?"
He said: "Sure."
Actually he gave me two hands and we threw in some conversation to hold the whole thing together even better. He even lent me some back muscles to help carry the frames from the garage to the upper level of my back yard. (It's even sweeter when he stops by and looks at the tomato plants growing in the frames - more history-making than I had anticipated - try and buy that at the mall!)
We grow when we put mind and effort and concentration and ingenuity into figuring something out; when we put our own chosen effort into our actions. Ran was talking about that a while back in his entry of May 21-23. Eleutheros was also referencing it on his blog when he talked about the tyranny of the mind set of: "Git 'er done (quickly)."
I've known for decades that consumerism is destructive. It's a parasitic meme which repeats and replicates itself over and again. And like any good parasite it feeds on it's host without outright killing it. If it kills the host slowly all the better since it can itself survive longer. And what parasite would give a second thought as to how the host continues to pay and pay and pay. But as I was saying in my last post on "It's more than just putting on the brakes" the "not buying" is incomplete - it has to be coupled with the life and living that has a way of taking root in those other spaces
Yes, I'll just say "no thanks, but could you pass me a little more time and a lot more of no-things." It's really just fine with me, when it's time for me to pass on, if I don't have all those toys.
I guess I'm shifting towards a "keep it simpler" kind of guy.
*****
From Wikipedia: "Cultural change necessarily involves resistance to change. The term Luddite has been resurrected from a previous era to describe one who distrusts or fears the inevitable changes brought about by new technology. The original Luddite revolt occurred in 1811, an action against the English Textile factories that displaced craftsmen in favor of machines. Today's Luddites continue to raise moral and ethical arguments against the excesses of modern technology to the extent that our inventions and our technical systems have evolved to control us rather than to serve us and to the extent that such leviathans can threaten our essential humanity."
And from http://www.primitivism.com/index.html : "Primitivism is the pursuit of ways of life running counter to the development of technology, its alienating antecedents, and the ensemble of changes wrought by both. This site is an exploration into primitivist theory, as well as various works that contribute to an understanding of the tendency."
4 comments:
I've been thinking about this in a similar vein myself, but unfortuantely this is all the capacity I have time to say. You are much better then I at summing up deep thoughts. My mind pulls on ten strings at once.
-P
Proxima,
Thanks for the accolade.
One of the things that helps with the string pulling and distractions for me is to pick one theme for a few days (or decades) and keep coming back to that, and then let much of the other stuff constellate off from that. It's far from perfect but it works pretty well for me.
Tim
As I was reading this, I thought of a reference I saw recently to the works of Ivan Illich. Here's a quote:
"The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry."
These days, as my Dad and I build a sunroom/greenhouse onto my house, I am surrounded by power drills and air hammers and chain saws and tractors and massive trucks with hoists . . . and I get to use some of them and it's seductive, but sometimes it's fun to jump in and cut a branch with my bow saw before Dad gets back with the chain saw. Or to wonder how long it would have taken to dismantle the porch with hand tools instead of ripping it away with a chain and a 4x4 truck. The project would take much longer, I'm sure, but I keep thinking about the notion of "energy-slaves" (after Buckminster Fuller) and the hundreds of those that I command with all the power tools and conveniences and so on. It doesn't sit right.
Laura,
Illich was so right-on with his comments.
I've taken to riding my bicycle part way to my office and I actually think of these things as I am passing cars stuck in traffic. But most of the time I simply enjoy the feeling of the wind and the sounds of the birds and the steady exertion during the easy peddaling.
It's such a contradiction. Cars become more powerful and roads reach further out and away from the city, and they have to be bigger and faster so those who have the biggest cars and the ability to purchase places "away from it all" (so they can show how they are different and so they can recharge themselves) and yet the further they go, and the wider they are, the more people use them and the more grid lock sets in which sets off yet again another spiral of building yet more roads. It really is getting to be quite insane.
To maintain the system we do become slaves to energy consumption and energy production.
The addictions to bigger, faster, more powerful, more, and easier have created a way of life which is perpetuating a falsehood that it will all get better if we just keep doing it, and which is at the same time picking our pockets of our basic ability to enjoy life and living - in the slow lane.
I hope your sun room / greenhouse is coming along nicely. What a nice addition.
Tim
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