Monthly Archives: February 2006
Why Do You Think They Call It “Paying” Attention?
As I wrote yesterday, there is quite a bit of confusion about what the benefits and sacrifices of “Living Simply” are, and that they depend almost entirely on your point of view, on what you choose to pay attention to. Well, as luck would have it, Fred Gratzon wrote today about much the same thing, but from a business point of view: Using our attention wisely is the essence of self-empowerment. We should only focus our attention on those core values and processes that nourish our lives. I couldn’t agree more. As I talk to people about living simply and deliberately, I find that, almost without fail, they look at it as a completely economic decision. I can’t really fault them for that, as I have done the same thing myself, but that way of looking at it falls well short of the mark. It really isn’t about money as much as it is about attention, the most precious commodity any of us possess. What you pay attention to is exactly what your life is made up of. You spend your attention,… Read more
Simplicity is Not Deprivation
A lot of people have the mistaken idea that those of us who choose a less consumer-oriented lifestyle are somehow deprived because we do not spend money as if it were going out of style (and oh, how I wish it would). They have a vision of us, holed up in some run-down cabin in the woods, seperated from “normal” society and cut off from anything that even remotely resembles “culture”, as if choosing to live more deliberately and simnply somehow instantly turns you into Ted Kaczynski. Well, the funny thing is that we, being those of us who are taking a more leisurely, deliberative view of life, also harbor the idea that the very people who are calling us deprived, are actually the ones who are deprived. As an illustration of this essential disconnect in how the two types of people see things, here is a little chart of things I have seen or heard other people say that the “other” type of people are deprived of: “Normal People” “Simple People” Are deprived of: Control… Read more
Paper Towels
It has been more than two months now since we last had paper towels in the house, and I can’t say that I miss them. Not only are they a complete waste of money and just one more thing to fill up our dumps, they kind of suck for what they were intended for anyway. Like most people, we used them to wipe up spills, as napkins, and sometimes as disposable plates. So we dug the cloth napkins that we were given as a wedding present out of the closet and started using sponges to wipe up spills and plates as plates, and now it is as if the damned things never even existed. As a matter of fact, we forgot all about them about a week after we stopped using them. When you can completely remove something from your life, and in a week, not even think about it, it is most definately, and unnecessary… Read more
Chinese Philosophy – The Short List
In no particular order, here are the men I consider to be the giants of Chinese Philosophy: Lin Yutang Po Chuyi Sun Tung’po T’u Ch’ishui Yuan Chunglang Li Chowu Chang Ch’ao Li Liweng Yuan Tsets’ai Chin Shengt’an Good luck trying to find anything in print by then here in the English-speaking world. Chinese philosophy has no place in such a frantic, hard-edged culture. We disdain their philosophies of living as childish or insufficiently complex and reasoned, while ignoring the fact that no one laughs at the child that glides wistfully through their days, enjoying being a child. We only laugh when we come across a child who, with serious intensity, is building a pile of sticks and mud he has convinced himself is the greatest fortress in all of… Read more
Vacuum Cleaner
It is my opinion that people own vaccum cleaners for, primarily, one of two reasons; either they don’t like keeping their house clean, or they don’t feel as if they have time to without this modern convenience. Taking the second reason first, let me posit that if you do not have time to clean all of your house without appliances, you might want to consider whether or not you have too much house. If you don;t have enough time to clean it, you probably aren’t there enough to enjoy it. Why? Perhaps because you are too busy earning money to pay for all that space and for all the stuff you warehouse in it, and all the modern conveneinces, like the vacuum cleaner, that you need just to keep up with it. Perhaps a smaller, cheaper house with less “stuff” in it would require less expensive “conveniences” and give you time to actually enjoy it. As to not liking to clean your house, there’s nothing wrong with that right? No one likes cleaning, do they? Yes, yes they do. There is a sense of… Read more
Microwave
By way of the microwave, fast food culture broke free of its traditional confines along roadways and into the center of our homes. As it became ubiquitous during the seventies and eighties, it became a primary beachhead of frantic consumer culture in our kitchens. By its constant presence, we are reminded that we are too busy, too frantic, to enjoy our food or its preperation. We are taught by this appliance to value the time we spend in the kitchen, making or preparing our food, more highly than we value other time – namely that time spent earning money to purchase a microwave, supply it with electricity, clean it, buy all the extra packaging that comes with microwavable food, buying microwave-safe plates, bowls and containers, not to mention having larger and larger kitchens to house our microwave and all of its appliance brethren. All of this so that we can enjoy bland homogenized food really quickly. If there is any truth to the adage “you are what you eat”, then it is no… Read more
Your Job Sucks!
According to a study by the National Sleep Foundation, the average employed American works a 46-hour work week; 38% of the respondents in their study worked more than 50 hours per week. Assuming that Mr. and Mrs. Average American will work for 35 years before retirement, that is 83,720 hours of their life spent not participating directly in their lives. Unfortunately, they aren’t enjoying those 83,720 hours much at all. Indeed, in late 2003, the Conference Board reported that U.S. job satisfaction hit a record low: Over half of all Americans are unhappy with their jobs. The Gallup Organization asked 1.7 million employees in 101 companies from 63 countries, “At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” Only 20% of the responding employees working at large firms answered yes. Finally, a 2004 Gallup poll found that over 70% of U.S. workers are “disengaged” from their jobs, meaning that almost three of every four workers have mentally checked out and… Read more
What exactly is Simple Living?
Ask ten people what Simple Living is, and you’ll likely get eleven answers. There are probably as many answers to that question as there are people who say that they are living simply. Given that it is, at base, a very individualistic thing, here is my answer: At it’s core, Simple Living is probably the wrong term for what I am talking about, and may be too limiting, too given to stereotyping, to be a good umbrella term for most of the people who have attached it to themselves for lack of a better one. Simple Living, Homesteading, Frugal Living; all of these are used almost interchangably, much to the dismay of those who have actually cleared their own land and built their own cabin, pioneer style, and feel a special priviledge to the term “Homestead”. As Daniel Quinn wrote in Beyond Civilization, “There is no one right way for people to live.” Simple Living, or Simply Living, as I like to call it, is for me, an act of philosophy and art. It is my attempts to remove all of the… Read more
Dishwasher
As Maricar wrote over at Keeping The Castle, the dishwasher is not the labor/time saving device many people think that it is. As a matter of fact, as I have learned, it actually costs more money and time to own and use one than it does to wash our dishes by hand. Invented by Josephine Cochran in 1886, the automatic dishwasher (Joel Houghton invented a hand-powered model in 1850) was never intended to be a labor saving device, but rather to keep careless servants from chipping delcate china by minimizing the contact they had with it. As part of our plan to live simply and with minimal stuff, and given my interest in getting rid of Unnecessary Things, the dishwasher was one of the first “conveniences” to fall under a critical examination. Regardless of whether or not we were using the dishwasher, every dish was being touched by us at least once between the sink/counter and the dishwasher. We always “pre-rinsed” our dishes so that the dishwasher could actually clean them. I… Read more
The War Against Stuff
Two or so years into our marriage, Jenn and I realized that we had somehow become, or maybe always had been, packrats. We were iving in a smallish house and surrounded by Stuff. As in the stuff you keep in the basement, the stuff at the back of your closet, the stuff that’s stuffed into one of those bottom drawers that you haven’t opened in years. All that stuff. How did this happen? First, there’s a tendency to think that whatever we already own needs to be replaced or upgraded or swapped for a more trendy color. So we buy another TV, better speakers, more shoes, another suit, a second car, a new set of dishes, more towels, plus that boat we’ve always wanted — without stopping to consider if it was necessary, if we could afford it, and what it would really cost us In part, this is about living beyond our means, and in part it’s about not being able to distinguish between what we want and what we need. It is about the affliction of our age: SDA. Gopal Ahluwalia,… Read more