Judging and Condemning

Seattle Simplicity hit the nail on the head a couple of weeks ago. Her post; Words of Wisdom for Your Simplicity Journey contains the hardest lesson I have had to learn over the last year or so, as the changes we are making in our lives begin to gather steam and become apparent to those around us:

Ignore other people’s opinions.

I, however, would take it a bit farther, and say:

Don’t expect people to leave you alone.

I think that it is hard to live a simple, frugal, philosophical life without becoming somewhat anti-consumerism, and when you start doing something that is as radically different from your compatriots as actively eschewing consumerism and its status symbols, people tend to freak out a bit. As Bertrand Russell said:

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such a departure as a criticism of themselves.

He’s right, you know. When you refuse to participate in the credit orgy that is modern consumer culture, you are passing judgement on that culture. And what is that culture but the people in it? So your friends and family feel completely justified in their reaction to your obviously insane urge to “live in a cave and eat berries”, as a supposed friend of mine called it when I explained to him that one of the possibilities for changing my life was to get the heck out of this overheated real estate market while I could still turn enough of a profit to pay for a piece of land somewhere that wasn’t “frothing” and owe nothing on it.

So I don’t ask for understanding or sympathy from anyone who doesn’t feel the same urge I do to live a more elegant, less cluttered life without so many of the things that they feel are what make life worth living. I understand that they will judge and condemn my chosen lifestyle, just as I have judged and condemned theirs.