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confused that almost everything you’re supposed to do to take part in modern life is increasingly acknowledged to be simultaneously sabotaging the very future of the planet as we know it.
how thickly strewn our daily lives are with sensual delights just begging to be noticed.
The basic blueprint for modern first-world living is normalized hyper-abundance and hyper-stimulation, punctuated by desperate attempts at escape when the fallout becomes too distressing. These attempts usually take the form of bouts of restraint (like diets), or of collapse (like illness, or ‘lie-by-a-pool-for-two-weeks-getting-drunk’ holidays).
normalizing an elegant sufficiency of consumption, and then artfully dotting it with intensely relished abundance.
takes advantage of the different flavours of different modes of being, and sets them against each other to ex...
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Most ads carry a subliminal message that we all have the power of self-creation, and that what they are selling can help us with that. This can only be countered by replacing their suggested romantic visions of ourselves with other romantic visions.
costly compulsion to browse for new purchases as a source of stimulation and novelty.
For most of human history, we have been used to social and environmental setups where if we behave irresponsibly or greedily or lazily, life begins to suck: our neighbours shun us; our crops fail; all our assets go to pot; our animals die; our drinking water gets foul. Over time we have come to trust this mechanism that tells us that ‘if life is really pleasant, then we can’t be doing anything too bad’. So now, in this warped new setup, which enables us to comfortably and repeatedly do lazy, greedy things – causing really unimaginable harm – we just can’t quite believe that our behaviour could
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Being time-stressed makes people behave in more carbon intensive ways (travelling faster, eating out more, doing more ‘convenience’ shopping). Countries with higher work hours have higher carbon footprints too – because of the time-stressed households that comprise them, and because more economic activity demands more resource use.
An average worker in Germany or the Netherlands, for example, works a whopping 400 fewer hours per year than their American counterpart.
“Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials.”
Julian Huxley predicted a two-day work week. “The human being can consume so much and no more… When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure.”
A 1965 US Senate subcommittee predicted that by the year 2000 Americans would be working 14 hours a week, with at least seven weeks of vacation time annually.
the work-consumption-life balance?
late 16th to 18th centuries European moral value systems took a heavy re-moulding by Protestantism, with its emphasis on work as the focal point of life and the road to salvation. Forswearing pleasure and frivolity was encouraged, and the attainment of money was seen as a sign that you were making fine headway into God’s good books. Large portions of society have had to work hard for millennia, but now work became something to be pursued for its own noble sake.
Our brains also generally fail to acknowledge how speedily we will adapt to our slightly improved life and start scanning for the next thing that could be bettered, barely pausing to register a happiness spike from the previous improvement.
That which we like is pleasant to us. That which we need is precious.
He candidly described friendship as something which starts from a point of need, or from the hope of mutual benefit, but then grows into sheer pleasure at having the other person in one’s life. He also viewed friendship without some element of mutual need as being somewhat vacuous.
people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers?
The greenest product you’re ever going to get, is almost always the one that you (or somebody else) already have. The energy costs that go into making and distributing even energy-efficient, sustainably-sourced new objects is very high. Generally much higher than whatever energy you will save by using that object rather than continuing to maintain and use an old object until it is truly worn out.
The desire to buy unnecessary things is very strong – it can feel like an assertion of freedom from the parade of functional activities that constitute much of life; like leisure and light-heartedness in the face of too much work and worry.
A large range of choices encourages perennial dissatisfaction with whatever you have chosen, no matter how satisfactory it is – you might not have picked the best option, after all!
those of us who tend to put a lot of effort and research into our choices, actually get less pleasure per dollar, and are less content overall – despite usually managing to select a slightly superior option.
with so much available we develop a delusion that we should always be able to get what we want, and feel ripped off and depressed when we don’t.
although endless choice promises endless freedom, it also entraps us in an endless series of fine-tuned decisions that we feel must be well-made to encourage success and accurately reflect our identity.
“If our style is masterful … we can live on top of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of colour and electricity and light filter up to us…” ~ Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
The luxury of history is that we can survey what has and hasn’t worked out well for various incarnations of humankind, and adopt a cultural mash-up approach accordingly.
Sometimes when you are feeling drenched by the details of your own life, it’s time to pack a suitcase for your myopia, and send it on holiday. Look up. There is so infinitely much more matter than you out there, hurling forth glowing plumes, imploding into vortexes, converging into gaseous balls, then shattering into incandescent rain. It is endless and eternal and entropic and generative and holy in the most religion-irrelevant sense of the word.
Remembering where and what you are should not be to the end of feeling like an insignificant speck. You are woven of this stuff, this starlight and magma, let it extend you and make you feel endless amongst it, swathed in the vastness of time, rich in your very elemental connectedness. Then scan what feels important to you as a creature.
