un-consumed

For all of my radical politics, there are few things I find more important and harder to live by than anti-consumerism, and this summer I've repeatedly found myself slipping.  This isn't just important for ideological reasons--my life gets terrible when I start defining myself and seeking happiness by spending.  Today's post is about physical objects, and what knowledge I've scraped together about how to deal with them.  Some of it is what's right for me, but I'm hoping to develop a more widely applicable approach. . .

1.  People are always more important than objects

I learned this lesson by living with my oldest sister and her husband when I was about thirteen, and I really have to thank them for it.  You wouldn't get yelled at for spilling, loosing, or breaking things.  It was understood that you would try your best not to do it again.  People--and not just their physical welfare, but their emotional state--were always more important than physical objects in that household, and it was a much happier way to live.    

2.  Things belong with the people who will use them best.

This is an obvious efficiency maximiser.  To best enact your values in the world, your resources (including your physical objects) should go wherever they will best enact your values.  Sometimes, that means somebody else gets the treadmill you use once a week, because they'd use it every day.  Sometimes it doesn't.

3.  Have respect for embodied energy: things are someones' life.

All person-made objects represent people.  The makers aren't going to get that time and effort back; it's been released into the world in the form of your object.  While these embodiments are less important than living-breathing-people-in-front-of-you, they're still important and worthy of respect.  Because of this, I try to primarily own objects which are sturdy, well crafted, and made by well compensated workers--and to make things last "a boringly long time."*

4.  Accept that you need to own objects, and that they will require time and care from you.

Whatever your needs are, you will not be able to meet them without some physical objects.  Almost certainly, you will need to own some physical objects.  Like pets (but less so), possessions require attention and upkeep.  Like certain combinations of pets, possessions require upkeep both individually and as collections.  This is a bitter taste.  Get used to it.  

One of this biggest gaps remaining in my personal algorithm for dealing with physical objects is the question of how much time and care they should receive.  Really good tools have improved my life dramatically.  At the same time, I struggle not to be owned by my things.  

5.  Cultivate a sense of security.  

I'm not 100% certain this is true, but for the time being I've found it helpful to postulate that being well supplied in general will carry you through famines, rather than making you soft.  Feeling insecure is distracting and stressful, and it makes you less good at life.

Economic security is an impossibly distant wish for many--possibly most--people.  Still, I find it helpful to know what I'm shooting for.  Supposing I had a steady income adequate to sustainably meet my needs, I would try to cultivate a sense of security regarding objects by (a) being very aware of what my needs were, (b) owning a sufficient kit of durable, high quality stuff to meet my needs, and (c) keeping a cash reserve specifically budgeted for replacing said objects when they were lost, damaged, and broken.  I would use my bountiful circumstances to develop skills which would help me do without, if necessary.  I would also try to plan well for retirement, life changes,** and emergencies, and follow the financial habits which correlate with happiness.  I shall try to post and/or link to those at some point soon.

Some people attempt to achieve greater economic security by storing objects, rather than cash they don't have.  This makes a lot of sense--in our present economy, you can find absurdly inexpensive consumer goods on a random basis.  By buying everything at its lowest price point and storing it for future use, you can have access to a lot of objects for very little cash.  You must also budget time and energy to organize, store, and maintain these objects when they aren't in use--and spare time, storage space, and energy are also frequently as short supply, when you're poor.  For some people, this strategy works very well, but it requires a lot of skill, planning, and investment of self into caring for things to work well.

A sense of security can fight the fear of being without, as well as the excessive attachment to objects that comes with fear.

6.  Fight hard against hedonic adaptation, aka "necessity creep."

I think everyone is vaguely aware of this problem.  Actually fighting it is another matter; this is the best I've come up with.  Figure out what your needs are.  Write them down.  If you discover them changing over time, take some time to decide whether or not they're changing in a healthy way.  When deciding whether to acquire something, think hard about how it will relate to your actual needs.  If you frequently find yourself justifying purchases which you later find excessive, maybe sit down for a minute and write about how the item you plan to acquire will function in your life, and whether it really serves your needs as much as money in the bank or a donation to your favorite charity would.

I have problems with this because for the first 24 years of my life, I was so intent on avoiding hedonic adaptation that I failed to recognize my real needs, let alone fight to meet them.  Arriving at a healthy willingness to recognize what is really necessary for me to flourish took more than a year of therapy.  This habit turns the fight against necessity creep into a tightrope, on which I feel I'm constantly overbalancing one way or another.

7.  Seek the elegance of just what is needed--seek less and better. 

For me, ultimate luxury would involve not owning anything that I wouldn't be using within the year.  The cost of owning and maintaining objects is high for me, because I get stuck on decisions that don't seem terribly hard for other people, because my health problems make it difficult for me to physically maintain things, and because I don't have the habits and/or mindsets of a skilled housekeeper.  I find a lot of elegance in simplicity.  When I dream of a perfect home, I see spaces which have everything in them which is needed, and absolutely nothing more.  

Starting in the real world and trying to accomplish this, I try to focus on the ratio between stuff and usage.  The goal is to get the greatest amount of use out of the smallest amount of stuff, without this project interfering with the rest of my life.  Owning beautiful things helps optimize your stuff/use ratio.  Taking pleasure in an object is a kind of use; therefore, maximizing use means, if possible, owning only objects which especially bring you pleasure.

8.  Don't get sucked in.

Minimize your exposure to advertisements and window shopping; shop only for items that you have noticed a need for in your day-to-day experience.  Do not go to places of commerce for pleasure or comfort.   

Take care of your feelings.  Try to notice and address what you feel.  Focus your life on the things that will actually make you happy--relationships, experiences, satisfying and hopeful work, and connection to something larger than yourself.  Seek pleasure and comfort in these things.

*where is that line from?  such a good line. . .

** this might be obvious to everyone else, but the materially expedient way to meet your needs will change with your circumstances.  Therefore, whenever you move to a new place, you're likely to need a certain amount of different stuff. . . etc.

investigative, collaborative, creative

Last year, I took these tests from the career center--a "career values inventory" and a "career interests inventory."  One of them showed me that I'd be willing to work in a coal mine, as long as I was doing work that used my skills, with people I loved, and thought I was helping someone.  The other showed me that I have an outstanding preference for work which is investigative and creative.

Knowing this is quite helpful.  With the kind of undergrad degree I'm getting, the obvious thing would be to go straight for an advanced degree at the swankiest school that will pay my way.  It is less obvious that I'd be happy living an intensely competitive and academic life.  I've started trying to cultivate the skills to do the work that will make me happy.  Since I'm pretty good at investigating things, that means becoming more creative and more collaborative.  

I have a long way to go on both of these fronts.  To become better at being collaborative, I've been trying to practice kindness. . . and particularly, to practice being open to the people around me.  I know people are responsive to this sort of thing; they want to spend time with someone who isn't going to shut them down, who is pre-disposed to be enthusiastic about their good qualities and accepting of them as an over-all package.  It is so hard.  I try to smile when I see people, but somehow it doesn't get to my eyes. 

I have a friend, L, who is exceptional at this.  People flock to her; you mention her name and people will immediately and enthusiastically mention that she is AWESOME.  They speak the truth; being around her just makes you feel good.  She threw a birthday party around the beginning of the year, the preparations for which involved baking several batches of cookies in our dorm kitchen.  It was like being transported to a farmhouse kitchen in some alternate reality, with the infinitely loving cookie-baking family that you never had. . . except that she was also nineteen and brilliant and adorable and not your sister.  Needless to say, it was a popular attraction even before the cookies started to emerge.  

Perhaps part of the problem is that I haven't worked out the ways in which I do and don't want to be judgmental.  There's boundaries to be sorted out here.  A lot of people do things that I find grossly unacceptable; what's the best way for me to deal with that fact?  

The creativity thing is also hard.  The Creative Habit has been very helpful, though I disagree with some of her premises.  Yesterday, along with my usual journaling (and now also blogging) and "professional" writing time, I made myself draw for half an hour.  It was incredibly difficult, even at the library with piles of drawing books before me, but I'm glad I did it.  Last night, when I was settled in with one of my "girl with a sword" books, I ended up putting it down and starting to write my own. . . because it was just more fun.  Hopefully, this is a quality that will slowly grow.  It's ironic that I'd shut down this part of myself, thinking it self-indulgent, being hyper-critical of my own work, on the assumption that I would never be able to create anything of real value.  I will probably never draw or paint or fiction-write anything spectacular, but being in the habit of making things--of overcoming the blank page with something interesting and new--can only better my work, whatever that work turns out to be.

I am lonely.

This should not come as a surprise.

Here are the primary things I want (lack and desire--I'm not sure how much of each) from friends:

1.  They understand most of what I am interested in thinking about without long additional explanations, because they know me well and/or have put thought into similar things.

2.  They are interested in hearing much of what I have to say. 

3.  They are just the right sort of judgemental.  I can trust that they will (for the most part) judge me only by some criteria that I understand and care about, that are related to my own core values even if I don't agree with them completely--and I know that they have some handle on what my values and aspirations are.

4.  We treat each other well.

Leaving aside how much we care about each other and how well we treat each other, very few of my Utah friends fall into the first category.  Many of my closest friends at school have the first two, but not the third. . . the right sort of judgemental is very difficult to pull off.  I would give a lot to have half a dozen reasonably bright people around me for the rest of my life who are in all four categories.  I think finding people like this--and being a good friend to them--is one of the most important skills I could learn.  I wish I had better ideas on how to learn it.

This criteria set is not perfect; my friendship with J, for example, often runs better because she's not in category 1 for me--and she's willing to listen to my long additional explanations till the end of time, which does much to keep me sane.  Also, she thinks differently than I, and has had many very different experiences, which just. . . helps.  Also, it works because she's awesome.  I should call her.  Except my phone isn't working.  Hmn.

I'm lonely, at which I should not be surprised.  It helps to acknowledge this; like many things, having acknowledged it, I can stop furiously trying to ignore it.

I've know this all along, but living St. John's style--surrounded by interesting people, several of whom are one's friends, all of whom are brought together by a common project--is really the only way to go.  This doesn't bring me any closer to knowing how to enact this outside of St. John's.

At the same time, I know that people need times of isolation.  Knowing that however much I reach out to people is unlikely to be satisfying, I can work on reaching out while also trying to make this a useful time of isolation for me.

mixed thoughts

I sort of miss last semester. It was hard, but since I was ignoring the outside world in order to get my life as a Johnnie up and running, it was also simpler in some respects.



I want my approach to life--to all these seemingly uncontrollable problems--to be something like this: I seek/cultivate/accept the courage to change the things I can, the patience to accept the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. Except, I have the audacity to understand that there are an awful lot of things I can probably put a dent in, the entitlement to take care of myself like I believe everyone deserves to be taken care of, and a strong suspicion that the way to approach problems I can't change is not patience, but rather, the cultivation of a deep inner calm--a rooted sanctuary where the world can't reach me.

So I suppose the serenity prayer is well named, but there's something frustratingly evangelical which I associate too strongly with it to be able to accept the thing unmutilated.

Perhaps a creative place?



Maybe the problem with serenity is: what I'm looking for isn't a place to hide and be still--it's a base camp, a stable stance for action to arise from.




I shaved my head, and I'm developing a uniform--making several copies of my favorite dress, in beautiful different fabrics and colors. This should make both dealing with the physical objects in my life and presenting myself to the outside world much simpler.



I am happier than I have ever been in my life.

what I need

I can survive without these things, but if I ever live without them, it is in hope of the time that I have them again. . . or, imaginably, in hopes of enabling other people to have their need-lists fulfilled.

-A good bed

-Privacy

-Food which is healthy, food which is delicious, and at least some overlap

-Writing tools--paper/notebooks, pencils, pen, word processor and computer, working library

-Sunlight and stars and outside

-Enough quiet and enough music

-Beauty, lots and lots of it

-Friends

-Somewhere to exercise/move

-Somewhere to meditate

-Basic hygiene

-Play, like recreational cooking, roughhousing, stories, and games

-A sense of security and stability

-Work that I love, which is of use to someone--perhaps which is of use to my community?

-Freedom from stagnation

-Healthcare and pain management tools, including the freedom to avoid triggers sometimes

-Emotional release

-Conversation

-Clothes that support my functionality, physically, socially, and emotionally

-A quiet, comfortable place to work

-A healthy community, of which I am part

Happy new year. :)

*edit/addition: Touch.