Altucher again! Where can I spit or take a shower after uttering that foul name!
jennypenny wrote:Did you read the comments? It's The Atlantic, so very high brow and well-written ... and yet just as dopey as Yahoo comments.
I didn't completely agree with the article's author or the thrust of the book, but this comment included at the end was interesting ... "Now, Westacott writes, because “not working is in itself no longer a badge of honor,” what the economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899 called “conspicuous leisure” is being displaced by conspicuous recreation. To describe the behavior of those who tire of this arms race, perhaps there needs to be yet a new term: conspicuous frugality."
Yeah, its that Mimetic thing working again.
"Let's now look at it through the Mimetic Lens. Most of the adherents of the frugality counterculture make it a point to try not to desire the objects of desire of others. Yet many often reveal that this is sometimes difficult. A number of the posts in the social groups are queries to the group as to how to avoid desires and how to balance them with other goals of financial independence, travel or other future plans. The counter-culture rallies around stories of self-discipline and realization of goals.
True, it is the case that some frugality adherents engage in competitive one-upsmanship, as in any groups of like-minded individuals, and they do copy each other willingly and swap tricks of the trade freely and often. But mostly they discuss successes and failures in dealing with friends and relatives who subscribe to the dominant consumerist culture."
The overall direction I see in the 2010s is that the older concept (1990-2000s) of simple living expresses itself as minimalism because we increasingly express(*) and define who we are and what we do by our stuff. Minimalism is thus an exercise in building one's identity by what we choose to own and what we choose not to own. In that sense, some forms of modern minimalism are extremely materialist/consumerist. Simple living also included removing responsibilities, relations, etc. to leave more time to focus; whereas modern minimalism almost seems to maximize the work hard/play hard lifestyle trying to emit as much CO2 as possible by consuming exotic travel, fancy food, frivolous(**) techmology... and other experiences to the max and curating the "bestest" 35 things money can buy.
(*) Or maybe that's just what bloggers do for those juicy affiliate links. The real world might be different from those of us who live in an online bubble.
(**) If it charges via USB, it's a good indicator that it's probably an overpriced solution to a problem that didn't exist 10 years ago.
Closely related is the parallel of how it shows status to be fat in a food-scarce environment, whereas where food is abundant, it shows status to be lean because it demonstrates control. (Similar dynamics for being tanned or even fit/muscular changes status according to how rare it is and who has the surplus to waste demonstrating the signal value.)
He discarded his cup in favour of sipping from 'cupped' hands. Clearly he was the pinnacle of simple living.
A cup is no great burden and makes drinking much easier. What's the point of making life more difficult than it needs to be just to prove a point? Cynics are forced into a place of repression of desire.
jacob said: whereas modern minimalism almost seems to maximize the work hard/play hard lifestyle trying to emit as much CO2 as possible by consuming exotic travel, fancy food, frivolous(**) techmology...
I don't disagree with you, but I think it would still be necessary to actually do the math to determine whether one individual attempting a "simple life" aesthetic is emitting more or less CO2 than another individual attempting a "minimalist" aesthetic. For instance, choosing to dwell in a micro-pod-apartment in a sleek new cluster of very low maintenance structures which share centralized geo-thermal system and flying to exotic locale once a year vs.living in cabin in the woods burning some wood in the stove and driving 50 miles into town for supplies once a month?
I read that if you could plug a human being into the grid, he would be around a 100 watt appliance. You can buy 100 watts of solar panels for less than $100. Petroleum is running around $44 barrel. Potatoes are around 1/100 as efficient as solar panels in conversion of solar energy. USB powered extremely frivolous novelty item sometimes used as minimalist substitute for primitive man-power available for less than $20. So, obviously, in this example, the minimalist solution would emit less CO2 than the primitive/simple solution, but would otherwise be non-preferred.
sky wrote:A cup is no great burden and makes drinking much easier.
for drinking water, presumably from streams and public wells, in a mediterranean climate? hands probably work 98% as well. not having to carry around a fragile item? priceless.
sky wrote:A cup is no great burden and makes drinking much easier. What's the point of making life more difficult than it needs to be just to prove a point? Cynics are forced into a place of repression of desire.
It wasn't really about the cup though, it was about questioning everything rather than blindly accepting the social norms.
There are a lot of good things to learn from the Cynics, but they are mainly in showing the silliness of societal customs. When it comes to designing one's own life, the Cynics fall short. "Throwing away the cup and drinking out of one's hands" is a cool story and an excellent teaching example, but I doubt that Diogenes stopped drinking from cups for the rest of his life.
http://www.zerowastehome.com/ ... generates about a pint's worth of trash volume per year. One strategy is to bring mason jars for shopping and use them instead of plastic bags. The site has a bulk finder for stores that sell in bulk or reuse containers.
She also has a book and is mentioned in the last chapter in Garbology.
In terms of trash, we throw out about a bag (garbage bag sized) once every 10 days or so. 98%+ of our trash is food packaging. I think our city-provided container can take 4-6 of those and the city empties it once a week.
One's trash stream would be another way to evaluate monetary efficiency. Afterall, any flow that leaves is money wasted just like the stuff that stays but also doesn't get used is wasted.
In other news, researchers measured a strong correlation between arctic ice lost and CO2 emissions. A quick calculation shows that everytime someone (US numbers) spends $68 (in the same way as the average person), one sqft of arctic ice is permanently lost. That's another way to think about stuff.
In theory, you could even wander about gathering up a wide variety of the waste streams of others and converting them into some other forms you could monetize, if you were willing to work for $2/hr all the day long. If you don't put it on your schedule, that bag of rags and that bucket of mulberries is never going to magically turn into a pretty purple rug (sigh.) I guess in order to cause a square ft. of melted arctic ice to freeze back up, you would have to do something like convert the contents of an alley dumpster back into useful goods, market them, and then use the proceeds to pay $68 worth of property tax on some land you planted with trees. You could make it a sort of challenge towards regaining your carbon emissions virginity, except maybe make it sound more fun than that.
ebast said: Hey- I thought that did sound fun actually.
Making Nothing from Something...
Well, at the most basic level atoms just keep cycling round and round the planet in different forms, and energy comes in from the sun and goes out as heat. So, it really comes down to maximizing something like keeping all the stuff in a form long-term most likely to be useful/beneficial rather than useless/harmful to humans. Obviously, everything in a dumpster was designated either useless or harmful by some human, but in an affluent society "useless" might just mean "not worth my time to process further."
jacob wrote:In terms of trash, we throw out about a bag (garbage bag sized) once every 10 days or so. 98%+ of our trash is food packaging. I think our city-provided container can take 4-6 of those and the city empties it once a week.
This is about what we throw out too, so is this an extreme level of waste (low) ? I have been under the impression we throw out way too much. Maybe average is much higher?
Yesterday, I passed a Walmart that closed a couple of years ago. It sat empty but now they're turning it into a self-storage facility. I guess that's where everyone will store the stuff they bought at Walmart before it closed.
I'm finding one of the best ways to reach a new level of minimalism is to embrace stuff that is multi-purposed, collapsible, light-weight, well-built, and beautiful.
What are the pros of this approach? You can have all the comforts of a modern person, with the flexibility to travel to a new place with 2-3 suitcases and a foldable mattress.
Agree. In the last 2 months, I have moved some portion of my semi-minimalist collection of belongings from apartment I shared with my sister to my camper/BF's apartment/friend-house-sit-renovation-project/Mom's apartment/up-north-getaway and 'round and 'round again. So, I am feeling the urge to further downsize to elegant core myself.
I checked this book out at the library. Fascinating stuff.
I tend to go hardcore minimalism.
@Olaz check out ultralight backpacking for ideas. Travel with nothing more than a backpack feels very luxurious. Of course, some home gear is naturally bulky (pressure cooker vs https://www.rei.com/product/114890/msr- ... et-2-stove with a light aluminum or titanium pot) so it may not be a total overlap.
