I’m going to do that intj thing where i overexplain myself. It’s my fault: I started talking about something other than what was being talked about without making it clear that I was talking about something else. As a result my comments appeared to reflect some very basic (as in dumb) ideas that I don’t actually hold.
Anyway, I’m not writing this to defend myself so much as to take the opportunity to unpack my perspective on what I was actually talking about… because that’s what I find interesting and worth doing. Also because I’m killing a four hour layover.
suomalainen wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2024 9:54 am
There is no out. Even Dick Proenecke (sp?) had regular supply deliveries via float plane. And there is no point. But why should that stop anyone from doing what they want to do today?
Right, that’s the beauty of ERE. You don’t have to give one single rats ass about the planet, climate change, peak oil, global economic injustice, the metacrisis, etc for ERE to be worth it. You get a better life no matter what your worldview and that’s the genius beauty of the carrot of ERE. This is well trodden ground.
At the scale of an individual life, it does not matter if it is consumerist, anti consumerist, postconsumerisr, etc. It’s just: is it a good life? Is it being lived on one’s own terms? To the individual lived experience the labels mean nothing and labels are much more of a hindrance to the good life than an aid. It’s very easy to get sucked into anxiety over whether one’s life is ‘anticonsumer enough’ and for most people this is a recipe for a moderate rolling internal disaster. Ask me how I know.
When @7 made the comment that an anticonsumerist lifestyle is an oxymoron, however, that’s the point at which I was no longer talking about a single individuals life scale.
When I say “there is an out” (to consumerism) I’m talking about the multigenerational project of cultivating the successor cultures to the current arrangement that will emerge over the next several centuries.
Today, these successor cultures are like weeds growing in the cracks of the pavement. They get their nutrients from the runoff of the asphalt empire: nothing exists ‘out’side of consumer logic in any meaningful sense.
In two or four hundred years, however, the fossil fueled consumer l society will no longer exist *as such* and what were once weeds will be the flourishing and culturally dominant social organizations of 2300 or whenever. The things people do now have some relation to the form these future societies will take, regardless of whether people know or care about that future form. Our actions ripple down through time.
I don’t know what those future organizations will look like, but I have some ideas of ways I’d like them to and not to work, based mostly on my understanding of thermodynamics, ecology, history, and my lived and observed experience of life under the current arrangement.
One of my desires/visions for these future societies is that they will not be based on the logic of consumerism, because I think consumerism is a bad deal for most forms of life.
The Out I’m referring to are these non or post-consumer future societies that I will never see nor likely get within a century of.
The ‘Point of all this’ I refer to is the relationship between my actions now and the successor societies I’ll never see but am part of the long transition towards. Insofar as whether or not my ‘anticonsumer lifestyle design’ has any kind of Point to it, it is in the quality of construction of these future societies which I will never see, and in the shape and flow of the transition from here/now to there/then of which I’ll experience a small part.
Note: nobody has to care about any of this! It’s entirely fine and appropriate for people to just want to live good lives and not think about this stuff and generate meaning in their lives however they want. I happen to generate some of the ‘meaning’/direction/purpose/creativity/curiosity/joy in my life via situating myself in the context I’m describing. I understand that some people find thinking about the future anxiogenic or ruminative. That is not my experience. My inner relationship with the future is a rich source of meaning and engagement. I’m not *worried* about the future. It is a slow-unfolding blossom of infinite interestingness and I am in awe of my sense of place within it.
So this is why I strongly disagree with the statement “lifestyle design is inherently consumerist.” It’s because I’m intentionally designing my life *as a transition towards* these future anti, non, post-consumer societies. I myself am certainly never going to fully decouple the material logistics of my personal life from the supply chains of industrial consumerism even if I put all my effort into such a project, which I am not. (Neither was Proenneke, to my understanding: he was just living a dope life on his own terms.) I think we’re at a point where it’s neat to have examples of people who make such an attempt for educational and inspirational purposes, to push everyone else’s Overton window of what’s currently possible, but not necessary or critical to actual pull off full individual life decoupling.
One reason that it’s basically impossible to fully decouple one’s lifestyle from consumerism is that you need the full support of societal infrastructure, and that doesn’t exist right now. That’s why I give a shit about the future successor cultures that will possess such an infrastructure! And this infrastructure won’t just fall out of the sky into the middle of an abandoned strip mall. It is being cobbled and pieced together bit by bit and it’s eventual emergence will be a long oozing surprising so-slow-nobody-notices churn of human social and material organization.
The next phase of the center of gravity of the fledgling successor societies is not “fully decoupled”, it’s something like “demonstration of a good life at 90% energy/resource reduction from western baseline.” Arguably this is accomplished already but only in very small numbers. Perhaps we’ll gain strength in the next recession.
After that it’s something like “living off solar income and 95% of materials from industrial salvage”. I’m just throwing out numbers here as a hand wave in the general direction I think is a good idea, to give my sense of the shape of the transition. There’s a lot more to it than just energy and materials of course, and I’m just this dumb guy who is probably wrong about what it’ll look like anyway.
. Thank you for unpacking all that, I'm glad to have the devil's advocacy inline with all this.