Confessions of a Consumer Addict

admin April 11th, 2012

One of my biggest disappointments in trying to live simply has been having some family and friends not get the whole idea. One of the readers of the blog asked for suggestions on how to handle this issue yesterday and I decided it was definitely worth a post rather than just a reply.

As I’ve pointed out on our web pages, it really helps to have a community of people, or at least a supportive group around us to help pursue simple living. It gives us strength and courage as well as ideas and tools for living simply and with joy.

Conversely, having people close to us who don’t get it or actively oppose our effort is a serious drag. It takes so much more energy to even attempt living simply, and it can just take the joy out of it, not to mention creating doubts about our own motivation and effort. And when the doubters are spouses and friends it can make it very difficult indeed.

Of course there is also the more important issue of having those close to us not being able to benefit from this liberating way of life as well as, to put it uncharitably, continuing to be a drag on the world rather than a help.

So what do you do when those who are important to you don’t get it?

Well, my response for quite a while was to be frustrated, defensive, hurt, and angry. I wondered how anyone could be so unenlightened. How could anyone deny reality, the data, the Bible, and simple logic? To not immediately grasp the ultimate truth of simple living seemed to me to be the hallmark of a knuckle-dragger!

Never mind that Jesus taught us not to put people down and to be compassionate even to our enemies. Oh, yes I did manage to hide many of my true feelings when I ran into “non-believers” and I tried to be understanding, but my emotions were on a tear each time, so you can imagine that my responses to skeptics or critics was less than effective, and my feelings afterwards were usually as bad as they were before the encounter.

I was too bound up with my own ideas and feelings. I was not remembering my own past when I would have been a doubter or antagonist myself even if I had known about the concept of simple living back then. But after a while I figured out that I would have to begin by deeply appreciating where the doubters were coming from, i.e., the same place I had come from. I needed to revisit my own consumer addict past in a loving and forgiving way, and apply that to the folks I was talking to. I had to begin these discussions by forgiving myself and understanding the other person as well.

Tough to do, but with practice it sure beats being defensive.

My suggestion is to listen to, and really appreciate what a doubter has to say, listening for the underlying messages that he or she may not even be aware of themselves.

I certainly was not very aware of my own motives and feelings before I became familiar with the notion of simple living. Now-days I find it helpful, rather than telling someone why they are wrong, to simply tell them a few snippets from my own journey from consumer addict to simple liver. It tells the other person that I’ve had the same attitudes and desires they have, so we’re both starting from the same place rather than at opposite ends of the field – and I’m not judging them. The message is that we aren’t very different from each other and that I can comfortably understand a doubter’s position.

I don’t think the transaction should be like a salesperson trying to ‘sell’ a potential customer. Rather it is two people who need to understand each other more deeply – knowing that when the conversation is over both of us may still hold the same attitudes, and that’s really OK. What has changed is that we know each other better and perhaps we are more accepting of each other. That is sometimes, but not always, the beginning of attitude change. It takes time. It took me a long time. I need to give the other person a break too.

For instance, I clearly remember having some of these thoughts and feelings in the past:

Most important, I learned how deeply these acquisitive desires were embedded in my soul. I didn’t realize how much a part of my identity they were until I started doing without things I wanted. All our lives we have been taught verbally and by example by nearly everyone around us that having money, power, and stuff makes you successful and admired – something we all want. Not having them seemed to mean that we will be seen as failures. I have never been able to entirely vanquish that feeling which lives somewhere down in the pit of my stomach. It became an important part of who I was.

Getting rid of those ancient personal psychological/physiological bonds is extremely difficult. It’s a little like using a hunting knife to take out our own appendix, inflamed and painful as it might be.

The people who simply don’t care about simple living, who doubt us, who think we’re off the deep end, or that we’re un-American or un-Christian, ALL have these same feelings for the same reasons we do. Sharing our gut-wrenching personal journey through them and how the Gospel helped us do it may help some of these folks begin to deal with their own, and over time (and it may take a long time) they may begin to appreciate our passion for simplicity. But it sometimes does take an astonishing amount of patience. That’s where learning compassion comes in real handy. Patience with others demands compassion.

I’m sure that lots of readers have their own ways of dealing with this, so please post comments regarding your experiences with folks who don’t get it. What worked and what didn’t?

• Community Building , Consumer Culture and Economics , Coping With Consumer Culture , How To's , Living More Simply , Spreading the Word
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admin February 29th, 2012

I hope many of you were able to watch the PBS American Experience show “The Amish” last night (2/28/12). I thought it was very well done – not at all like some of the recent spate of network and cable shows that have too often been intrusive or sensationalistic. If you missed it, you can still view it on the PBS web site, http://www.pbs.org.

Being an Anabaptist myself and having grown up in Central Pennsylvania not far from where much of the show was shot, three things stood out for me:

Christian Simplicity is not a Lifestyle Choice

Amish simplicity is a daily act of faith rather than a voluntary “lifestyle” choice as advocated by many contemporary simplicity personalities and movements.

I have nothing against voluntarily choosing simplicity and I think it is a good thing to do, but what distinguishes “voluntary simplicity” from Amish life as well as what I advocate on this blog and web site, is that Christian simplicity flows directly, as an obvious matter of course, from our faith in God and Christ. It isn’t merely a trend, philosophy, lifestyle, or logical choice.

If we genuinely follow Christ and understand His teachings, then we are virtually compelled to live simply – there is no choice involved. To not live simply would be to disregard much of what He taught us. He taught us humility, to love and care for one another, and to put that before money, possessions, and position. To become part of The Kingdom we must give up seeking these things and refocus our lives on what’s more important – family, church, and community.

To guard their faith and adherence to its principles, the Amish and other old order Anabaptists have chosen to not be a part of consumer culture and to stay off the grid, famously eschewing motorized vehicles, electricity and phone service supplied by the grid and many other “utilities” most of us take for granted.

Although I believe that the Amish way of plain living is faithful and beneficial, I don’t believe that all Christian simple living has to include being completely off the grid. I do think we’d be much better off in some ways, and the world would be better off in some ways, if we all did. But given the degree to which we’ve come to depend on the grid for all our “basics”, and the billions of people who would have to go back to very low density ways of living (needing much more land to live on for instance) if we were all to live as the Amish do, it might create an even larger ecological catastrophe on the planet. It just isn’t possible for all of us to live on subsistence or larger farms given the world’s population. And if we all suddenly had septic systems instead of municipal sewage systems there would be an unmanageable amount of pollution.

But we CAN refuse to go along with a great deal of consumer culture, and we CAN refuse to continue our personal love affairs with the technology that drives it, so that our future is not one of increasing drains on the planet, on society, and our nerves. We can put those things aside and refocus on our faith, families, congregations, and our service to others – the true fruits of Christian simplicity.

Faith and Christian Simplicity are Community Affairs

The second point that stood out for me was that the primary focus of the Amish on their communities of faith, their congregations, then their families, and last of all, the individual – exactly the reverse of the rest of American culture. The larger culture is unfortunately fixated on the individual to the detriment of society.

Their faith and lives are not about a pietistic focus on personal salvation. For them, it is the church and the family as a community of faith coming as close as possible to living in The Kingdom that eventually gets them into heaven. How they live together in love as brothers and sisters is what counts, not personal salvation credits piled up to ensure that “I” get into heaven (and unfortunately sometimes also “and the devil take the hindmost”).

On this blog and web site I’ve tried to emulate that theology by promoting the notion that we should be working with our congregations and/or groups within them to foster simplicity as a means to deepen our faith, our relationships with each other and God, and vice versa.

Christian simple living is not “all about me!”

Contrast with the Frontline Show “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown”

Following “The Amish” was the Frontline program “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown.”

Wow! What a contrast… but I think it was a natural follow-on program.

I see the relationship between the two programs as a morality play. The Amish have steadfastly adhered to their belief in living simply as a Christian community rather than creating such material demands that our science and technology push to extreme limits to supply those demands. The Amish don’t need nuclear power to satisfy their simple needs. Their egos do not get off on advances, scientific or otherwise.
It seems a truism that if the rest of us had lived that way, there would not have been a Fukushima or a Chernobyl meltdown, or even a Three Mile Island (just a few miles from my new abode), and certainly not a Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The Amish have a lot to teach us if we only cared to listen.

• Anabaptist History , Community Building , Consumer Culture and Economics , Living More Simply , Technology
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admin January 30th, 2012

There was an interesting article in the New York Times Sunday 1/22/12 (“How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” NY Times front page), about Apple’s off-shoring of almost all of its manufacturing – very instructive in terms of how 21st Century economics actually work on the ground and I recommend it for simple-livers. It got me thinking about how we are inextricably bound-up in the consumer manufacturing and marketing web.

Perhaps more important, it made me think about the various basic assumptions we make about the economy and our lives – most of them probably wrong.

The Times article simply recounts the history of how, in the early days, Apple went from a strong “made in America” philosophy to later off-shoring virtually everything they make. It quotes Steve Jobs telling President Obama that the jobs that went to China are “never coming back.”

In fact, Apple says that curing unemployment in the U.S. is not their job! “We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

This highlights a huge problem with globalization from a Christian simple living perspective: when corporations manufacture and sell all over the world and are owned by stockholders in a hundred countries, they have no reason to be loyal to any one country or to you or me. They are loyal (sometimes) only to their stockholders who are scattered across the planet. They will therefore take advantage of, rather than taking care of, those countries and communities in which they manufacture and/or market their products. This economic philosophy doesn’t merely change the morality and behavior within those corporations; it changes you and me as well.

That kind of globalized corporate morality has unfortunately become a pillar of the 21st Century business belief system. We all have a big stake in that belief because it ensures that we will have a constant flow of toys – newer, faster, smaller electronics, cheaper clothing, cooler, cheaper cars, etc. Steve Jobs’ pitch to the President was that the consumer world we’ve come to love (actually demand) isn’t possible if things are made in America by American workers. Here you can drop in the name of any country or community because it’s true everywhere in the world. I just happen to live in the U.S so I’m more sensitive to how it happens here in my little back yard.

China, for instance, now has a larger manufacturing infrastructure than the U.S., and it’s that extremely efficient, closely knit infrastructure, along with cheap labor and tight government control of its monetary system, that makes our digital world affordable for us. The stuff can’t be made here anymore. Those plants and jobs are gone, and they aren’t coming back for basic structural reasons. Tough luck American workers!

But if we are to “have it all” then it has to be cheap, otherwise we couldn’t afford it even with deeper levels of personal debt. Our, now largely unconscious, lust for more, bigger, better, stuff, has forced us to give away our factories and jobs. We are no longer even close to being self-sufficient. We’ve burned our furniture in order to keep warm!

One of the results of this phenomenon is that America has lost an estimated 6 million manufacturing jobs in the past ten years, and many of the people laid-off had long-term difficulty finding new jobs, many at substantially reduced incomes when they did find work. As a result, many lost their homes, some went bankrupt, and all suffered.

If we were thinking, feeling, and acting like compassionate Christians we wouldn’t be doing this to our neighbors. It’s just that in our corporate rush for profits as well as greater returns on our personal investment portfolios, we don’t care enough to try.

Now, we can argue the finer economic and political points of whether this has been good or bad for Americans in the long run, but the issue for me is that these decisions which affect the welfare of millions of people are being made by people in corporate bureaucracies that couldn’t care less about their impact on individuals, communities, states or nations. And they will bend their interpretations of economic and social data in any way that justifies their profit-maximizing decisions.

Of course they don’t want to see themselves as bad guys – immoral or amoral. Few of us consciously choose to be heartless or immoral business people, managers, or employees, and none of us want to think of ourselves that way either. But it’s the outcome of what we do – how others are affected by our actions – that matters, and it is that upon which history (and God) will judge us.

Major corporations such as oil and gas companies sometimes mount media campaigns selling the notion that their employees and managers live right here in our very own communities, and therefore care a lot about what that corporation does in the community.

Bunk!

Those employees may very well live in my town and they may care about it or even about me in particular… but they don’t get to make the decisions that most determine corporate behavior and their effects on us. The ‘suits’ in high-rise corner offices a thousand miles away or in another country (some of which hold values and beliefs antithetical to ours) call the shots and the local employees are not paid to disobey orders!

So much for that argument!

This has been a long-winded way of saying that there is a reason for making ‘local’ a key part of simple living, and even more important, of being certain that as Christian simple-livers, we should only work for, or patronize organizations that in fact do care about us as customers, neighbors, and as God’s people.

And for Christian businesspeople, the key is treating others with love and compassion first, rather than putting profits first. In The Kingdom, profits are secondary – necessary if one is to stay in business, but secondary. Love of God and His people come first… only after that we can get concerned about the profit.

I say this as someone who grew up in a business family and who has had a business and had to meet a payroll. I understand the challenges businesses face. That business is challenging doesn’t give us a free pass to treat people without thought, awareness, and compassion.

If we can’t make a living or make a profit after having treated our customers, employees, neighbors, and families with thoughtful compassion, then we should find another line of work that will enable us to do so.

Human organizations, and in this case multinational corporations, don’t usually do that (there are a few exceptions, but they are few and far between). But in The Kingdom, it’s S.O.P. And Christian simple-livers should be striving for The Kingdom… with or without Apple Inc.!

• Consumer Culture and Economics , Coping With Consumer Culture , Media , Psychology , Social Justice
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admin January 17th, 2012

I am actually embarrassed to admit this, but one of the things I learned during our recent move and settling-in, is how dependent I/we are on the consumer establishment for my sense of security and well-being.

Ugh! That’s disgusting! But true.

After two or three weeks of unpacking and getting to know our new town, I noticed that every time we saw a chain store or big box store that we frequented in our former town, and which was within a short driving distance of our new digs, one or both of us gave a sigh of relief or even a little cheer.

Oh. My. God! Are we hooked or what?

We felt a greater sense of security every time we found a store that sold the things we were used to. Some of those things were, in fact, real necessities, for instance we are vegans both out of medical necessity as well as philosophy. Unfortunately, Central Pennsylvania, where we have settled, is a bit of a food desert when it comes to vegetarian and vegan restaurants and organic food stores. This we knew before we moved, but we felt we would be able to make-do. So when we discovered our first health food store and that it had many of the foods we were used to, we were elated and felt much more secure.

But the same thing happened when we found stores that only offered the extra, often unnecessary, amenities like a Best Buy or Macy’s. We could certainly live pretty well without their goods, but it still made us feel better that they were close-by – again, more security in the consumption zone!

So there was both the need for things that actually keep us alive and healthy, and the consumption of stuff that merely tickled our fancies. We are far more hooked than I thought, but it goes much deeper in my reptile brain than just feeling good about buying stuff. It has become a deeply emotional thing that is tied (perhaps illicitly) directly to my need to survive!

It reminds me of an explanation I heard some years ago, about why certain scenes in photos or paintings, or even just the mental image of a scene makes us feel good.

Take for instance the pictures we’ve all seen innumerable times of a farm or cabin nestled in a pretty valley like the old Currier and Ives paintings. It might be a winter scene with a wisp of smoke curling from a chimney, or a summer day with a stream flowing by the house and a field of wild flowers behind the barn. Even though we may think such pictures ubiquitous or trite because we’ve seen them so often, they still give us a bit of a good feeling.

We see in them security and safety as well as family and social traditions that we know and are comfortable with. Cabins or farms set in a fertile, protected valley make us feel good because they imply good crops and sufficient food. Surrounding hills offer protection from storms. The chimney smoke on a winter’s evening means warmth and safety. These elements guarantee that we will have ample food and that we will be protected from danger.

But 21st Century consumer culture has corrupted our basic assumptions about safety and security: much different than Currier and Ives or those that are presented in the Bible. We have substituted a plethora of consumer goods in big box stores set along congested highways in place of a barn by a stream, or a family sitting by the fireplace on a winter’s night.

Certainly our consumer version of safety and security creates an uglier picture than those of Currier and Ives, but also a whole lot more dangerous to our well-being as individuals, families, and society – but still… I felt uncomfortably better knowing my 21st Century need for gadgetry and supra-abundance could be easily satisfied in our new surroundings – whether I actually satisfy those needs or not.

Even our brain stems, those remnant reptile brains of ours, have now been imprinted with a corrupted sense of security… one that ultimately makes us much less secure and more vulnerable.

So, I guess the first thing for me to do is to notice that this is happening to me and to at least be awake to what this corrupted sense of security is likely to lead me to do. I now know that I feel this way, so I can pay much closer attention to what I am doing, or rather what the snake in my head wants me to do.

Gotcha!

• Consumer Culture and Economics , Coping With Consumer Culture , Psychology
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admin January 9th, 2012

I thought I knew where I lived and where belonged. I had good friends and neighbors who I could depend on, and who could depend on me. I had a good, simple-living, stable life – generally knew where I was going, if only to the grocery store or barber shop. Scheduled myself to meditate, pray, and exercise every day; attended church meetings and worship every week. Knew the good places I could eat on my vegan diet, and of course knew all the organic food stores in our area. I posted to this blog regularly and worked with my wife doing our puppetry. In short, a good, simple, somewhat predictable life.

Well forget all that!

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything to this blog in four months. That’s because we willfully threw away that comfortable stability and moved from the Washington D.C. area to Central Pennsylvania.

Amazingly disruptive! Sure I knew there would be the usual hassles of a move and that we’d be starting out all over again and would have to get familiar with a new area, but I was totally unprepared for the emotional disruption. The move made me incredibly aware of how dependant I have been on my physical environment for my emotional and cognitive well-being as well as my identity.

In early September we decided to make a long-dreamed-of move. Being ‘formally’ retired, we wanted to move away from the traffic, noise, and confusion of the urban D.C. area to a much less expensive, more picturesque place closer to some of our extended family.

Because the real estate market was extremely slow and our house was neither in an upscale part of town, nor in particularly good repair, we knew it would take a long time to sell and we’d have plenty of time to deal with shifting our puppetry business to a new area, slowly, carefully say goodbye to church members, friends, and neighbors, pack, and find a new place while we waited for a buyer. This plan also gave our brains and emotions time to adjust to leaving ‘home’ and finding a new one.

Wrong!

Our house sold in 1 (one) day and we suddenly had no place to live! You can imagine the chaotic, disruptive, rest of the story.

The past four months have been a bit of a blur, and I’ve had virtually no time for a number of important things, like writing this blog.

But back to where I started: I have found that my sense of who I am and how I live – small habits as well as big philosophies – is incredibly dependent on my comfort with my community and knowing where everything is and how I fit into it all. I am really an organic part of my environment and when it changes – I change. What I care about and what I do change.

Our old house (it was a 1920’s arts and crafts bungalow), was always in need of large scale repair and looked it. It was hard to keep clean and would have needed a major interior and exterior renovation to come up to 21st Century, nay, 20th Century standards. It certainly had its charms, but it had not been well-built to begin with and over the years had been poorly maintained before we bought it. So we got used to living a “wrong side of the tracks” sort of existence – but which was mostly satisfying. We lived in a wonderful neighborhood which more than made up for the condition of the house.

One of the reasons for our move was to find a much less expensive place so we could pay-down our mortgage because we’re retired and no longer have the potential for an increasing income to look forward to.

Here’s the kicker for a couple of simple livers: we found a place in Pennsylvania that was not only much cheaper, allowing us to cut our monthly expenses, BUT was also much newer (“mid-fifties modern”), was in gorgeous, immaculate condition, and looked like a million dollars.

Culture shock!

I love the place! It looks great in all its classical modernism; much of it looks newly minted; the floors don’t move and creak when you walk on them, everything is well-built – even classy. I could go on, but the bottom line is that a couple of simple livers are now having to adjust to a house that, a couple of months ago, seemed beyond our means, and did not look particularly ‘simple.’

Besides, as simple living Christians we’re supposed to be lovers of people, not especially lovers of stuff!

But for us, this house is much more affordable and is certainly more modest than some other homes in the area. It’s just that it doesn’t feel like modesty since it is so much better looking and better built than our previous house. It’s a place that I would have coveted long before I found the pleasures and advantages of living simply – a time when having bigger and better was one of my mantras. So living in this new house sort of feels like cheating.

And of course during this transition I haven’t been working on the blog and have been feeling something of a traitor to the movement. In fact my anxiety over the hundreds of details around the move and then finding our way around a new locale was so high that I all but gave up my meditation and prayer practice – I just couldn’t concentrate enough to sit still! So I not only felt like a traitor but like a double-agent!
Who was this person living in this new place? It sure wasn’t the same old me.

Things have been gradually settling down. We’re finding our way around – but haven’t found a home church yet – and I’ve picked up my prayer and meditation life, and now, here tonight, I’m back to blogging.

And of course there is the obvious: living simply doesn’t necessarily mean having to live on a subsistence farm or in a run-down house – it means living with less than our consumer culture dictates and using our resources, however many we have or don’t have, for others rather than thinking only of ourselves.

I’ve figured out that I’ve simply lost some of my usual geographical guideposts for how well I’m doing with that and I’ll have to reorient myself to some new ones.

Sorry for my absence but I’m getting it back together again and I hope to be posting random simple thoughts as regularly as possible… in fact I think I feel one coming on right now, so I’d better get on it.

Peace and Joy
Steve

Tags: Commentary

• Consumer Culture and Economics , Coping With Consumer Culture , Psychology
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admin August 22nd, 2011

What truly amazes me is that virtually everyone, spurred on by politicians and the media, continually calls for an economic recovery, i.e., a return to the pre-recession economy. This would mean a return to high rates of consumption, increased debt to both pay for the goods and make more profit for lenders (since actual incomes are unlikely to go up sufficiently to pay for the increased spending – or if they did go up sufficiently we would have rapidly rising inflation), a housing market also at pre-recession levels of sales and profitability, and so forth.

If I’m not mistaken, these are the conditions that brought about the crisis to begin with. In other words most people want to return to an unsustainable economic model featuring still more bubbles and busts. Eventually, of course, this leads to “The Great Bubble” from which the economy cannot recover – that’s what eventually happens in pyramid schemes, the Great Macroeconomic Pyramid Scheme.

So tell me again why so many people want to return to these conditions! Are our memories really that short? Are we all really slow learners?

No, don’t bother – I know the answer.

Good old homo economicus – you and me, in macroeconomic speak – and our various organizations and institutions (mutual funds, 401K’s, banks, political parties, special interest groups like the Sierra Club and the NRA) have far too much of our egos, money, and lives invested in clinging to the old model. We’re all hoping that somewhere in that perverse convoluted mess, we will make out OK financially, and we’re too frightened to seriously consider any other way of living.

We’re going to continue blindly doing the same things that have not worked in the past in the hope that they might miraculously work this time around.

As a society we still really want our gadgets, cars, houses, and golf course retirement homes, regardless of the cost to society as a whole or the risk that the whole model will collapse. We’re still just not willing to give up anything in order to survive over the long term.

I am no longer naïve enough to believe that those of us who care about this can suddenly bring about a revolution in our 21st Century group-think so that everyone gives up the old model and moves to subsistence farms in West Virginia (West Virginians wouldn’t like that anyway!).

I’m not calling in the Marines to bring about the revolution, although God knows the Marines need something useful to do, and I’m not going to read the riot act to society (again)…

BUT, I do think that Christian simple livers must continue to encourage more and more people to join us in focusing on the things that are truly important in life instead of just consuming and going deeper in debt to chase ephemeral dreams of a gadget-driven good life. We can show more people how to live mindfully and compassionately instead. And when the Great Bubble finally does burst in a few years, we will have laid some really sound ground work for a real recovery – built on rock, not on sand. If, in our simple living, we are also caring about the millions of people who will have been badly injured in such an economic train wreck, we will be able to show the wisdom of living for people instead of living for stuff. And maybe many more people will join us.

We need to work hard at this because we know neither the day nor the hour when we will be needed and we need to be ready with an attractive, workable alternative.

If the Spirit is with us, we’ll be able to do that. Let’s keep on truckin’ and praying!

• Consumer Culture and Economics , Fomenting Change
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