Confessions of a Consumer Addict

admin January 4th, 2010

Well here it is: three different articles related directly to simple living and the environment – all in the same edition of The Sunday Washington Post (1/3/10). The stars must be aligning just right!

When our simple living concerns serendipitously show up all at once in the headlines of one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, then maybe our time has come… or not. I always get overly excited when things like this happen, as though our world is really, finally about to change for the better. I can’t help but think that it has to be more than just a coincidence. Maybe our collective consumer desperation over our deteriorating financial and economic situation has finally culminated in a rush to sanity!

Then my memory kicks in and I recall that in the past such rushes to sanity have quickly pooped-out when the heat of the crisis abates and most of us revert to type.

But there is always a glimmer of hope that even if the sanity doesn’t last long, that at least a few people will have learned a little about a better way of living and a few more people may actually have tried living a little better – a baby step toward lasting sanity. And I really do think that happens often enough that it’s worth writing and talking about.

At any rate, I commend these articles to you along with a brief summary of each.

Sink Your Teeth into a Fast, Michelle Singletary

Michelle, who writes the Color of Money column in The Post, recommends a 21 day financial fast in which we buy only necessities by curbing our need to consume. Several families took her up on the fast and the article reports on their experiences.

She advocates the fast for people for whom the stress of money causes pain with a spouse, friends or family, or for people who are worried about their retirement or college savings, or if they just don’t have enough to get to the end of the month, i.e., it’s for most of us.

The fast instructs us not to ‘shop’ (or window shop, which she says, is merely shopping for entertainment – a definite no-no) not to use credit cards (cash only), and not to buy anything that is not an absolute necessity like food. No going out to restaurants or fast food emporiums, not even a coffee on the way to work, and no buying gifts or gift cards.

On the gift-giving issue, Michelle tells us that, like most simple livers already know, we can give ourselves or hand made things instead.

And on using plastic: it makes buying too thoughtless and easy. Even if we pay off the card every month, the ease of it causes all of us to buy more than we need.

Michelle also advises folks to make a budget and stick to it, explaining that budgeting is not about you, it is about good stewardship, using well what God has given you.

There are many more very thoughtful items in the financial fast guidelines, so click on the link above and take a look at the entire article.

Happy Talk, Carol Graham

Carol Graham is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. Her book, Happiness around the World: the Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires, will be on book shelves this month, and her article in The Post hits a few of her book’s key points, including:

There is a pattern for those who are happy:

A stable marriage, good health, and enough (but not too much) income.
Not surprisingly, events such as divorce, unemployment, or economic instability are terrible for it.

But strangely, we tend to adapt to both prosperity and adversity, i.e. we can have virtually everything and be miserable as well as being cheerful during tremendous adversity. Where our adaptive ability often fails us is around uncertainty. This is difficult for most of us to adapt to and it is under these conditions that many of us feel the least happy.

Carol’s team’s studies in Russia and Peru showed that those who made the greatest income gains were, ironically, the most critical of their economic situation while those with the least income gains were, on average, more satisfied. Of course, she explains, the frustrated achievers may have made gains precisely because they were discontent in the first place.

But the bottom line here is that, as a number of recent studies have shown, our western, First World assumptions about wealth and possessions making us happy are simply bogus.

Beyond recycling and light bulbs, Juliet Eilperin

Finally, a story that once again not only demonstrates how far behind the rest of the industrialized world the U.S. is with regard to the environment and climate change, but also shows how those who are way ahead of us are becoming missionaries to us, the former (how embarrassing) leaders of the technological world.

A Swedish experiment aimed at helping U.S. citizens understand that a lifestyle that curbs greenhouse-gas emissions is not necessarily oppressive, just different, has selected a number of American families to be “Climate Pilots”.

Under the coaching of Swedish volunteers, several Virginia families are installing high-tech greenhouse gas saving devices and changing their daily routines to greatly reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. In addition to installing such technologies as geothermal heat pumps, these families are also using a number of low-tech strategies such as eating much less meat to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by farm animals.

The author reports that Americans each emit 23.5 metric tons (that’s nearly 26 tons U.S.) of greenhouse gases per year, 4 times the world average! The average for the European Union countries is 10.3 tons per capita while Sweden is now at about 7.4 tons. Sweden has made climate change a central pillar of their domestic and foreign policy for over 10 years. The city of Kalmar for instance will be fossil fuel-free by 2030. Several Kalmar families visited VA to coach the climate pilots there how to do it themselves.

Sweden has accomplished this by making climate change a national priority such that every community has a climate and energy adviser, and the government has launched “study circles” on climate across the nation during the ‘90’s. The article also makes the point that Sweden, along with other European countries, has not succumbed to the American pathology of believing that individual’s rights and freedoms must always trump the common good, no matter how many people may be hurt by that kind of ego-centric living.

Post Script

Perhaps Christians who live simply may be able to reach other Americans with the message that it is our community, whether it is our local neighborhoods, or the nation as a whole, that is at stake here. It is no longer about ‘me’, but care for all of us and all of God’s creation that is paramount, not my right to have a Hummer!

Tags: Commentary, Information

• Community Building , Coping With Consumer Culture , Environment , Fomenting Change , How To's , Media , Psychology , Spreading the Word
• Comments(0)

admin September 1st, 2008

… making fewer demands on the planet, building more meaningful lives and having the time and resources to serve others are primary goals of Christian simple living.

But to make a real difference in the Twentyfirst Century living simply requires a community of people in close proximity working together to create a more responsible community. We know that it takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to live sustainably and serve others. The membership of many urban and suburban congregations are geographically dispersed, sometimes having long commutes just to get to the church building or visit each other. This makes it difficult to have the day-to-day community necessary to support each other’s efforts, reduce reliance on transportation, share and barter equipment and materials regularly and so forth. So many of us are left to go it alone – a real shame since congregations have tremendous potential to change the world, if we could just change our organizational model and shift our missions and goals just a bit. But Imagine …

…what could happen if one or two urban or suburban congregations decided to take seriously their mission to live and work together as a physical Christian community enabling them live simply and reach out to the needs of others. They might create a new geographically integrated community in which:

• What was important was not their jobs, incomes, houses, and reputations, but building their community, enriching their lives and relationships as well as their ability to reach out to those who needed their help;
• Members lived within walking/biking distance of each other, the church meeting house, and their jobs, thus reducing pollution and resource degradation while improving their health;
• They shared resources such as vehicles/transportation, appliances, tools, and their skills and labor;
• Families didn’t need to have 2 fulltime incomes because they didn’t engage in a consumer lifestyle, buying unnecessary stuff and throwing away much of what they had.
• They therefore needed less money than the average consumer and thus had more time to be with their families, support their church and community, and work in the congregation’s service projects and ministries;
• They made the community affordable for people of all income levels. Even in the midst of urban consumer culture, they created their own steady-state micro economy by providing low cost basic services for each other such as preventive health care, education, elder care, professional services, local food production, real estate, financial services, etc., through voluntarism and by adopting alternative service and financing arrangements for their community.

Imagine that over time they:

• Created a meeting house that served as their community center for religious functions as well as daily living activities, and which over the years, eventually housed not only space for worship and Christian education,
• but also … A small high quality K-12 school run not only by professionals but also by a cadre of volunteers, thus charging a tuition low enough that everyone could afford it;
• Home and community-based support services for their elders enabling them to continue living in the community or with their families instead of having to live in assisted living and nursing facilities.
• In addition they operated a senior drop-in and activities center.

All these services were staffed by volunteers including students as well as professionals;

• A restaurant serving seniors, kids, and the local community, again run by volunteers (elders, empty-nesters, kids, and ‘sandwich generation’ adults) and a small paid staff;
• Offered alternative financial planning and counseling, responsible investing, home re-location and real estate services, and local job finding services to support more congregation members in moving into the local community and finding employment consistent with their values;
• Space for community meeting and recreation functions;
• An equipment loan/barter service;
• Consulting services and support groups for green living;
• bartering for repair and up-keep of homes, vehicles, etc.
• Alternative, low cost preventive health care services, rehab and perhaps clinical services based in part on barter and volunteer services.
• Created a local farming and food production system to ensure that the community had healthy organic, locally-grown foods all year round which:
• Utilized a network of local Community Supported Agriculture farms and other local organic farmers including member and non-member farms;
• Managed a small volunteer/user-run food processing plant for freezing and canning local produce so they were able to eat high quality, local food all year;
• Operated a meal preparation facility to make meal preparation more time- and cost-efficient (similar to the new Dream Dinners or Super Suppers stores) using the locally grown and processed food;
• Supplied the restaurant (see above) with healthy locally grown food.

Impossible? Unrealistic?

It’s entirely do-able, given time and a critical mass of congregation members with the desire and a plan. In fact many congregation already have the seeds to begin. Such a community would be self-supporting and sustainable. It would offer both paid and volunteer jobs, providing many of the services families need at well below market prices, and all operating outside of the conventional economic system. It works, not because it has to make a profit and keep shareholders happy, but because the Church community wants and needs it, and because it is a key part of their faith and practice. A key difference between this and various other Christian communities in the past and a few still in existence today, is that a community such as this is geared toward using an existing urban/suburban infrastructure (houses, apartment buildings, church buildings, transportation, jobs, etc.) and bases it’s structure and practice on Twentyfirst Century conventional family and community norms. It doesn’t attempt to be monastic, exclusive, or driven by a single tightly focused mission, but rather would be sufficiently diverse in its activities, incomes, and interests that it could be nearly, if not completely self-sustaining. Rural communities such as the Hutterite communities have done this, sometimes with great success, but it may be time to make it work in urban America as well.

Tags: Commentary, Information

• Community Building , Food , Health , Health Care , Social Justice , Wellness
• Comments(0)

admin March 20th, 2007

Is institutionalizing our parents and grandparents in nursing homes a loving, just, or economically sustainable thing to do?

It must be, because that’s what has become the norm in our society.

Fortunately all older people haven’t been institutionalized this way yet. Some older people are lucky enough, or healthy enough, to be able to ‘age in place’, being supported by family and friends if and when needed. But many are not so lucky. A growing number of elders unfortunately walk, or are pushed, down the common pathway to the nursing home.

My day-job is working for a health care research organization that studies issues in long term care among other things. It is clear from that research that we are already in big economic trouble caring for elders with the boomers hitting 60. And that problem is going to get much worse in the near future.

I’ve also had a fair amount of personal experience with assisted living and nursing facilities. I’ve found that once you get past the ‘chandelier effect’ (the big brass chandelier and French provincial furniture that usually grace the entryways and public rooms) the level of care can be devastatingly poor except in the more expensive programs.

Certainly some people proactively choose to go to nursing facilities, but there are many others, however, who are forced into this because there aren’t any other real options. In our society, living with your children or grandchildren is now usually considered to be an unfair burden and therefore not a real option.

Full-time nursing care or a nursing home is sometimes a practical solution, but there are better, higher quality, less expensive options, which often aren’t offered or aren’t considered.

Soon many of our parents, grandparents, and us for that matter, will not be able to afford to live in such a facility of any quality – and the range of quality in these facilities is breathtaking. The economics of long-term care are turning against us as the boomers age and health and custodial care costs go up. There are already far too few trained caregivers and facilities, and just too little money for many of us to afford the rapidly escalating costs of assisted living and nursing home care.

Folks getting close to retirement can forget about long-term care insurance because it is too expensive to justify the tiny benefit it will provide. For middle-aged folks the prospects are a little better, but not much. Long-term care is so expensive that even relatively good LTC insurance policies won’t come close to providing what will be needed.

We are racing toward a financial wall at break-neck speed, apparently without a thought as to how we are going to deal with it

More difficult than financing is the issue we have so far avoided thinking about:

Institutionalizing our parents is not a loving response to the normal process of aging.

It isn’t loving because no institution of any quality can provide the love and concern that a normally healthy family and community can, and they can’t provide the familiarity and comfort that ‘home’ provides at any stage of our lives. Home is home no matter how old you are. And it certainly isn’t loving to push our families into a terrible financial quagmire just to survive.

We try to avoid this issue because none of us want to see ourselves as unloving or uncaring, but in those fleeting moments when we are honest with ourselves this feeling pops-up as a very unwelcome intruder. Let’s face it: we are merely rationalizing when we try to convince ourselves that “they’re better off this way because we could never provide that kind of care.” Thank God you can’t provide that kind of care!

How did we get ourselves into this crisis?

Americans, in the Twentieth Century, took the notion of the self-reliant frontiersman and the rugged individualist to a new extreme. We decided that our children must be allowed to fulfill themselves as completely independent individuals, discovering their futures and making their fortunes no matter where that might lead them. This extreme individualism has become one of the key drivers for our culture.

This meant that kids routinely moved around the country in search of education, jobs, and spouses, usually never to return home to live. We then decided that individualism must also mean that the insular, nuclear family of two adults and two kids was a big improvement over the traditional extended family. This left us with families scattered across the country. Increasingly communities, particularly suburban communities, became case studies for the film “Bowling Alone” – large tracts of houses occupied by strangers who formed temporary alliances with a few people living close-by or at work.

‘Family’ has become a mere holiday entertainment involving costly and time-consuming travel, not to mention the newly traditional argument over whose family we will visit this year!

What does all this have to do with simple living? There seems to be nothing simple or sustainable about this new arrangement – especially not for the young and the old. The young are also farmed-out to day care or pre-pre-pre-school, which are simply mini-institutions but, we hope, not as bad as the nursing homes!

But it seems to me that a community of Christian people or congregations committed to living simply and caring for each other, could creatively work together at the congregational level to develop loving, effective, and enjoyable lives – not just for our elders, but also for every generation represented in our congregations. If we care, shouldn’t we be able to create our own ‘hand made’ solutions that are better than relying on ‘competitive free market forces’, the wisdom of government, or blind luck?

If we really began to live simple lives by cutting back on our demands for the ‘good life’ we might save time, money, and effort, which could then be re-invested in voluntarily caring for our youngsters who need day care and after-school care, and elders who could be cared for in their homes or congregationally run home and community care programs – rather than farming them out to commercial institutions. Young folks can help take care of elders along with adults, and elders can help take care of kids and provide other services as well. That way everyone stays useful, productive, and happy much longer. It builds community, and it builds family. Seems to me things used to be this way, but who am I to stand in the way of ‘progress’?

It’s not possible to turn back the clock, but I’m wondering if we haven’t thrown the baby out with the bath water in our race to be modern, self-fulfilled, well-off individuals – maybe otherwise known as a ‘race to the bottom’. Maybe we need to re-visit these issues and bring our lives and communities back into a truly human scale that have depth and meaning again.

Tags: Commentary

• Community Building , Consumer Culture and Economics , Coping With Consumer Culture , Health , Psychology , Social Justice
• Comments(0)

admin February 28th, 2006

Kicking my consumer habit turns out to be a whole lot harder than I thought. I have even worked in addiction treatment and prevention programs, and I’ve still got this monkey on my back. Maybe it hurts too much to go cold turkey. Maybe I was abused as a child. Maybe my mother dropped me on my head. Oh crap, I just don’t want to stop!

Fortunately (or unfortunately) I’ve got lots of company, because most Americans are addicted to the consumer lifestyle to some extent. But just like the heroin addict, we are addicted to a lifestyle that is killing us.

We’re getting so deep into our addiction that, like all addicts, we sometimes don’t see it, and we go into denial when someone points it out. As they say in addictions treatment programs, you never stop being an addict – for the rest of our lives we are merely recovering. That’s certainly true for me despite being deeply committed to living more simply, not polluting, and working for justice.

An addiction is a vicious circle in which we drink, smoke, or shoot-up to feel better. Then we need more and more to keep feeling good, then we feel better for shorter and shorter periods of time no matter how much we use, and we can’t do without it because it hurts too much. We look around and see that we have blown much of our lives and money supporting this vicious circle … and as much we ache to get out of it, we can’t – without some help.

Fat, salt, sugar, starch, the remote control, the car, automatic washers, microwaves, and the couch – a recipe for life-long addiction, chronic illness, and early death.

Hyperbole? Not a chance. Our culture has got us by the (pick a body-part) and it has no intention of letting go because business and industry has too much money invested in the machine. This is our U.S. Cali drug cartel.

In the addictions world, there are pushers who sell us the stuff for an exorbitant profit, enablers who, consciously or unconsciously, support our addiction: “Oh come on, it’s a party! Have a drink, it isn’t going to kill you!” “Oh, come on, it’s the holidays, a little cheese cake isn’t going to kill you!” “You know, you really deserve a new car, do something nice for yourself for a change.” “Take a break – have a grease burger!”

And then of course there is ‘us’, the users.

We are caught in an inexorable, vicious circle:

• We are over-eating and under-exercising – all in the name of modern comfort and ‘efficiency’.

• Our addictive need for larger houses, more cars and lots of other stuff, requires two-earner families working longer hours with less time to cook, eat well, or spend time with our families that need personal nurturing.

• We then buy exercise programs, diet plans, and health spas that we really can’t afford in order to counteract the effects of our poor lifestyles.

• Our poor health exponentially raises the cost of our health care and creates an under-class that can no longer afford health insurance or a doctor.

• And finally we go into deep credit card debt to pay for it because many of us really don’t have the money to live this way to begin with.

This vicious circle is, in turn, fueled by industries and businesses that have become addicted to our money – they can’t survive without our addiction!

The first step in AA’s 12 steps is where we need to begin:

“We admitted we were powerless over (name your substance) — that our lives had become unmanageable.”

In my case, and probably yours too, I have to be honest and admit that in spite of my beliefs and values, I REALLY LIKE THIS CONSUMER LIFE – AND I DON’T WANT TO STOP! The Burger King Whopper and fries is goooood. That Nikon D200, 10-megapixel digital camera at a mere $1,600 is calling my name, and I DO want flat panel plasma HDTV this year.

If, together, we admit that we are hooked, and if together we admit that we have to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God…” (AA step 3), then maybe we have a real shot at living saner and simpler lives. Then maybe we can even reach out and help others as well.

Tags: Commentary, Information

• Community Building , Consumer Culture and Economics , Coping With Consumer Culture , Health , Living More Simply , Psychology , Wellness
• Comments(0)