Archive for the 'Media' Category

Simple Living Issues on the Front Page

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!

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An Attempted Escape From Desperation

admin February 8th, 2009

True story: I spent a lot of years feeling pretty desperate.

Ironically I became increasingly desperate while searching for happiness, success, and security. But the search always foundered on the daily pressure to find and keep a (more important) better-paying job and of course worry about performing well once I had the job. Then there was wanting a new car, or furniture, or camera, and at the end of each month there was still more worry about how to pay the bills.

It made me feel like I simply wasn’t good enough, smart enough, or ambitious enough to be a real success, and I felt like everyone else knew it, especially my Dad, my sister, wife, kids, friends, and colleagues. Well OK, the whole world!

When I’d finally manage to acquire something I wanted, it almost never actually produced the advertised nirvana, success, respect, or even simple happiness for very long. The stuff turned out to be largely marketing lies that had appealed to my ego rather than my practical needs or my spirit, which was flagging badly:

    The shiny, great-smelling new car became scratched and dented, and eventually broke down;
    The new computer became obsolete in 3 years;
    Folks admired my new house until bigger ones were built down the street;
    The new job was great except that it came with more headaches and I wasn’t performing in it any better than the last job;
    My marriage folded
    and the pile of bills got still higher.

I felt victimized, frustrated, and angry at myself, and after a lifetime of this vicious circle I was a cynical, unhappy, tired, and desperate person. There had to be more to life, to my life, than disappointment and anger.

Perversely, all the time I was worrying about this, my income actually did go up, I did have a nice home (though fairly simple), my health was good, I had time to pursue hobbies and sports, and I did new and interesting things. But I didn’t really notice those details and therefore failed to experience or appreciate them because I was fixated on what I didn’t have, and so my desperation just grew.

It all felt like the classic nightmare in which you are being chased and you try to run but your legs feel like they’re stuck in thick mud and they just won’t move, or the infamous dream of finding yourself in a very public place in your underwear, or worse!

At this point you’re probably expecting me to say that simple living saved me from all this… but it didn’t, at least not all by itself.

I’ll write about why, and what I believe saved me in my next couple of posts.

What has your experience been like?

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A Compassionate Response to the Economic Crisis

admin January 18th, 2009

Consumer culture is sick, and needs a compassionate response from us!

The current economic meltdown has been caused by a severe chronic illness that is causing a lot of pain. It begs for a compassionate cure that only Christians who practice simplicity can provide.

As Christians who live faithfully and simply, we have something of great value to offer this newly troubled consumer world. In fact our intervention now could be crucial to society’s, and the Church’s, long term survival. BTW, it’s interesting that the word ‘crucial’ is derived from the Latin word cross, so this may be an opportunity for us to carry ours!

Christian simple living offers a healing perspective on the poverty and illness slowly emerging out of the economic chaos, and it might finally be seen as a welcome alternative to consumer culture. I believe that Jesus would want us to help the newly poor, and heal the sickness underlying the new poverty, although in some cases it is just a lowered standard of living rather than true poverty.

You could fairly say that in the past, consumer society just appeared to us to be sick because of our theology/philosophy of life, but now, we have all seen the hard evidence that in fact it really is an illness.

As a society we are caught in a vicious circle. Our individual and society-wide sense of entitlement to a good (you could even say wealthy) life pervades every aspect of our culture and economy to the point that it has become the most significant driver of our culture – and fate.

Over the course of the Twentieth Century our ego’s sense of entitlement has been carefully nurtured by business and industry and now it drives our economic decision making from our consumer purchases to how we invest for college and retirement to how we frame the business models of multinational corporations. This sense of entitlement boils down to “I want more money faster so I can support the extravagant lifestyle advertisers tell me I so richly deserve!” The resulting consumerism, speculation, and corporate empire-building, has led us to the current economic meltdown.

But apparently there is a consensus that the cure for this ego disorder seems to be to put still more money back into our personal and corporate pockets so we can all get back to spending money again and “rebuild” the economy. (Brings to mind the old saw that the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over while expecting a different result each time.)

This kind of cure is, at heart, a Ponzi scheme, and it is what makes it a vicious circle. And although the cure may make us feel like it is doing some small amount of good in the short run, it will only foment an even worse crisis in the not-too-distant future, because it not only doesn’t address the real problem, it feeds it.

As a society we could break out of the vicious circle, but of course we won’t. For too many people it just feels too good to be out there accumulating “wealth,” as the brokerages now insist on calling our “savings.”

…and like the heroin addict who feels sooo good when he shoots-up, then feels sooo bad when he comes down (and in his pain thinks mainly about where to get the next fix so he can stop the pain) we too, even in our economic misery, think only about our next high. Without treatment the addict’s body eventually becomes so sick that that he dies of organ failure. Our consumer addiction is likely to do the same to us individually and as a society.

So our economic crisis truly is an illness causing much pain and even some real poverty while much of society refuses to deal with the root cause and get on with living simply.

They need us now!

This may, in fact, turn out to be the best opportunity we will have in this century to help people understand why Christian simple living is a real cure rather than another Ponzi scheme… and we should probably start in our own congregations, because oddly enough, the Church, regardless of what Jesus taught, has rarely spoken out strongly on this issue with conviction and energy, much less taken meaningful action on it – so our congregations are filling with the newly poor… and sick.

What are some specific actions you believe we might take to minister during the crisis?

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We Aren’t Getting Healthier and Living Longer

admin October 10th, 2007

Americans, at least in the past, have crowed about how good our health is – that we’re living longer and feeling better than most everyone else in the world, and we’ve bragged about how good our diet is compared to the rest of the world.

Wrong!

There are now a number of studies, one just out*, that say the reverse is more likely to be true, and it looks like once again our boasting has been filled with more hubris than truth.

The reality is, that after a generation of increasing life spans and improving health, a number of studies have shown that trend is reversing – and researchers are worried. Although our most elderly citizens are in fact living longer than in the past, younger people are not so lucky. They are in significantly worse health than the previous generation, by their own report, and this is a strong predictor of life span – the poorer one reports their health to be, the shorter their actual life expectancy is.

The self-reports examined in the new studies show that more people are having more difficulty with even the most basic day-to-day activities of daily living like climbing the stairs and getting up out of a chair; far more report having high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes than ever before, and disability rates among the younger generation are rising fast.

Many of these problems can be tracked directly to the obesity epidemic: two thirds of all Americans are overweight! We’re eating far too much of the wrong stuff and we’re becoming more and more physically lazy.

When is the last time you didn’t use the remote instead of walking to the TV to do it manually? How many times do you use the handicap automatic door opener in a large building instead of opening it by hand? Do you always use the elevator instead of the stairs? Do you drive to the corner store instead of walking? And there are many more questions we need to ask of our selves.

Fat tastes good doesn’t it? In fact our favorite meals are pretty much fat, salt and sugar burgers. When you say it that way, Uggh!

In addition, the baby boomers report having substantially more stress in their lives than the previous generation, including long commutes, taking care of both kids and elderly parents, and that many are working two or more jobs in an attempt to keep up with their spending (most often unsuccessfully).

This again tracks directly to the simple living cure: living close to work and family rather than participating in the traditional car-centered urban sprawl, and building mutual support communities within our churches and local communities to share the burdens of caring for our elders and kids.

This leads directly to two of our basic premises in Christian simple living:

1. Less is better – we need to stop eating so much of the wrong stuff.

2. God wants us to be good stewards of what he gave us rather than ignoring or wasting them – we need to take action to be good stewards of our bodies just as we are to be good stewards of the environment.

* The study was conducted by Beth J. Soldo, Ph.D., Olivia Mitchell, Ph.D., and John McCabe, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, and Rania Tfaily, Ph.D., of Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, and published in print and online by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

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To Cell or not to Cell

admin June 14th, 2006

I want a cell phone. Is this part of my consumer addiction, or do I really need one?

I bought my wife a cell phone years ago so she’d be safer on the road, and she has rarely used it. I’ve resisted getting one myself to reduce my dependency on the ‘grid’, lighten the load on the environment, and not support the ‘growth economy’.

But now my car at, 11 years of age, and has 150,000 miles on it, and is a whole lot less dependable than it used to be, and it would feel a lot safer if I had a phone in the car. Of course I could always buy a newer, more dependable car but that would be a tad more expensive and even worse for the environment. So, personal safety vs. economic and environmental responsibility – what to do?

I’d love to have a new toy, and it would be convenient in case of an emergency, but then I’ve spent countless years driving old cars with no phone, so why is it now suddenly dangerous to be without one? Sure, they’re available now and they weren’t a few years ago, so why reject safety for a principle?

The reason is actually pretty compelling. We think of high tech industries as being ‘clean’ or ‘light. When we look at a cell phone or laptop we don’t notice any smoke coming out of it and no oil stains on the table and we conclude that it’s clean, but in fact they are far from it. What we don’t pay attention to is the tremendous amount of fossil fuels, water, and toxic chemicals that are used to manufacture them.

For instance, the United Nations did a study last year and found that the average desktop computer requires 10 times their weight in fossil fuels and other resources to build compared to the average car which only requires twice its weight in the same fluids – NOT a light industry. And at the rate we discard cells, computers, and peripherals, it becomes waste, often not recycled. Those that are recycled usually end up in super-dumps in Asia where the toxics leach from them creating the equivalent of Super-Fund sites. National Geographic Magazine did an article on recycling electronics several months ago and included a startling picture of kids in Asia pulling the innards out of computers and cell phones while sitting in toxic wastes that had leached into water puddles. NOT a clean or safe industry!

We need to also consider that the use of these speedy, ‘efficient’ high tech devices also has the perverse effect of dramatically speeding up the rate of economic growth, development, and environmental degradation virtually everywhere in the world. Is this also something I should support?

Obviously there are good reasons not to further contribute to this mess. But I want a cell phone!

What would you do?

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A Media Drought for Lent

admin March 30th, 2006

When Lent began this year, I was faced with the perennial question of “What should I give up?” There was the usual list of possibilities, but one new suggestion from our Pastor was “Give up the media.” Don’t turn on the TV, or radio, and don’t read the newspaper. This would probably also mean not getting on the Internet, but I’m not sure if that would include email (does being a Christian always come down to splitting hairs?).

It made me think. Although I have gone for periods of time intentionally not turning on the TV, I hadn’t thought about avoiding all media. What would happen if I did that?

It could be a very good thing in that we don’t usually think about the huge number of social values messages we get through the media and how they subtly change our perspectives and behavior. Even when we only intend to listen to the news stories, all the advertising, commentary, sequencing and framing of stories, the music played, etc., influences what we think, often unconsciously. Even when I make a point of deconstructing media messages and work at not accepting other’s biases, I’m still getting a dose I’m not aware of. So, does listening to the media every day really help us to be ourselves, marching to our own drummers?

If the notion of not conforming to popular secular culture is a key ingredient in Christian simple living, and I believe it is, the question becomes, how much are we conforming to the culture without even knowing it? Are we being covertly co-opted because we are so ‘plugged-in’ that we aren’t aware of losing ourselves and the values we think we have?

You may be thinking, like I did, “I can make myself conscious and aware, and inoculate myself against the negative effects of the media. I will just listen-in without buying-in so that at least I know what’s going on in the world. I won’t let myself be changed by it.”

Fat chance! Consumer culture is more powerful, seductive, and subliminal than many of us realize. The media are so much a part of our society and economy that their very structures automatically insinuate consumer and economic growth assumptions into our thought processes and value systems.

In spite of believing this to be true, I still want to know what’s going on in the world. I’ve spent a lot of years in the behavior-change business, so I have at least some residual belief that awareness, education, and training can be helpful in changing our behavior and reducing our susceptibility to media influences.

BUT … I no longer feel invulnerable to media messages and I do believe that I, and probably all of us, should spend much less time plugged into the media. Our use of the media doesn’t have to be like an umbilical cord that keeps us alive through ‘mother media’. If we work hard at it, we can be less susceptible to unconsciously conforming to the culture – we might actually have more time to live the truly free life Jesus promised.

So I think I will give up the media for Lent. I want to test my own theory and find out how a media drought will affect my life one way or the other. Will it make life simpler?

What do you think?

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