MANY of you may have seen the opinion piece in NYTimes recently, "The Joy of Less." I had wanted to comment on it when I first read it, and was reminded of it today when I was on this other site Three At Sea. (They actually call it Three@Sea, but I refuse to support that because the @ is WAY too tacky, and the people used to be in computers and stuff and well... Not hip, guys.) Anyway, its about a family who used to live in Boulder, but sold their house and most of their stuff and bought a boat and are planning on traveling around the world during their daughter's middle school years. THE POINT BEING: That these people have bucked the status quo and are living their own way somehow, with the lack of many material possessions (although they remain entirely wired to the rest of the world).
All of this sort of jives with the whole grad student lifestyle. I am poor, live in a small apt, no longer watch tv, and because of my whole environmentalist leanings, am also disdainful of the consumerist society we live in. That said... I have a lot of stuff. But I figure I may need some of it some day, so I have to keep it, because otherwise I would be feeding the consumerist beast, right? My life is less about the pursuit of things and more about the nurturing of the BRAIN. This is true with what I actually do for money, and for what I do in my spare time. Also, the pursuit of the body is in there somewhere, cuz I live in Boulder, and we are all fit and beautiful here. You could say this is also a mind-pursuit of sorts, as theres all sorts of thinking and refreshing you can do while youre working out, if youre not plugged in, which I rarely am.
Anyway, I am not so sure about the pursuit of happiness part being entrenched in these drastic lifestyle changes. It is true that hectic lives make people crazy. And that a more moment-to-moment life, like that achieved on a boat (OR being a forager/hunter/gatherer, my personal favorite escapist fantasy), where you have to be paying attention to your surroundings in order to live, seems more fulfilling than doing some drivel that you find meaningless. However, I am unsure about the necessity to buck the yolk of society in order to obtain happiness. I agree it is probably not found in things. Maybe too often people associate the obtainment of things with a typical American life, but maybe you can do the normal things like have a regular job and not be obsessed with the pursuit of things, and whatever happiness can be obtained that way. There are just a lot of people who seem to think something drastic needs to be done with their actual life situation in order to be happy, but maybe it is just the internal adjustment, which often accompanies that outward change, that is truly the key.
Or...
Is this how people talk themselves into settling down for a common life?
1 comment:
I have had the urge lately to sell our house, buy a big RV and travel around. Greg can quit his job, and we will be nomads. Sounds nice! We can go down south in the winter and north in the summer.
Of course, if I were to make a mental identification out of doing that, it would be no better than being mentally identified with all the stuff in the house. It's the mental identifications that count - not how much stuff you have. You can live in cardboard box, and still be just as imprisoned by all the "stuff" in your mind as physical stuff outside your mind. Know what I mean?
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