People who voluntarily spend very little money do so for a variety of reasons. Some are just naturally frugal, some are saving up for something, some want a simpler life, and some are trying to consume less for environmental, ecological, and/or social reasons. Most are some combination of all of these reasons.
I fall mostly in to the latter camp. I’m very concerned about unsustainable levels of resource extraction, climate change, the way our civilization treats the atmosphere like an above-ground sewer, and economic inequality. I’ve been concerned about this stuff for a long time, but I mostly concentrated my efforts to do something about it to my professional life.
It's not that I didn't think my personal lifestyle mattered. I was (am?) a bit of a workaholic, so my personal life only got the leftovers from the energy and attention I applied to my professional life. At the end of yet another twelve hour day, I didn't have the energy to shop and cook, I just wanted a beer and for someone else to make a meal for me, and I was fine with paying premium for it.
Still, I sought to make ethical/low impact decisions. I stopped buying things wrapped in plastic. I bought organic food (and went veggie for four years). I bought bamboo toothbrushes and t-shirts made out of hemp. I didn't own a car when I lived in the city. I bought carbon offsets for my occasional personal flights. I was a model "green" consumer.
Largely due to my professional work digging in to the sources of and solutions to climate change, however, I knew that my actions had very little real impact. My decisions as a consumer come only at the end of a long, long chain of resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and delivery of goods and services. In real numbers, numbers with units like CO2e/kg and NOx/kg-mi, the "green" product I selected was only marginally less bad for the world than the standard product. If everyone out there made the same choices I was making, we'd still burn the planet up and kill all the koalas. My ecological footprint, while smaller than the American average, was much more than 1 earth. Not good enough, Jack.
For the longest time I pointed my finger at "the system" and said "well, look, these are the choices I've been given - there are no better choices for me to make. The system needs to be fixed first, and offer me actually effective choices, and then I'll be able to live a one-earth lifestyle." My personal lifestyle was essentially a "eh, what can you do?" shrug.
And while "the system" certainly does need to get its act together, and our economies need to figure out how to effectively deal with externalities, economic-inequality feedback loops, and perverse incentives, I began to feel that sitting around waiting for "them" to fix the broken system is a bit of a cop out. For one thing, I wasn't entirely convinced that I was doing "everything" I could reasonably do - something about the line "the system doesn't provide me with sustainable alternatives, so this is as good as I can do" didn't mesh quite right. Not only that - my soul was eating itself from the inside out, and I needed to figure out why that was before it was too late.
The system isn’t broken at all
The idea that a growth and consumption-based culture will ever be able to serve us actually sustainable choices, as if that’s something you can just inject in to your product on the assembly line, seems deeply problematic to me. There are arguments that the same kind of thinking that got us in to this mess will get us out of it. That we can exploit and innovate our way out of this mess. I'm skeptical.
It's becoming more and more clear to me that the system isn't broken, this is what it's designed to do. In the same way that you can't tweak an ICBM to be a farm implement (although the US government tried), you can't tweak our current arrangement to be closed-loop and infinitely sustainable. The ICBM is built to destroy cities and murder millions. Our current arrangement is built to rip resources out of the bowels of the earth, drive the masses to quiet spiritual despair by propagandizing them to believe that they are worthless unless they consume an ever-larger flow of stuff, and use the air, land, and sea as an enormous globalized sewer to dump the wastes of this entire process in to.
This is why I've stopped holding my breath waiting for "them" to "fix it". The idea that there is a group of people who are working diligently to actually fix the problems (and not just salve the symptoms) is a fairy tale, a bedtime story we tell ourselves to absolve ourselves from taking any kind of ownership over our own behavior. We tell ourselves that "they'll think of something."
Yes, "they" did think of something actually, you know what "they" thought of? They thought of getting theirs, of generating as much wealth as they possibly can while the getting is still good, and building apocalypse compounds in New Zealand to ride out the consequences of our actions. That's what "they" thought up, and it doesn't involve a Bright Green Future for you at all. That's "their" plan - what's yours?
The calm quiet darkness is eating my soul, but that’s normal right?
Once you see it, it's hard to unsee it. Or rather, it's hard to unfeel it. Peter Kalmus said in an interview that he got to a point where he got nauseous if he got on a plane. On his last flight, all he could see were dead babies and he felt like throwing up. So the real answer as to why he doesn't fly anymore isn't necessarily any well-thought out, thoroughly cited, data-backed analysis of carbon footprint, although Kalmus has all that. It's because it makes him sick, and he just can’t take the massive cognitive/moral overhead anymore.
Another reason why it's a bad strategy to just wait until someone else fixes the system is that the less we feel in control of our lives and circumstances, the more we suffer psychologically. Purely selfishly, I'm going to have a better life experience if I assume that my own actions matter and start doing things to make that better world I want to live in, no matter how small to start.
It's much better, I think, to refuse the greenwash lies fed to use by advertising and assume personal responsibility for our lifestyles. Not only will our personal impact actually decrease, but we’ll feel less bad about ourselves, because we're adopting an internal locus of control rather than an external one. The more in control of our actions we feel, the healthier our mental states are.
“But changing your own life can’t possibly make a meaningful difference!” Maybe so. But it feels better to not be a hypocrite, to not be part of the problem, and I guarantee you that we’ll get nowhere if literally no one changes their lives. I prefer—it literally feels better to me—to assume some kind of personal responsibility over the impact of my actions, regardless of the statistical significance of my contribution to the global meta-crisis. If everyone stopped flying and driving tomorrow, carbon emissions would drop like a rock.
“But that isn’t going to happen.” Yes yes I know, maybe, whatever, what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter if it will or wont, I want to live my life AS IF my actions actually matter, because that’s how I keep the barrel out of my mouth, okay? If organic red wine, bubble baths, and spiritual bypassing is how you cope with being part of the generation responsible for the destruction of the health and beauty of the planet, don’t let me get in your way (seriously!), I’ve just been there done that and it didn’t work out for me. The cognitive dissonance ate my heart from the inside out.
The F Word
Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes, frugality.
The larger point is, it doesn’t take a hyper-sophisticated carbon footprint calculation tool to know with high confidence that the person spending $12k/yr has a much lower footprint than the person spending $90k/yr. We don’t even need to know what they’re actually spending their money on - if the heavy consumer is only buying "green" and "organic" and "eco", and the frugal person is buying junk off Amazon and eating whatever looks good at Grocery Outlet, the green consumer's carbon/resource footprint is still probably going to be higher than the frugal person's.
So, yes, it’s less bad to spend money on an ethically sourced gizmo than one clawed out of the earth beneath a strip-mined forest by actual modern slaves. But it’s way more impactful to simply buy almost nothing. And, as people have been reporting for a very, very long time, an intentional forsaking of a high level of material affluence is correlated with greater happiness, fulfilment, sense of peace, and deeper spiritual experience.
So, I figure, why not just do both? I try to buy almost nothing, and when I do, I preference ethically sourced stuff. It doesn't have to be either/or. There's an added benefit here in that buying almost nothing reduces the number of decisions I have to make.
So, to recap, the main reason I'm in to frugality is because I think We've Got to Do Something, and after a decade plus of working very hard to minimize the impact of the built environment, I figured I should get my own house in good order. I haven't abandoned the professional work, to be clear. I just could no longer take the tension between what I was trying to do with my professional life and what was going on in my personal life. I want them both to be aligned.
Repent, sinner!!
Now, the environmental movement has known for a long time that the "guilt and shame" angle doesn't work in terms of getting people to change their lifestyles. Beating people about the head with statistics on GHG emissions per capita and pictures of ocean plastic doesn't actually work, generally speaking, to move the needle. Particularly if the people doing the beating about the head have barely lower footprint lifestyles than those they’re attempting to convince to change their lives. Per Espen Stoknes wrote a brilliant book about this.
So writing a post about how my climate guilt influenced me to change my life isn’t exactly strategically advisable. But that doesn’t matter because this is not an advice blog. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I'm not actually sure what it is I'm doing here, to be honest.
I have a vague notion that I'm trying to do some kind of travel writing, except the journey isn't geographic, it's my path towards a lifestyle of my own creation. As such, the motivations and thought processes that got me to this point are relevant. And a heavy dose of environmental guilt and shame happens to be part of that story. I'm not going to harp on it too much, because as I said this angle is unproductive self-flagellation for almost everyone who indulges in it.
Happily, the desire to "do less harm" is only part of the frugality story, however. It’s the “away from” motivation, it’s what I was trying to get away from. The other parts, the parts that excite and entice me towards this lifestyle, are much richer. I'll get in to those in the next post.