In my last post, I mentioned a counterargument that one hears from time to time if you bring up a planned change to your life to be more ecologically aligned: "But that won't make a difference!"
There's a lot going on beneath the surface of that response, but today I want to unpack just one component of it. That’s the implication that it’s only worth it to ‘go eco’ if it'll make some measurable difference on a global scale, if it'll somehow Save the Planet and the Whales and All the Ugly Critters Too I Guess Fine Sure They Can Stay Too.
Reading in between the lines, the big assumption lurking behind "but that won't make a difference" is that living frugally or ecologically is a sacrifice, is less enjoyable, is not the preferred way to go.
This assumption is ridiculous. The whole point of living ecologically, frugally, sustainably, whatever label you want to attach to it, is to live A Good Life, at multiple scales. I want my life to be awesome, and I want your life to be awesome, and that guy over there's life to be awesome, and I want all future generation's lives to be awesome as well. I'm not trying to "be eco" because I’m worried that if I don’t hair will grow on the back of my hands or Jesus will frown at me — I'm trying to "be eco" because I have one short little chance at living on this void-hurtling rock and I want my time here to not suck.
We have to connect a couple dots to see why this is so.
Dot One: Everything sucks
The statistics are available to anyone. The psychological well-being of Americans is bad. It's really bad. On sum, Americans are not enjoying themselves. We're depressed, suicidal, anxious, and lonely. We're overworked, underemployed, overcaffeinated and underslept. We're exposed to environmental toxins everywhere - in our cars, our homes, our food, our baby toys, our cookware - and our health care costs are insane. The rapidly increasing cost of an education of rapidly declining quality either prices people out of upper education or enslaves them to the economic treadmill. Apparently, we hate each other. Consumer technology looks to be destroying our political institutions, co-opting our minds, and launching cyber-social feedback loops that threaten to completely destabilize the noosphere and our civic institutions. We leave our most vulnerable fellow humans on the streets to rot while idolizing people wealthy enough to buy a ticket off this festering rock on a column of idolized fire. We die alone and scared. Whenever a localized disaster hits and people have to scrape and sacrifice and endure suffering, they look back on those episodes with fondness because "episodes of disasters seem to represent a break from the unfolding disaster of everyday life"! How messed up does a society have to be that its citizens prefer, in some sense, acute catastrophe to normal life? And as if all that wasn't bad enough, the consequences for this social arrangement aren't visited only on those of us reaping it's "benefits" - we outsource (aka "externalize") the environmental and social toxins to every corner of the globe. Not only does affluence make us feel bad, it hurts other people who don't GET to be affluent, and so we have to feel guilty for screwing over other people's lives to support our own miserable ones.
So, uh, yeah, goddamn right! I made a list of everything everyone in this society does, and I'm trying whatever the opposite of that list is, because I want a good life! Why would I do anything else? I don't want to die in the shithole of our healthcare system, or crank the best years of my life away indoors and have nothing to show for it at the end but chronic health issues and a bunch of back-burnered relationships.
This isn't high-level rocket science here. I didn't have to go to college to be able to come up with this idea. You don't need an advanced degree to see a bunch of people metaphorically sprinting off a cliff and dashing their bodies in to meat pulp on the rocks below to think "hmm, maybe I'll.... *not* fling myself off the cliff too?"
Now I don't know what exactly to do, I don't have all (or perhaps any) of the answers, but I think the question I'm working with -- "Okay that way of living is clearly daft, what way of living isn’t so obviously terrible?" -- is the right one to be asking.
Dot Two: Why Everything Sucks
To me, the key insight to modern malaise, to postmodern anomie, to affluenza, is the fact of life commodification. To keep the economy running, households need to do their part and buy stuff. Sellers need to convince people to buy stuff. To convince people to buy more and more stuff (because GDP needs to grow every year on average or the game is up), sellers need to use more and more sophisticated methods of convincing us that our lives aren't good enough, that we'll not achieve happiness, unless we buy the blue soap. But of course this narrative is pitched as us every single day, so we're never given a chance to just sit around and be content with ourselves. We're constantly kept in a state of feeling bad about ourselves, chasing self-love with our online shopping carts and never quite reaching the state of happiness we're promised over and over again.
You know this, of course. It's boring. It's a cliché. It is so cliché that marketers have co-opted the anti-consumerism narrative and now sell us t-shirts and hats and stickers with clever designs to communicate to our Instafriends just how ironically anti-consumerist we are. Our culture, being emergently self-directed, obligingly offers for sale every flavor of "alternative" lifestyle you could demand. The only thing our culture can't do is offer a lifestyle that you can't purchase - because the commodification of every nook and cranny of our lives is the whole entire point of our current arrangement.
The thing is, knowing this isn't enough to disentangle yourself from it. Knowing that advertising is manipulative isn't sufficient to not be manipulated by it! The only way to not be influenced by ads is to never see or hear any ads. The only way to not be trapped on the hedonic treadmill of modern consumer culture is to not be a consumer. (Don't try to be an anti-consumer, by the way, that's a trap.)
And the only way to not be a consumer is to not buy stuff. Simple, right?
I think the reason that almost everyone knows mindless consumption is toxic, yet almost no one disengages from toxic consumption, is because so few of the critics of consumerism offer any kind of realistic alternative. We get burned out on hearing how awful it is for us, with no feasible vision of a different way, so eventually we swipe left and forget it.
Dot Three: Most people who tell us how to not suck make things suck worse for us
Many people pushing alternatives like frugality and sustainability have a real messaging problem. Typically, it boils down to a preachy shame and guilt message (kind of like my last post), a turn or burn message. It feels bad to hear that. Not fun at all. Meanwhile, consumer culture promises easy good feelings, because consumer culture is exceptionally good at appealing to the most powerful motivation centers of our poor paleolithic brains. So we’re not strong enough to resist consumer culture, but the shame-and-guilt environmental PR folks make us feel guilty about it. Thanks, assholes.
Look, in the words of Rob Greenfield, you and I did not ask to be born in this place and time, facing perhaps humanity’s greatest crisis. It is not your responsibility to unfuck the world. Stop playacting the martyr, take the burden of the whole entire world off your shoulders, and go play outside for a bit. You’re welcome. (I wrote that for myself as much as anyone reading this, just to be clear).
Dot Four: How to actually make things not suck for yourself
None of our wisdom teachers, no philosopher, prophet, or social scientist ever said that buying stuff and chasing wealth would bring us The Good Life. In fact they basically all said the exact opposite. So why do so many of us chase wealth, the exact thing that all our sages warn us against?
Well, we don’t hear from our sages too often. Only if we read a book or something. But we hear from people who want us to buy their stuff every day, hundreds of times a day.
Living a modern life is like having someone follow you around all day whispering “You’ll be happier if you buy that. And that. And that. You are kind of a loser, you know that right? But you can be a winner if you work harder to make enough money to make the minimum payments to buy that on credit.” It's a constant and relentless message.
How different would we all act if we had someone follow us around all day whispering “You are enough. You are worthy of love. The best things in life are free. Nothing compares to the satisfaction of making things with your hands, drinking tea with a good friend, and doing right by other people. You don't really need all that much to live your best life.”
If you've ever quit social media, you know it takes about six months to stop mentally composing a witty caption for the picture you're going to upload to your feed while on a hike in nature, and feeling the dopamine pleasure tingles in anticipation of how many likes or <3's you're going to get.*
The only way to be kind enough to your mind to make it even available enough to consider the idea that frugality is a more effective strategy for achieving The Good Life and who cares if it’ll actually “make a difference”, is to unplug from the constant programming of consumer culture. It's not easy, and it will take some time. But it's worth it.
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*”Um, dude, you have a little heart button at the bottom of this post.” I know!! I can’t figure out how to turn the damn thing off! Leave a comment if you know how.