Everyone wants The Good Life.
My sense is that the dominant culture tells us that high material wealth is what leads to The Good Life. Our whole society is arranged around this idea. To be only a little unfairly simplistic, the aim of western civilization is to increase GDP/capita. (Can we just take a moment to reflect on how spiritually dead, how utterly unenchanting this implicit cultural aim is?)
The role of business is to convert resources into consumer goods, and the role of the consumers is to convert consumer goods into waste. The role of government is to protect this process from disruption. Somehow, this is Our Story, Our Dream.
A sense of entitlement gets swirled into this Story. The rule of thumb is that the more you work/earn, the more stuff you get to convert into waste. This isn't exactly how we phrase it to ourselves, but it's what it is. We're conditioned to think it is our right - practically our duty - to partake of the material decadence of our time. We think we have earned this lifestyle.
This is balderdash. This is so obviously balderdash that it's offensive, once you dig a little bit into where all the stuff we're supposed to convert to waste is coming from.
The grotesque material wealth of our society is built on the increasingly-more-expensive-to-get-at ocean of fossil fuels beneath our feet. We figured out how to suck it up out of the earth and put it to work. The narrative Culture likes to tell itself is that our great prosperity and material wealth is a result of Human Cleverness, Ingenuity, and Stick-to-it-edness.
Well, humans are quite clever, I'll give us that, but no amount of cleverness is going to get a 10,000 pound metal box full of bobbleheads from a factory in Asia across the oceans on a quarter-mile-long floating warehouse without gobs of oil. It’s difficult to get a sense for how much energy is in fossil fuels until you start to play with the numbers. A gallon of gasoline, used in a standard small engine, will put out about as much work as a human will in three 40hr weeks. A barrel of oil represents about 2.3 years of one human’s manual labor.[source]
We didn't work to build this level of wealth, we cleverly harnessed the energetic potential of a bunch of ancient algae goop. Which is getting more and more expensive to harness, by the way, and there remains no hint of an alternative energy source on the horizon which can run society in the manner to which we've all become accustomed.
What I'm driving at here, is that we 21st century people are all a bunch of lucky bastards, and we ought not to forget it. We got super lucky to be alive during the period of time when humans are mainlining fossil fuels like it's going out of style. To be born in this period of time is to win the material wealth lottery. People who win the lottery aren't entitled to a million dollars, they just got lucky.
Unfortunately, this isn't what our Story tells us. Our Story tells us we deserve this, and fails to even mention how utterly singular the effect of fossil fuels is on our relationship to material wealth.
You know what you deserve, just for being a human being? You deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. You deserve to love and to be loved. You deserve to live in an environment full of nice living things (like trees and snakes and fishes and stuff), and devoid of toxins that break you down at the cellular level. You deserve to stare up at the starry sky while snuggled up with your lover, with no cares on your mind at that moment except how you're going to make your partner laugh or gasp next. You deserve to dance, sing, be with friends, work with your hands, cry when you're sad, laugh when you're happy, work on a piece of art (whatever that looks like to you) because you've got something inside you that wants to get out, daydream, smell the desert before a rain, and feel spring breezes in your hair. As a child you deserve to be cared for and looked after. As an elder you deserve to be respected and listened to and looked after. You deserve to die well, surrounded by loved ones and a sense of meaning, or in an epic battle of your choosing if that's your jam.
These things that we deserve aren't actually hard to get. Or rather, they don't require a lot of money, or demand that we work like maniacs for decades before getting a taste of them. They certainly don't require a monstrous fossil fuel based society that is running us off a cliff. It's possible that our sense of entitlement is preventing us from getting those things we so richly deserve.
My intent is to uproot as much of my culturally-instilled sense of entitlement as I can, in order to lower the barriers between myself and the Actual Good Life. To decouple in my mind the connection between "converting stuff into waste" and "my just rewards". To cultivate the idea that the true and lovely things in life are in fact easy to attain, if I can somehow avoid the distraction of entitlement to a completely once-in-a-species'-lifetime jackpot of material abundance.