This is my shower:
It is a ten liter black dromedary bag with a tube. It hangs from a hook on the side of my tiny studio. The sun heats it up during the day. I rarely use a towel; the dry desert wind dries me off in a few minutes. I typically only use three or four liters for a full shower.
This setup is my ‘normal’. It feels entirely unremarkable. I feel neither very positively about my shower experience nor very negatively. It’s just how I get not-stinky and rinse the dirt off at the end of the day.
When I take a ‘real’ aka first world shower, though…. what luxury! What splendor! What marvels! It’s a treat. I might even say something to anyone nearby afterwards about how amazing pressurized water and thermostatic temperature control devices are.
But if I begin to take first-world showers regularly again, by shower number five the experience is… entirely unremarkable. Neither positive nor negative. It’s just how I get clean at the end of the day. (Actually I’m so used to outdoor showers at this point that I feel claustrophobic in normal shower stalls, but never mind.)
We’re all familiar with the hedonic treadmill: this is where when you get something new and shiny that brings you pleasure the positive experience wears off rapidly. When you buy a cool new car, within a month or two it’s just how you get to work/the grocery story. Meh. A spiffy new shirt is just a shirt.
Frugality nerds and voluntary simplicity advocates have been pointing this out for long enough that I think everyone gets it by now. Reminding yourself of the hedonic treadmill is a good tactic for preventing wasteful purchases.
But avoiding new useless crap is only a first step, and it is a passive one. It’s easy to miss the fact that the hedonic treadmill goes backwards, too. We can walk backwards on the hedonic treadmill and wind up in the same place.
The first few times I showered outdoors with the solar bag it kind of sucked. The wind on my wet skin was chilly, I didn’t have the bag high enough and the pressure was low, I dropped the soap in the dirt, and I was mildly uneasy being naked outside. It was a step backwards.
But quickly it just became normal. I was in the same place, hedonically speaking. But my water consumption was cut by, I don’t know, 90%, and I no longer use natural gas to heat my shower water. And it’s now really easy for me to have a wonderful experience every once in awhile - all I have to do is find a real shower somewhere.
This is a powerful tool
This idea is important and very powerful. With careful discernment to not take steps backwards in terms of health or safety, we can
Dramatically decrease the infrastructure we ‘need’ to have a ‘good life’.
Dramatically decrease our operational resource consumption (water, fossil fuel use, materials use…)
Maintain our baseline level of pleasure/satisfaction with the routines of life
Create multitudes of experiences that are available to us for very cheap that feel luxurious/highly pleasurable.
If we recognize the utility of walking backwards on the hedonic treadmill, we can start looking around for opportunities in our lives to go through some short-duration discomfort that wears off soon enough but gets us closer to the kind of lifestyle effects we actually want (less clutter, smaller house, lower cost of living, more freedom, smaller ecological footprint, simplicity, more optionality and wider lifestyle options…)
This isn’t normal. It is not normal to look around your life and think ‘right, it is Tuesday, what can I do today that will be annoying and unpleasant?’ We’re not wired that way. (Well, most of us aren’t…) That’s why I think it’s worth explicitly pointing out, explicitly naming, so that it can be a tool in your kit.
This is one of the key insights of voluntary simplicity. It looks like a life of voluntary simplicity sucks.
The truth is that it DOES suck... for like ten minutes, and then it feels just as nice as whatever expensive, complicated, prone-to-disruption fancy first-world 'comforts' aka luxuries I had before, and the idea of hustling for and paying to get those luxuries on tap any time I want them seems... totally ridiculous.