As I work on The Crowbar Manual, sometimes I write bits that I realize don’t belong in it.
I’m trying to write more of a technical manual that an ideological polemic, and I don’t want my unhinged rants to distract from the pragmatic advice of the manual. I’d like the manual to be useful to all sorts of people, including people who don’t necessarily share my perspective on society and our place within it.
These letters, however, are the perfect place for my unhinged rants. You literally signed up for it. ;) Below is a section that I decided to take out of the Manual.
The ruling unspoken paradigm of our culture is that increased consumption leads to better lives and societies. This was true up to a point but we're now well past that point and our societies are now in what ecologists call overshoot. The situation now is that:
Our societies are consuming resources faster than the environment is generating them, which is causing all sorts of problems, and
People are still chasing better lives via increased consumption of one sort or another, despite this no longer being the best strategy.
The brutal truth is that we have plenty of material resources for everyone. Technically speaking there is no need for any material scarcity anywhere. We have solved the technical problems of supplying adequate shelter, food, security, and health services to everyone. The reason we fail to actually deliver these services to everyone, everywhere, is complicated but it's not because we as a global civilization don't have enough stuff.
We fail to deliver sufficient material goods to everyone because our societies are programmed to chase More. Our governments are programmed to chase More, our businesses are programmed to chase More, and we as individuals are programmed from birth to chase More as well, mostly because in order for businesses and states to get More they need their subjects to chase More.
The thing with chasing More is that you can never arrive at More. We're programmed to expend most of our time and energy chasing More, never getting there, and then we die. That is the essential vision of life under consumer culture.
This manual has no insight in how to get society writ large to stop chasing More. This manual is about how to stop chasing More in your own individual life, at the scale of your household. It is about how to arrive at Enough material wealth.
You can arrive at Enough. You can't arrive at More. By the end of this manual you might be able to actually pick a specific number and say "that will be enough", and get there, and then do anything else with your life.
We're programmed to increase spending in step with increased income. We're programmed to think that if we don't buy and own a house, we're losers.
Something odd is happening with society. The rules are changing but people aren't fully acknowledging it.
It used to be that you could pay for an education with a job while going to school, and then you could pretty easily get a job if you looked right, and then you could have some kids and buy a house and a car or two and that just wasn't a big deal, and health insurance was easy to get, and your workplace culture was basically okay and you were respected.
It's now not easy to get all of those things, even if you look right. But the expectation that it's easy is still there.
A while ago, if you wanted an education and a house and kids and health insurance but you didn't have it there was something wrong with you. You were a loser, or a dummy, or something. (The other possibility is that you weren't a white dude, in which case of course you couldn't get those things easily, because society wasn't built for you.)
Now, to get all those things with relative ease, you need to have a lot going for you. You need a bit of a head start, more luck than usual, an IQ a standard deviation or two above average won't hurt, and you need to not have any particular disadvantages.
But the changing landscape of achieving the dream lifestyle hasn't fully been acknowledged. Why not?
Well, more or less, the older generations need younger generations to at least try to keep showing up for jobs and to try to get some money and to spend all of their money on stuff because otherwise the economy will struggle, and if the economy struggles then retirement accounts and house equity won't do so well, and the older generation's lifelong pursuit of More will struggle.
There are big, big problems with the way things are going. Systems in overshoot have a day of reckoning ahead of them, always. But most people who are close to their own finish line hope that day of Reckoning is Later, and so in the meantime they still just want More, and it doesn't matter too much to them who has to be called a loser and manipulated into chasing the mirage of an old dying dream in order for them to continue to get theirs.
So work harder, loser. The reason you don't have a house and can't qualify for a housing loan is because you don't work hard enough, or you are too whiny, or something.
I have no advice for how to qualify for a housing loan. I've never even seriously considered buying a house myself. I rented at more than 30% of my income, and then I lived in not-made-for-Instagram tiny houses I built myself out in the desert. I currently live in a cabin in Alaska that someone else owns and I pay utilities and do DIY around the place. I'm not saying you need to live in a tiny house out in the desert. I'm saying that I'm not someone who Made It and ticked all the 20th century lifestyle dream boxes and is now telling you to suck it up.
This manual is not about how to achieve the 20th century lifestyle dream. It's not about how to hack the system. It's about how to stop playing the consumerism game altogether.
Everything about 20th century western society was built on the implicit paradigm that more material consumption equals better life. Unless you were born and raised under a rock, you were programmed this way, as was I.
This manual is about deprogramming yourself from that assumption.
This manual is about realizing that, actually, if you're able to reject the lifestyle dreams that were incepted into you since birth, you can have a good life that doesn't depend on More. You can build a life that depends only on Enough. And Enough is much, much easier to get than More. The Enough game isn't rigged like the More game.
As a bonus, you will be less and less an unwilling stooge of the older generations that want to exploit your desire for a decent life on their terms. You will begin to learn the skills and the practices to build a good life on your terms.
Consumer culture says that quality of life is 95% composed of material wealth.
Postconsumer culture says that quality of life is composed of something like 10-25% material wealth, Enough so that you aren't hungry or cold or in danger. The rest is skills, relationships, wisdom, fill in the blank according to your own unique psychology and human interestingness.
This manual doesn't assume that They are going to fix the dysfunctions of our unfair, unjust system. It doesn't give any advice for how to get society to increase taxes from people who've gotten enormously More.
This manual assumes that you're done waiting for society to suck less and are prepared to play a different game.