Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things

From YouTube description of the trailer: "How might your life be better with less? MINIMALISM: A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE IMPORTANT THINGS examines the many flavors of minimalism by taking the audience inside the lives of minimalists from all walks of life—families, entrepreneurs, architects, artists, journalists, scientists, and even a former Wall Street broker—all of whom are striving to live a meaningful life with less."

I find that this documentary pontificates some nice aspects of consumerism, but as it has been explained to me in a reasoning, it fails in some aspects as it has a one size fit all approach which does not and cannot work.

Minimalism is really not a new concept considering that for most of our experience as humans we have been foragers, which would not allow for accumulation of much material. Not because early humans were political activists, or did not appreciate the perceived comfort of excess, but because it was simply not practical to hoard. And even though we are sedentary now, there really isn’t necessity for the majority of things we accumulate.

However, we are far removed from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the consequential worldview and have been socialized differently. As one of the people behind the documentary points out, coming from a (financially) poor background tends to make people susceptible to wanting to be (financially) rich. To many people today, part of being rich means being able to afford excess and having excess. A person who is in position to afford excess should not tell a financially poor person to not desire a similar position, as the former may lack sensitivity to the day-to-day experiences of the latter.

Likewise, a financially poor person arriving at a position of minimalism could easily be ‘sour-graping’. There is no knowing then, what they would do if they got in a position of affording excess. We have seen time and time again, publically and privately, that once people get access to what they have been denied they usually indulge, and then some. So simply suppressing desires is not a good long-term solution.

The documentary quotes Jim Carrey saying, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer”. It is argued by many that this is easy for Carrey to say because he is rich and famous. An interviewee in the documentary argues further, who else better to make said argument than a rich and famous person?! I would usually disagree with the interviewee, as people in worldly privileged positions are not the best people to make arguments for others to not desire those same positions. In this case, Jim Carrey’s message has great weight to it, and more so, to an audience of already wealthy people who may be struggling with the pressures of wealth. Although not necessary to arrive at a conscious position as people can reason, people should still have the option, and should be allowed experiences to figure these things out for themselves.

Western powers and individuals have a tendency to do things badly while infecting the rest of the world in the process. Upon realization that they have and continue to move badly, their go-to position isn’t to rectify what they did, but to shame those they infected into not doing what the west has done for centuries and continues to do. This six-year old clip from YouTube about the West’s concern on the environmental impact of India’s car pollution demonstrates this hypocrisy rather well, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv8GL6cZm44 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv8GL6cZm44) .

Pushing for ‘improvement’ by the West is rarely about how humans, and by extension the environment, benefit, but rather about them maintaining their preeminence (if one can call it that). So even though it is a good position to question one’s consumerist streak, I am not in a hurry to push the idea of minimalism on poor people. And it is with those reservations I bring the documentary to people’s attention.

Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (Official Trailer) - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Co1Iptd4p4#)

Your ‘Minimalist’ Lifestyle Is Quasi-Religious Anti-Poor Bullshit
JAMES WILT

My first winter living in Winnipeg was the city's coldest since 1898. I spent three months of it holed up in a small bachelor suite without any heat, hot water, light or internet.

Books were read by literal candlelight. Laundry was washed in the bathtub using a homemade soap mix of borax, bar soap and washing soda, later to be dried on towels that were draped on the floor. I wore two sweaters and sometimes a puffy down jacket to stay warm; luckily, my place was on the middle floor and featured few windows, meaning temperatures didn't drop too low.

This austerity was entirely by choice.

The thermostat was fully functional, as were the laundry facilities in the basement. I could have flipped on the lights at any point.

Rather, those lonely, cold months were all an attempt to dramatically cut my consumption of material possessions, energy and information. It was a kind of lifestyle that viewed sacrifice and voluntary simplicity and even boredom as the only possible responses to the terrifying realities of climate change and ecocide and economic inequality and the entertainment culture that was distracting us from it all.

It was also a deeply religious response, despite me having mostly ditched the faith a few years prior.

"There's a really strong Christian aspect to anti-consumerism and simple living: that man is fallen, that we are too worldly, too materialist and need to return to some Eden to re-establish grace," notes Leigh Phillips, author of Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, in an interview with VICE.

This is a serious problem. Look, I don't care if you're religious: you do you. The issue for me is that this ancient ascetic ethos—the notion that we have to consume far less in order to refine our souls and save the world—continues to grow in cultural clout.

And it's anti-poor and reactionary bullshit.

Bemoaning people who live paycheque-to-paycheque—which, according to a 2016 study, is 48 per cent of all working Canadians—to be more disciplined and attentive lets the very rich and powerful in society off the hook. It blames the masses for "living beyond their means" when it's a select few—like, literally a few—who are hoarding the money and control and obstructing society from rapidly transitioning to a just and sustainable future.

Yet glowing examples of asceticism-as-solution are just everywhere.

There's the painfully bougie and oft-ridiculed magazine Kinfolk, birthed out of a Brigham Young University dorm room and featuring the cringey tagline "in praise of slowness." Or the so-called Minimalists, a pair of white dudes who travel the world to proclaim the joys of simplicity, and just happen to be close friends with evangelical legend Rob Bell.

(Usually left unacknowledged by such folks is that "slow" and "simple" stuff tends to be considerably more expensive and time-consuming than buying shit at, say, Walmart or Tim Hortons. Both of the Minimalists previously had six-figure jobs; the founder of Kinfolk worked at Goldman Sachs.)

It also doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that a key figure in David Foster Wallace's final novel, A Pale King—which was obsessed with grand notions of sacrifice and civic virtue and paying attention, a foil of sorts to Wallace's indictment of entertainment in Infinite Jest—was a Jesuit priest who taught the incredibly dull discipline of tax accounting.

Nor that the even less tolerable Father John Misty had Macaulay Culkin "crucified" by Ronald McDonald clowns in a recent music video for "Total Entertainment Forever," ending up as some hamfisted, No Logo-inspired mess about corporations and technology and sacrilege that only a guy who ranted at a festival crowd for 20 minutes about the banality of entertainment before storming off stage would ever feel comfortable delivering.

Sure, some such trends aren't explicitly religious.

There's the somehow still-running Adbusters, the "tiny home" movement, third-wave coffee shops and endless books about the smartphone-induced permadeath of real-world discourse and silence. Or the socially acceptable practice to shame people who shop on Black Friday, despite the fact it might be the one time in the year they can afford to indulge in something nice for themselves or their kids.

All of these reflect the same skepticism of possessions and pleasure and even modernity, viewing them as a degradation of morals and virtue.

Joona Salminen, an expert in early Christian asceticism at Finland's University of Helsinki, said in an interview with VICE that starting in the fourth century, people striving for religious perfection tended to leave the city for the monastery in the desert. There was a clear demarcation: the urban centres housed food, wealth, possessions, family, parties and sex, whereas the Desert Fathers (as they were known) prioritized citizenship of heaven via fasting, celibacy and manual labour.

By far the wildest story from this era was Simeon Stylites the Elder, who spent 37 years praying and fasting on top of a 50-foot pillar in the Syrian desert.

The emphasis on strict asceticism waned over time, especially following the Protestant Reformation (which famously elevated faith over acts). But the very clear line drawn between worldly pleasures and heavenly treasures never really dissipated, carried on by the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Shane Claiborne and "plain people" like Amish, Hutterites and Mennonites.

"We're not always fully aware of how the context of many important intellectual things in our Western thinking is indebted to an ascetic environment," Salminen says.

It's an idea that's taken on even more prescience with the looming reality of climate change. The idea goes that there are too many people on the planet. Cities are too consumptive. We have to get back to the land, live simply so others can simply live, remember that small is beautiful. In other words, our only way of dodging catastrophic wildfires and flooding and droughts is to clamp down and stop using so much shit.

Here's reality: wages for workers have stagnated for decades. Income inequality has widened. Jobs have become more precarious—especially for young people—while the cost of living skyrockets.

Meanwhile, a handful of multi-billionaires have expanded their grip on the world's wealth, largely via rapacious sectors like finance, real estate and fossil fuel production; as identified by Oxfam in early 2017, a mere eight men now possess the same amount of wealth as 3.5 billion people. In the same study, it was found that Canada's two richest businessmen have the same amount of wealth as the country's 11 million poorest people.

And it's not like the average worker is responsible for climate change.

The world's militaries emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other sector. Air travel—which was controversially excluded from the Paris Agreement, along with shipping—is disproportionately used by high-income people. As calculated in a 2011 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the richest quintile of Canadians emit almost double the annual emissions than the poorest.

Sure, we can probably all cut back on eating factory-farmed meat. Some elements of our day-to-day lifestyles should probably be revamped, with high-speed rail maybe replacing cars, renewables and nuclear power displacing fossil fuels.

But minimalism isn't going to get us out of this mess. As Kyle Chayka in the New York Times pointed out, the trend provides "further ways to serve our impulse to consume more, not less."

Rather, we should be aiming much higher, for a far more technologically advanced and sustainable society. The anti-anti-consumerism, really.

"We can have a conversation over whether the current suite of products that are made in society are the optimal suite of products," Phillips suggests. "And that's an interesting conversation. But if we're simply saying that people should consume less, then we're actively endorsing that Thatcherite, neoliberal transformation of the last 40 years where we have seen working people are consuming less."

I ended up abandoning my ascetic lifestyle after moving into a house with roommates. Part of it was the awkwardness of washing one's clothes in the bathtub with other people around.

A bigger factor was me simply giving up on the possibility of change: I'd spent much of those literally dark months reading books about overpopulation and the negative impacts of the internet on attention spans and memory, and had become convinced that The Masses were too dull and stupefied to change their ways.

It was pompous and intellectually lazy, something I only realized after spending a long while researching writing about energy and technology issues.

But the solutions are out there. They'll just require a lot of collaboration to deploy; retreating into the desert and placing the blame on working people is reactionary nonsense that only allows megalomaniacs like Trump to get away with annihilating the globe.

What we need is to demand proportionate wealth and power to call the shots, to accelerate progress and development that benefits everyone, especially for oppressed groups like black, Indigenous and people of colour, migrants and LGBTQ people. To shoot high, dreaming of green affordable housing for all, and access to cheap and nutritious food, and plenty of time to f*** around on our PS4s or even have "simple" and "slow" picnics in the park with our Christian pals.

Hell, even if it doesn't work, it sure sounds more fun than freezing my ass off in a tiny bachelor suite.

Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xzmee/your-minimalist-lifestyle-is-quasi-religious-anti-poor-bullshit (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xzmee/your-minimalist-lifestyle-is-quasi-religious-anti-poor-bullshit)

To cure affluenza, we have to be satisfied with the stuff we already own
Richard Denniss

If people maintained and repaired their possessions, the world economy and the impact of human activity on the environment would be transformed


Affluenza has not just changed the world, it has also changed the way we see the world. Short of money? Borrow some. Caught in the rain? Buy an umbrella. Thirsty? Buy a bottle of water and throw the bottle away.

Our embrace of “convenience” and our acceptance of our inability to plan ahead is an entirely new way of thinking, and over the past seventy years we have built a new and different economic system to accommodate it.

There is nothing inevitable about this current way of thinking, consuming and producing. On the contrary, the vast majority of humans who have ever lived (and the majority of humans alive today) would find the idea of using our scarce resources to produce things that are designed to be thrown away absolutely mad.

But the fact that our consumer culture is a recent innovation does not mean it will be easy to change. Indeed, the last few decades have shown how contagious affluenza can be. But we have not always lived this way, which proves that we don’t have to persist with it. We can change – if we want to.

I define consumerism as the love of buying things. For some, that means the thrill of hunting for a bargain. For others, it is the quest for the new or the unique. And for others still it is that moment when the shop assistant hands them their new purchase, beautifully wrapped, with a bow, just as though it’s a present.

But the love of buying things can, by definition, provide only a transient sense of satisfaction. The feeling can be lengthened by the “thrill of the chase”, and may include an afterglow that includes walking down the street with a new purchase in a branded carry bag. It might even extend to the moment when you get to show your purchase to your friends and family.

But the benefits of consumerism are inevitably short-lived as they are linked to the process of the purchase, not the use of the product. So while consumerism is the love of buying things, materialism is the love of the things themselves – and that’s an important distinction.

Salespeople and psychologists are well aware of this phenomenon. The term buyer’s remorse refers to the come-down that follows the thrill of buying something new. For many, the cold hard light of day takes the gloss off their new gadget, their new shoes or their new car. For some, this can be so overwhelming that they return the item. For a minority, the thrill of buying new things is so great, and the disappointment of owning new things so strong, that they make a habit of buying things they know they will return.

For those interested in the impact of consumption on the natural environment, it is crucial to make a clear distinction between the love of buying things and the love of owning things. While consumerism and materialism are often used interchangeably, taken literally they are polar opposites. If you really loved your car, the thought of replacing it with a new one would be painful. Similarly, if you really loved your kitchen, your shoes, your belt or your couch, then your materialism would prevent you rushing out and buying a new one.

But we have been trained to love the thrill of buying new stuff. We love things not for their material function, but for the symbolic act of acquiring and possessing them – the thrill of anticipating a new thing, of being handed it by a smiling shop assistant, of pulling up at the golf club in an expensive new car. For many, if not most, consumers, it is the symbolism of a new handbag or new car, its expensive logo proudly displayed, that delivers happiness, rather than twenty years of using a material object.

It makes no sense to conflate materialism and consumerism. Indeed, our willingness to dispose of perfectly functional material goods and gadgets is the very antithesis of a love of things. The process of buying new things and displaying new symbols might provide status or other psychological benefits, but the pursuit of such symbolic objectives is largely unrelated to the material characteristics of the products being purchased and disposed of.

Symbols matter, and psychological benefits matter. The fact that people are willing to spend their own time and money to show they fit in or to make sure they stand out should be of little or no concern to others.

But for those who are concerned with the impact of 7.5 billion humans’ consumption decisions on the natural environment, the choice of such symbols matters enormously. Whether people choose to signal their wealth by spending money on huge cars or antique paintings is arbitrary, but that does not mean the environmental consequences aren’t highly significant.

Put simply, if we want to reduce the impact on the natural environment of all of the stuff we buy, then we have to hang on to our stuff for a lot longer. We have to maintain it, repair it when it breaks, and find a new home for it when we don’t need it any longer. If we want to cure affluenza, we have to get more satisfaction from the things we already own, more satisfaction from services, more satisfaction from leisure time, and less satisfaction from the process of buying new things.

Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/30/to-cure-affluenza-we-have-to-be-satisfied-with-the-stuff-we-already-own (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/30/to-cure-affluenza-we-have-to-be-satisfied-with-the-stuff-we-already-own)

IS MINIMALISM A LUXURY OF THE RICH?

Owning few items used to be called poverty. But when one is able to purge, declutter, and own only long-lasting, good quality items, is this a luxury limited only to the wealthy?

A friend of mine spent several years teaching English as an additional language to adults; most of her students were new immigrants, and many of them, refugees. She saw a frequent phenomenon: an accumulation of stuff. Like, I'm talking: eight TVs kind of accumulation...

No, these folks aren't greedy, and they aren't individualists who are trying to accommodate each family member's personal show preferences! But, after living in want, in desperation, and in lack for so long, when faced with abundance, the scarcity mindset still rules. How can I give up this opportunity for a free XYZ? What if I never get that chance again?

You hear the same thing about people who lived through WW2 or the Great Depression (though, less frequently as people with memories of that time period age and pass away): these are the grandmas who save pencils down to the nub and have partially used notebooks that are 30 years old, waiting to be completed if needed.

The Minimalists have a phrase: you should purge everything that you could replace (if needed) in 20 minutes for $20 or less. One part of me thinks: sage advice! Keep it simple! The other part of me thinks: what arrogance! It assumes that our situation, wealth, access, etc. will never change.

This article, on the website Becoming Minimalist, has stuck with me for years. Patrick Rhone describes a sea change in his life:

"$18,685.00 is the gross total of what I made. Not the net. Not after taxes. That was it. Between August 2003 and August 2004 that was my gross income for a family of three [him as dad and his two boys].

That’s how I became a minimalist."

Rhone cuts through the BS to illustrate the privilege that many of us take for granted when we "decide" to pursue minimalism.

"To many of us, choosing to “live simply” is to others living in poverty and they may not have a choice. We should be mindful of this when we talk about it to others because, many times, we come off sounding like elitist jerks."

Yep.

It is often experienced that minimalism creates wealth (of time, of richness of experience, etc.), but do we acknowledge the implicit financial wealth that allows us to "pursue" minimalism?

Source: https://www.shopdignify.com/blogs/shopgoodblog/is-minimalism-a-luxury-of-the-rich (https://www.shopdignify.com/blogs/shopgoodblog/is-minimalism-a-luxury-of-the-rich)