I wanted to share this blog post from A Guy Named Dave. He blogs at 100 Things Challenge about consumerism, minimalism and finding freedom from stuff. Over the past few months I have been shedding unnecessary things by either selling them or giving them away. That is the easy part. Honestly, the hard part is not buying more stuff. I do allow myself to purchase food, and necessities of course. But cloths, shoes, and other things are put off for a once a year thrift store trip. The only thing I allow myself to purchase for fun is vinyl records. All this said, I start to wonder what to do with myself. When living in a urban location you don't have a ton to do so usually the solution is to shop. It is hard to break free from that.
It can be a bit boring to live a simple life. You purge your excess stuff. You stop shopping on the weekends. Soon enough you find yourself sitting in a shockingly empty house wondering what to do. So, what do you do? Well, the first thing is to ask yourself, why do you feel restless? Why does life feel empty?
In fact, it is completely appropriate to go through a time of feeling restless and uncertain after adjusting our lifestyles to simple living. Here’s why I think we experience this. Consumerism manufactures bondage and breaking free isn’t the final goal.
People who excessively consume, be it for comfort or status or whatever reason, become enslaved to their things. Often consumerism binds them in triple-shackles: debt, discontent, and debris. They spend so much money on stuff that they go into debt and are now bound to their payments. They buy things that don’t satisfy and now experience cognitive dissonance, either convinced there’s something wrong with them or something wrong with what they bought; both rationalizations usually lead to another purchase and more bondage. And, all this stuff makes for a serious mess around the house that quite literally has people feeling stuck in stuff.
As bad as the constraints of consumerism might seem, for many people there is a familiar comfort to them. This is a common experience for those experiencing some kind of, say, addition or dysfunction. People will regularly stay in a bad situation rather than go through the discomfort of changing.
Yet thankfully, many people do change. Many of us have changed our relationship to stuff. We’ve broken bad habits and are no longer stuck in stuff. We’re free!
But freedom is not an end goal. Neither is emptiness. (In this, my view of simplicity differs dramatically from Zen, which seeks emptiness as an ideal state.) Freedom is the most privileged state of attachment. What I mean by this is that freedom allows us to fill up our lives of our own free will; freedom allows us to become attached to the right things.
This process of filling up our lives takes time. Moreover, it doesn’t happen by simply creating space. Simple living creates space. I often say that simple living creates physical, emotional, and spiritual space. But just because we’re no longer filling up that space with stuff doesn’t mean we can leave it empty and be satisfied. If we leave the space empty (yes, even the physical space) we’ll feel, well, empty.
The Little Goods Life that I’ve been talking about lately addresses this. It emphasizes filling up by pursuing “little goods.” It’s a lifestyle of consumer moderation, but also of career and charity and relational moderation. Little by little.
One final thought for now. Around the world people fill up their lives with all sorts of pursuits. Obviously, many people fill up their lives with bad activities. But there are plenty of good things to do. So if you don’t like hiking, try crafting. If you don’t like reading, try photography. If you don’t like cooking, try volunteering. There are endless fulfilling activities for you and your family. Be patient, though. It takes a while to break free from consumerism. It will take a while to settle into new life pursuits.
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