Post 2, Further Introduction

Simplicity is for simpletons!
-Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Simple living is usually viewed as living close to nature with romantic visions of splitting wood, raising one’s home by hand and growing one’s own food. And while that may sound like living to some, if not a direct arrogant assault upon our ancestors who welcomed the technologies to ease those burdens, it does not, to me, sound simple in any connotation.

On the other hand, the simplest-minded form of living to pursue is the life which the majority collectively pursues wherein, in our current age, one is able to buy so many nice and convenient comforts as a benefit of the work they have performed. But I don’t care to buy comfort. The time (the closest thing we can collectively call a possession) spent and lost in earning the money to spend on ultimately unnecessary luxuries will always be more valuable than those luxuries, and we will thus be in the red to begin with. And while pursuing such a career is simple, it in no way, from what I’ve seen and experienced of it, sounds or ever felt like living to me.

There are examples littered throughout history of people who willingly accepted the hardships, and sometimes dangers, in daring to attempt to take up a different way of living to satisfy just such a feeling.

The Pilgrims had their New World.

Many of which seemed to try to live outside of civilization and find a return to nature. As humans, we treat the forests, fields, plains, and deserts of both the equator and poles as separate essences we are invading and imposing upon. There is us and there is nature, two separate entities competing against each other for survival. Is there a more commercialized way to define the planet? Must all things be viewed in terms of competition even in such as competitive economized world as this?

Actually, couldn’t we argue that every civilization up until at least Rome had a "new world"—even in the old world—that they could have found uninhabited?

As has long been obvious to thinkers throughout history, having come from that very same beginning, the same source of atoms and energy, we—humans, trees, animals, bacteria, climates, everything—are all a part of one nature. All beings are natural.

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson; Self-Reliance

If we are separated from nature in any way, it is not in being thoughtful beings amongst animals, or mobile creatures amongst the plants or any other sort of arbitrary differences we wish to use to separate ourselves from our environmental companions, but rather in secluding our lives from our natural place in the world with such unnatural obstructions as clocks, used to get us to work on time, that are in tune only with themselves and calendars based upon our place in space with no relation to all else that exists within that same space.

But, unlike some historical figures who took to the woods to find an escape from these unnatural limitations, I find no desire to remove myself wholly from society. The sounds of the city are no more unnatural to me than the birds singing or the wind blowing; the finely built architectural gem no less natural than a bird’s nest or beehive; our ability to create (or discover) technology no different than a lizard changing color or the HIV virus’ ability to change its DNA rapidly in the name of its own survival; the city itself an ant hill amplified. For, in the eye of evolution—as well as creation, for there were days before the trees and land animals in each theory—was there not a time when the wind blew but was not interrupted by the leaves? Should the flowers then find a tree as unnatural as we claim ourselves to be because they were here first? And was there not a time when the frog was not here to croak, the cricket not here to chirp? Or even a time when the rain did not fall and moisten the ground? Are we then to view all these things equally unnatural as we supposedly suddenly are?

I will not deprive myself of the natural brilliance and inventiveness of the great number of things that technology, through a natural human intellectual evolution, has granted us simply because there was a time—usually only time within mind—when it was unknown to us. And as much as we tend to glorify a pastoral and simplified past, I have no interest in splitting wood, sewing fields, milking cows, warming by fire and whatever else one would require for simple survival to only the next day or so. Maybe that makes me lazy, American, civilized, or a consumer of convenience. But if civilization does in fact advance—even, evolve—as we collectively tend to believe, then it would be arrogant and disingenuous to discount the accepted basics to the survival of human life that we have received through the years and attempt to rebuild the foundation of necessities ourselves; it would suggest that all previous experiment and experience in discovering these basic tenets were wasteful and useless. While I am likely to distrust the collective intentions of a human’s need to survive in relation to my own, I do trust this historically collective work. I trust the woodchopper eventually accepted the chainsaw as a welcomed relief to the burden of chopping wood; ventilated heat more comfortable and considerably cleaner than the fireplace; houses of wood and plaster a safer haven than the log cabin; and mechanical farm equipment more efficient than each of us working our own mule and plow. To disregard and discard these basic advances of human survival would amount to little more than a vaudeville stage show of a previous and extinct time, falling upon unimpressed and inattentive eyes and ears. Specialization has its advantages and I am willing to accept many of them in exchange for whatever specializations I have been paid or ask to perform.

Thoreau had his Walden.

Additionally, just as Homer (Simpson, this is) once suggested that alcohol is the cause and solution to all of life’s problems, I like to think the same of people. For, if proverbial evolution has failed to make a mistake, and the best things in life are indeed free—a statement I will be sure to continuously test—then what more bountiful product can one enjoy for nothing other than people?

Hell, there’s only six and a half billion of us.

Besides my fascination, and disgust with; my trust, and distrust of; my pride, and disappointment, in people, they also entertain and love me to no end, and so I am in no need—no immediate need—of distancing myself from them in order to remove myself from the cycle of work we have been placed into.

All being beings of nature, each of us is our own individual and unique interpretation of that ongoing force that has carried on for billions of years, each contributing an unique trait to the total combination of what is now called human consciousness.

At our best, we must simply discover what it is that is inherently within us and pursue it to whatever ends it may attain. The only unnatural act is to deny that. To elaborate on a previous statement, if there is anything unnatural about the world it is the money that we have put before us, and the time it takes to earn that money, to distract us from that which is naturally within us, that which developed in the womb before we were ever exposed to the physical environment. For me it is an inherent distaste for unnecessary work.

Hawthorne and company their Brook Farm.

How then can I go about trying to satisfy my disdain for work while not wholly removing myself from society? Is that even possible? For no matter how much one wishes otherwise, to live in the world one needs money. It cannot be gotten around. Even if one wishes to try to live off the fat of the land, these days they would still be required to pay for that plot and the monopoly of the landowners is nearly complete the world over, leaving only the inhospitable—for the time anyways—free to those who wish to occupy it.

Ishmael his sea.

Is it then impossible for one to reap the benefits of civilization while still openly denying it’s accepted ideas about work, pay and success? Has the American experiment truly halted? Did it really finally give into the “we told you so” attitude of Old Europe? Did it suffocate itself with cynicism already? By Lincoln, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Twain and the host of others I don’t have the personal familiarity with to list here but wish not to exclude wholly, I will not give into that notion. Our time is no bigger a Big Brother situation than the Middle Ages—read Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for an argument on how it has been humans’ weakness in not thinking for themselves to allow for such a situation to have always been true, but also for the dream that there have always been enough self-taught or natural thinkers to prevent it from fully happening—and still we have enough examples of thoughts and individuals from those times as well to not wholly discourage one attempting to think for themselves.

Or his desert. Depending on which book you’re reading.

It is with this traditional stubborn individuality that I will test my theories and beliefs with the full consciousness that they may in fact fail. But if that pessimism didn’t prevent the creation of this nation, why then should they stop my attempt at personalizing my own inconsequential life? Besides, what good are theories or beliefs if they cannot be practiced amongst the multitudes?

Christopher McCandless had his Alaskan wilderness.

And so, I simply plan to distance myself from certain attitudes and mindsets through a continual process of testing, questioning and, simply, simplified living that will ultimately show over the course of the next year just how easy—and just how hard as well—and possible simplified living, while still being a functioning member of society, still is in our modern day.

Post 1, Introduction

This will not be an experiment in simple living but simply an experiment in a simplified form of living.

Having seen and heard far too many horror stories of people suffocated in debt caused by an ingrained instinct to constantly consume and as many stories of hyper stressful jobs and unfulfilling careers; having long grown tired of work being the central activity in my life; now long past the realization that the more money I have made the more unhappy I have been; as well as due to an ever increasing list of additional reasons that will be further discussed in an ongoing manner here in the future, I will here chronicle the process in which I hope to find it possible to live on as little money as possible, while also working as little as possible, over the course of the next year. I look to keep a running tab of how much I have worked, how much I have spent to date— extensively listing the things I have purchased—while also outlining the philosophies behind consciously deciding on living this way of life.

This is not a change of lifestyle so as to take up this particular way of living. In fact, this is exactly how I hope to live for a long time coming, if not altogether for the rest of my life. A continuous exercise in living richly while being poor.

But I not only hope to show how it is financially possible to live as such, but am also out to find the plethora of ways in which one is capable of spending their free time, as opposed to their money, that are often overlooked. I not only hope to work as little as possible, so as to maximize my free time, but I also hope to hang out with my friends as much as possible; I hope to find a great many things that cost little or nothing and can still be enjoyed without the ever-presence of money. I hope to go outside often; I hope to make all sorts of food that I’ve never made; I hope to further my education in the privacy of my own home; I hope to expand the boundaries of my own personal individualism—one I possess no greater than any other—and to show that, through a determined dedication to minimizing work, one is able to do so much in “doing nothing” over the coarse of an hour, a day, a month and ultimately a year.

And it will be a year that I will chronicle this manner of living (I began counting on July 1, 2007 and will do so through an entire year). I have begun with the goal of spending no more than $1,000 a month—$12,000 over the course of a year for those instinctively reaching for a calculator as opposed to instinctively turning to their own intelligence—even though that will more than likely prove high. As for work, I have no particular goal in the number of hours that I will work other than to keep it as far below the standard 2000 hours full-time workers work in a year.

This may not succeed. I suspect that it will, and will do what I must to make sure that it does. Regardless of the outcome, I will chronicle the ups and downs; the successes and failures; the worries and joys; the ways in which we are conditioned from youth in thinking that we need more money and the ways in which one can, hopefully, overcome those teachings.

Again, this will not be an experiment in simple living but simply an experiment in a simplified form of living.