(Keep in mind whilst reading this: I wrote this as part of an assignment, and I had to do certain things I might not have otherwise. Edit: I can’t get the text to unbold itself, so…. I’m not yelling, I swear. And there’s emphasis on some of these words, I swear.)
In this world we live in we have been taught, however accidentally or inadvertently, that we should become an individual more like everyone else— yet less connected to them. In most places in the world we seem to be learning that happiness comes with a price tag. This consumerist way of thinking is causing many of our world problems— and individual scale ones you may not have made connections to before.
The broadest way I can describe this is as thus: together we have grown apart. By one individual thinking like the others, we have become individualists trying to be like other people instead of being with other people. This avoidance and imbalances stems out via consumption and consumeristic ways.
We’re avoiding conflicts and problems with otherwise easy or uncomplicated solutions by reigning in material objects and “problem solvers.” Unneeded things such as TV, iPods, videogames, computers, and cellphones are beginning to be— in fact well into being— viewed as necessary in nations such as the US, UK and Japan, but also in other developing countries and even the ones just recently living on “a dollar a day.”
We are taking more than we need, to less benefit. If one were to spend as much on food as some do for TV, cellphone, and internet bills, we could sustain an entire household indefinitely.
In places like the US and the UK, obesity is a major problem 25% of the US is obese, and, despite efforts to bring the rate down, that number is still rising. More food isn’t benefiting us any.
Our internal balances have begun to manifest themselves in physical ways such as this. The cries about abuse of resources should be ringing so loud in your ears that you cannot hear across the room. I hear this as tro multa— tro multa, too much.
Too much food taken in, more wasted. Too much debt. Too much freshwater being soiled by the factories and plants trying to keep up with our consumption. Too much reusable items not being recycled in our urgency for more. Too much time spent shopping aimlessly, not in need or even want of anything in particular— because in places such as America, we shop just to shop.
Too much logging. Too much pollution. Too much extinction. Too much imbalance between life and death, in life and death— because instead of killing that animal for food or even clothing, some of us kill it just because.
Tro multa.
No matter where I walk I can see the mindless assumption, or perhaps the sheep-like following, of the phrase “Bigger is better.” People do not NEED a bigger house— but they strive for one anyway. No one really needs a bigger phone or MP3 player— but they sell like candy under a cent sign anyway.
For people who don’t grow our own produce, I see many a yard bigger than my entire house taking up clean water to make it “perfect” when grass could do just fine on its own.
A simple walk to the park shows me that we still are making bigger things— bigger ads, bigger signs, bigger roads, bigger living areas— where only a few species are actually allowed life and entrance, the rest cast to the back of our minds and the back forests we so frugally leave them— bigger bags, bigger hair dos, bigger guns, bigger toys, bigger tro multa. In 1950, the average house size was 983 square feet. In 2004, the average house size was 2349 square feet. Is that really necessary?
Bigger is not the solution to, as near as I can tell, anything thought of as material. Small isn’t the problem. The problem behind almost every major problem I see is CONSUMPTION. The cause of that is the internal balance I’ve mentioned, the almost mindless going-on without thinking beyond what we have. If we individually could get our priorities straight and realize that change is simpler than one thinks, I believe we could remedy these situations.
In thinking more to less benefit we’ve caused a problem you know well by now— the acceleration of global warming. Less land. Less biological diversity. Less stability— you know the deal. If we could listen to the less is more ethic with what we currently view with “bigger is better,” then we could realize that lives are one of the few exceptions to less is more. With lives, less is closer to none than is comfortable for anyone. If we could listen to this logic, we could again slow down the process of degradation of our Earth, the only planet we have. “Once the Earth is all used up, we don’t simply move to the next valley.” - ‘Bob Horowitz,’ Sustainable Enterprises
Our thinking big is affecting the small.
Small or less developed countries we claim to aid are struggling with starvation still because we won’t give up on those unneeded after-school snacks or deserts we waste a lot of. Small animals die out because, supposedly, we “need” more space to live when two people can live cozily in about 100 square feet of space— and cost efficiently, I might add. In having a big media industry, it is often hard to find one voice of nonfiction you’re looking for in all the fictional bowls of swirling distraction we are fed. It is hard to get a single voice such as the one you hear behind this paper to be heard, no matter how urgent that voice and the message it speaks may be.
For all these things that are deteriorating our society, other nations are and have followed suit. We need to stop the cycle. We have imbalance, we take more to try to accommodate, we have less to show for it besides “stuff,” we have more imbalance, we take yet more with different colours and a spinning disk on top, it affects others, other people follow suit, and others have the “not enough” end of the bargain because although we might not be taking things physically away from them, our neighbors won’t have what we take, our great grandchildren won’t enjoy what we destroy to fill our material lusts, their friends won’t be able to point out the attractive species of plant or animal we place in extinction, and our minds— the most important part of us— are dying before we do.
How many stories have you heard about a two-parent household with a child who feels disconnected because one or both work all the time to sustain luxury items that they don’t even enjoy?
How many happy faces do you see— the truly content and joyful ones and real ones— smiling above business attire?
Compare that to the other side. Teachers are one of the last-income, yet happiest people I know. They see to be much happier than the formal images described above. The time teachers do have is spent enjoyably— with friends, family, and loved ones; training for or coaching a favorite sport or athletic area… less is more, even if the teachers aren’t the perfect example of this. They make less MONEY, and, even though they have less free time, they spend it doing things that cannot be taken place of by material things.
What makes you happy isn’t cheesecake, isn’t the nine hours you spent on that video game you never touched again, isn’t the car you only drive a few times a week, isn’t the collection of black Santas in your house that creep out all your visitors, isn’t even spending all your free time looking at google images. What makes you happy is the person who bought you the cheesecake, the friends you talked to about the video game, the family that protested you didn’t need a car like that to see them once a year at Yuletide, the peace you feel when you have nothing to do whilst sitting in the bed surrounded by those figurines (preferably with your eyes closed,) and the happiness you feel when those photos you spent only a little time finding were put to good use in a documentary to help stop all the things you find wrong with the world.
In 2009, Approximately 18.8 million American adults had a diagnosed depressive disorder. Our addictions to “stuff” certainly wasn’t helping that— we certainly had less depression before WWII, as Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., would agree, and we’ve all heard the “horror stories” of how much we didn’t have then.
Creating inner balance, which will affect the outer balance, is proven to improve our lives without the “stuff” we think we need… and often don’t even want.
We should do one if not all of the following things to achieve that goal. They may seem obscure to some, but really they are just things we haven’t had time to think about around our televisions that can improve ourselves— and therefore the rest of us, a chain reaction that actually can snowball so that we can, once more, settle into having less be more.
These three things don’t have to be shoved into your life. Take just 15 minutes a day at first to do such things, maybe, or start slowly going from “I need, I want” to “I can do without” certain items. You’ll be amazed at how your life and others’ can change with this, how little materials you’ll find yourself getting and how much more joy you’ll see. If you still don’t believe we’re in a time for the need of change, look at what a journalist put in one of their articles:
“Sadly, it is likely that so too will the animals which have already been sealed in their colorful, transparent tombs — gasping for the final breath of air they’ve been packaged with, as they peer out to a world in which their lives are considered essentially worthless. And in such a dark hour, it’s hard not to believe our very humanity awaits a similar fate.”
—Lc Rising
Creating worlds and trying to fight for change in ours has brought about a lot of thinking of scrapping current systems entirely and creating new ones. A few sometimes separate ideas have emerged and… well, I think I want to create a blog to discuss things and why they should, shouldn’t, can or can’t be brought about (if they can and should, why are we talking about it?!)
For instance…
This would in effect make it so that places to volunteer would either be nearly obsolete, or “government” funded. The idea is that there is a minimal but universal tax on anyone, say, that has a house or rents property, depending on the size or number of properties they have. The rest of the money needed to run public education, finance soldiers, etc. is made strictly on faith—which I think would go much farther than many a politician would be led to believe. (Is it lead or led? This annoys me so v.v;)
It might help, of course, if the rich people got some sort of “merits” or something, but I’m not going to think about that.
Education that changes not slowly over the course of decades, but is changed every fucking year and has current relevance. It took at least a decade before we had required computer classes in any schools. Perhaps colleges and universities could be made to have part of the funding they get from students go into hours a year of preparing the curriculum for next years high school education (Okay, I’m not saying change it every year; maybe work on it for three years at a time.)
Currently, I’ve been made to believe that our government and politician’s generation (and many of those after them) are showing hard core (though I wouldn’t say concrete) proof that the education system has been inadequate for a long time. The need for a college education as a necessity that no longer all but guarantees a job, contributing to the financial hysteria; all the flaws in our government being pointed out, mostly by the younger generation; the “stupid” things politicians—and parents, and others— do that even to those who haven’t graduated college know are absolutely ridiculous; the continuity of ignorance to misogyny, racism, ableism, cissexism and other big words I usually have a hard time pronouncing, ESPECIALLY in the older class; the amount of students who, even if in “higher” classes or what you’d think were relevant average ones, are just plain bored. You’d think that, if taught properly, things would be different, yes?
