Stuff vs. Simplicity

Lately I have been watching documentaries and reading a lot about consumerism and our obsession with stuff. The western world has been working on the paradigm of thinking bigger bigger bigger!! The mistaken thinking is that bigger is always better. The new information coming to me from many angles is the paradigm of simplicity. Other cultures outside the Western world, including my own, have enjoyed simplicity and been more serene because of that choice, but those cultures are slowly but surely being eroded and are also pursuing the Western dream of more stuff. Consumerism has become a disease. We think that more stuff will make us happy, but it does not… it cannot. All it does is force us to work harder to pay for the stuff. On top of that, as illustrated in a great documentary called ‘The Story of Stuff‘ (a 20 minute must-see documentary), we get bombarded with advertising that drives us to want more stuff and so we get stuck in this rat race to keep paying for stuff that neither makes us happy or sets us at peace. Worse than that, our children think that that is the only way to be because that is what they see and what they see day in and day out becomes their deep-seated reality. So many of us are stuck in life and think that life is like that… hard and un-yielding and that we are stuck here to suffer, but I beg to differ. It is we, with our choice to stay in the rat-race, to live in this way which is hurting the earth and taking us closer and closer to extinction that are creating this space of sufferance.

Why do we do this? Why do most of us cling to this path even though it is so painful or so obviously unsustainable for the long run? Why do we want to saddle our kids with this type of legacy? Daniel Quinn, in his classic book Ishmael “examines mythology, its effect on ethics, and how that relates to sustainability. The novel uses a style of Socratic dialogue to deconstruct the notion that humans are the end product, the pinnacle of biological evolution. It posits that human supremacy is a cultural myth, and asserts that modern civilization is “enacting” that myth.” If you are interested in learning more about his eloquent and compelling examinations, I urge you to read these amazing books “Ishmael”, “The Story of B”, “My Ishmael” and “Beyond Civilization”. He has more and I read most of them, but these four provide a solid foundation for a new thinking. I can tell you that I can separate my life into the moment before I read Daniel Quinn and the moment after I started.

My new paradigm is about freeing myself and my family to stop living life inside the box of this cultural myth that we humans are here to do as we please with the world and the world will just accept that. We have to know by now that any species who overruns the world as we have, who causes hundreds and thousands of species to go extinct, who treat the world in this deplorable manner with little care for the great responsibility entrusted to us is going to be made extinct. We, man, who is the first species on earth to think and therefore act beyond our instincts have been entrusted with the care of the world, to work within the boundaries of laws such as gravity and the laws of nature, to protect this biosphere and leave it better than we found it for future generations of humans as well as other species of animals and plants.

We, as in any leadership venture, are going to face an uphill battle. It won’t be easy to change the flow of choice, ritual, habit, life from the direction we are in now to a whole new direction. If we succeed in changing this direction over the next few hundred years, we will be able to survive and eventually thrive as a whole biosphere. If we don’t change, we will be extinguished, as so we should. I am willing to face the uphill battle and the unknowns…. it won’t be easy… I know this much for sure…but I know we have to change. Who else is willing? The toughest part is not knowing the solution, we have to keep digging deep and utilize the most creative potential we have to change this flow. One thing we humans have been great at is using our imaginations… not all of us, not all the time… but history has shown that we can be immensely creative. This is one of those times that more of us need to be creative and more of the time… we have to stay on and keep thinking and more importantly doing action to help move us in the right direction. We cannot be paralyzed by the feelings on not knowing what to do.