It seems to me that when people talk about voluntary simplicity, they are talking about refusing to engage with wasteful lifestyle patterns. Which is well and good at face value. But then they go on, and you notice the way they are defining the definition, heavy on the stylizing, a bit more fuzzy on what “wasteful” actually means. Living simply is refusing complexity, simple as that, but it is not a style. It is not an affectation. It is not appearances and surfaces. Those things are affected by choosing simplicity, but they are not simplicity itself. Nor does such virtue signaling — look how cleanly and purely I live — do much to reduce the waste and, therefore, harm of complexity.
Refusing complexity is meeting your needs as simply as possible, and meeting your needs includes managing whatever waste streams you generate. In practical terms, this means you are not ever offloading work and waste on other bodies elsewhere. You do the necessary work to maintain your own body. You minimize the harm and waste. That is living simply. And that is not what people who talk about voluntary simplicity are talking about for the most part. That is certainly not how they are living. For example, there is no room in simplicity for air travel to weeklong spiritual retreats…
This isn’t a style. It has nothing to do with décor. You can have elaborate tastes that are, nevertheless, not complex. Have you seen a bowerbird’s nest or the dens of some kinds of pufferfish? Now, that’s style! As elaborate as any Victorian parlor. The difference is that the birds and fish do the work themselves; they gather the materials in a generally non-invasive, certainly non-colonial and non-enforced manner; and they leave no non-biodegradable blot on the world. None of these things could be said of Victorian parlors. Moreover, none of these things are true for any people in our culture today, no matter how spartan their domicile.
That’s where many people trip up… they are using words like “choice” and “simplify” and “non-harm”, but what they are talking about is self-abnegation… which is not even that. We are not denying the mini-Me self. We are actually centralizing the self, the willful mind that controls. What we are denying is the body. Particularly, we are denying the experience of pleasure and using that “will-power” to show how good we are. In practice, this is just virtue signaling and purity segregation. It does very little to reduce harm, particularly if you are spending so much time in the passive contemplation of your navel that others have to do nearly all the work of tending to your body — from growing, shipping and processing the food you eat to all the multifarious steps involved in producing your clothing and shelter (these days both involve quite a lot of oil-based plastic) to pumping your septic tank and otherwise cleaning up after you.
Anything that has multifarious steps involved is complexity, by definition. That is what needs to be avoided. Not décor. Not even diet, though diet choices are closer to choosing simplicity than the paintings you hang on your walls. Humans have always decorated their homes and special places. It is not style. It is art and expression. Not of the self, necessarily (though “Enlightened” modern art does trend that way), but of the world as you see it and, sometimes, how you would like to see it. Nearly all animals engage with this form of creativity to some extent. I would argue the forms of flowers and trees are also art, expressions of the beauty those beings sense in the world and want to encourage. Art is not harmful per se; it is how the art is produced and used that carries the harm. And in fact, one machine-knitted sweater made from dyed acrylic yarn is far more wasteful than a whole roomful of buddhas and santos made from driftwood and reclaimed fence posts and painted with organic and locally-made dyes. Note that there is no utility in the statues, just art, pure fanciful clutter; but they are much less complex and much, much less harmful to the world than one warm sweater made in the system of complexity.
The useless statues are simple statements of what good an artist sees in this world.
The sweater is a complex product. (We’ll get back to that…)
A bowerbird’s nest is an exclamatory statement on the beauty he sees in the world and wants to perpetuate. It is also a declaration about himself and his body’s fitness to reproduce, though it is kind of hard to see fitness in such extravagance. What exactly is it about blue bric-a-brac and a large grass hut that signals good genes to a future missus? I’m not a bowerbird, so I couldn’t say. But it’s like a peacock’s feathers or a lion’s full mane. These are lovely and show that the individual has nutrition to squander on frippery, but do they seem rather maladaptive in terms of survival. Really easy to get stuck or snatched when you have long dangly bits hanging off your backside. And that mane is a breeding ground itself — for insects and fungi and microbes, many of which do not contribute positively to the lion’s health.
But anyway, beings make art to signify what is lovely to us. Usually in the name of love, but also just because it makes us happy. This can be wasteful. It can be complex. But it is not those things by definition. It is the way in which it is produced, and particularly the system within which it is produced, that is complex and therefore harmful.
In Stephanie Kaza’s Green Buddhism, she talks about a man who has enumerated several critiques on consumerism.
OK… let me step back from that for a second. First, every last being is a consumer. We all take in material and energy and we all generate waste streams. In a healthy system, the wastes of one being are the food of another. Biodegradable means that lots of mostly tiny critters are consuming that waste. Trees exhale oxygen, which is a poison to their tissues, and breathe in our exhalations, carbon compounds, which are poison to us. This is a perfectly circular economy. No actual waste, though both beings are generating quite a lot of toxic exudate. No actual break in consuming either. If we were to stop taking in the oxygen waste products, we would die fairly quickly. If trees are deprived of carbon, they wither. (They don’t actually die though…) Consuming is how the world copes with both food and waste, body inputs and body outputs. Consuming is not a choice.
But we both know that that is not what people who are critiquing consumerism are talking about. Consumerism popularly means excessive consumption, taking more than what the body needs, producing more waste than other bodies can process. It has come to mean a lifestyle choice that is focused on acquisition. This has become the top mortal sin in circles who also do a good deal of virtue signaling and purity segregating. And it is a complete fabrication. It is gaslighting, misdirection, averting the attention away from the actual causes of imbalance in our world.
Let’s take one example. Many people in my country have more than one car, most have at least one. This is a wasteful possession in every sense of the term. But why do they have it? Did they voluntarily choose to spend a couple years and more of their wages so that they could drive around the countryside? Car ads would have you believe that. Many critics of car culture would also have you believe that. And there may be some validity to that image for people of a certain economic class, those that are not spending all their wages on a car payment and have the time free from labor, waged and otherwise, to fritter away on travel. However, most people buy a car because they have to. Most people buy a second car because they have to. This is not their choice.
Look at any two-car household in this country. Odds are that there are two adults working full time at jobs that are far removed from the home and far removed from each other. Also far removed from child care and schools. Both job and home are also usually far removed from grocery stores and health care centers and most other necessities. But the main thing is the need for transport to wage work. In the vast majority of places, there is no public transport that can get you to work and then back home again in anything less than one or two hours each way. If there is public transportation at all. Which is not the case in much of suburbia — which was designed to sell cars. Among other product. It is not the car that is the waste (or not just the car). It is certainly not “consuming” the car by buying and using it — even buying more than one of them — that is the waste. It is the system that manufactures a need for cars so that cars can and must be manufactured and sold.
Now, before we address that — because that is the point, you know — let’s get back to Kaza’s consumerism critic. This guy had created four different labels for classes of things that are wrong about consumerism, the last of which he named the republican critique. (How precious…) This flaw in consumer lifestyle, by which he apparently meant excessive consuming as a choice made by flawed people (probably mostly women…), is that it “shifts attention to private involvement with personal goods and away from public engagement with politics.” (One wonders what he thinks politics actually is…) Moreover, it “shifts a person’s identity away from work (how one contributes to society) and toward lifestyle (what one consumes)” (parentheticals in quotations were in the original). Now, this is Kaza paraphrasing, not quoting directly, and there may be errors in the interpretation; but this is what I read.
Have you ever seen a horse, placidly grazing in a sunlit meadow, after some perceived threat, suddenly rear up with wild eyes and loud neighing? Yeah… that was me when I read that. Especially the nay-ing. It was like, “How could you get so much wrong in so few words?!?” (There is now some very black scribbling in the margins of that page…)
Let’s peel that apart, shall we… (I will try to minimize the snark.)
We have established that there is rather less choice in consuming than he apparently believes, but what does it mean to “shift attention to private involvement with personal goods”? What is life but private involvement with personal good? Even if you define good, as he does, as material things, that is what a living body does. It involves itself with its own care and feeding, which requires stuff. And politics? That is nothing more nor less than deciding who gets access to stuff and who does not. He may be talking more about ethics and values when he uses the word “politics”, but even those are mostly about who gets stuff and who does not, as well as who has to deal with the work and the waste.
Most people in the world have no involvement with politics on anything but a very localized scale, mostly private. And that is by design, not always by choice… though most people don’t want involvement with the wider republic either, for many reasons. But this republic took that choice away from them. It is designed to keep them involved in their own private relationship with the piddling amount of stuff granted to them and to keep them far from any involvement in making up the rules about stuff’s distribution. Just holding down a job to enable a body to have access to necessary stuff keeps you from having any time to devote to the republic. But the republic does not want your involvement and finds many ways of painfully underlining that fact.
And what is public engagement anyway? How do we choose to shift our attention away from that? Once again, there is no public as in, I think, he means it — that is, a body that chooses. This is not quite the same thing as saying, as Margaret Thatcher infamously declared, “There is no such thing as society”. But there is no amorphous blob of being that is not composed of individuals making their own way through life. There is society, which is a collective noun for humans living close together, and there is a public sphere, the widest milieu in which our choices affect other humans. But there is no public voice. No Public-being to engage with. There is no thing that is not private individuals doing their thing.
But he probably means that people who are focused on their own private lives are not part of the rule-making conversation. They are not deciders. They are not affecting much of the republic. And again, that is not by choice, but by design. If people are free to decide, they generally decide to live their own private lives unencumbered by the ideas of deciders. And yes, their concerns are mostly with stuff, but also with contentment and satisfaction and connection and beauty. There would be no wide public sphere, nor large scale politics, if people were left to their own devices and allowed to live simply. Everything would be small and local and mostly concerned with the body.
I should also note that the republic is not simple. Nor is it not harmful to most of the world.
Then we get to the revelatory part of his philosophy. Consumerism “shifts a person’s identity away from work (how one contributes to society) and toward lifestyle (what one consumes)”. No, no, no, and no… Here is where we see his fears. If people are focused on their own lives, then they aren’t doing the work that keeps me fed and sheltered.
Work is not “how one contributes to society”. Nor is it an identity for most of the people doing the most necessary work. Work is how we manage the body’s needs. In a simple system, work is only done to feed and shelter an individual or a very small group of people that are living together. Living together, mostly in order to share the work. We are not really a social species at heart, especially as we age, but we do recognize the value of sharing the burden of care work. But sharing! It is voluntary and not usually onerous because every body is contributing. This is not “contributing to society” except in the smallest and more personal sense, the household or small tribe. It is certainly not labor owed to others. It is still done mostly in private and mostly in support of your own body.
And it is still mostly about what each body is consuming, that being the principal focus of care work. This is not a lifestyle. This is just life.
Anything more than that is complexity. Anything more than that is harmful and inegalitarian. Anything more than that is not your responsibility or burden. (So all y’all PMC leisure class toffs can just fuck off…)
Except that is not how our culture works. For us, work is synonymous with transactional relationships. Work is how all this stuff gets produced and moved about. Work is how it is sold. Work is busy-ness. To some extent, work is also how we regulate and affix value to those transactional relationships. (My job in a bank is nothing but busy-ness that monitors who gets access to stuff and who does not). And the most essential work, caring for the body, that “private involvement with personal good”, is relegated to the realm of the unnamed and the unseen. It is lesser-than the work of production, precisely because it does not involve much transaction. There is little profit or gain in it. There is little reward at all except a healthy living body (as if you need anything else). And there is much less stuff.
Shouldn’t that, in fact, be the goal if one wants to reduce harm by living simply?
Yes, it should. But then our system will fail and there will not be room for things like books about consumerism. There will not be consumerism. And there will not be production. Which, as I said, is the point…
This system of waste is not fueled by people buying things. It is created by people who sell things and thereby extract wealth for themselves. It is designed to both facilitate cheap production, so that there is little cost interfering with profit, and to spawn need, so that people must buy things. This is not a society of wasteful consumers. This is a system of predatory and harmful production. And it is not even driven by actual producers, who are often low-status and poorly remunerated, but by the people who sell the product.
Capitalists, property owners, people who sell things they did not make for personal profit, these are the people who have created this complexity because the more complex the more opportunity for transaction. These are the people who make decisions about production, choosing long supply chains for their cheap labor, toxic resources sourced in destructive fashion because it is cheaper that way, and no responsibility at all toward waste streams. These are the people driving the excess. We have billions of cell phones not because people want cell phones but because some few other people decided to sell cell phones and then molded the system so that we can’t get by within this system without a cell phone. What is two-factor authentication but a tool for selling cell phones? (And then charging us for the “service” of keeping other predatory profiteers out of our private lives.)
It is not consumerism. It is profit, taking more than you put into the world for your own private gain. It is not consumers, which is all of us, but the people who make decisions for business corporations that sell stuff. It is not private lifestyle choices. It is people who are taking everything they can, consciously creating a system that enables them to take from other lives. It is not even stuff, but the people who are manufacturing need for stuff. It is not the people who are retreating into simplicity and private life, it is the people who are forcing us to do their labor and then give them what money we earn in that labor back to them.
This is complexity. This is harm. This is not consumerism. Consumerism is not a thing. Consumerism is the way profiteers direct blame elsewhere. It’s not us. We just make the stuff. It’s these stupid people who keep buying it. Disingenuously eliding the fact that they have made all the rules and structures in their system to favor themselves and to push over-production so that they can take more and more and more profit from the world — without ever doing the work, of course.
And that is what is most missed in these tales of voluntary simplicity. Sitting in the zendo is not as simple as it appears because of what we habitually do not see — all the work, and stuff, that must feed into a body that is doing no work himself. Just creating a space that is not shelter, not producing food, not for any care work, is sort of a waste — though it could also be art. But a contemplative life is harmful if that life is not managing its own consuming and waste.
Similarly, a bulto made from reclaimed fence posts in New Mexico is not harmful, per se, but when it is shipped to Connecticut, the complexity has gone up tenfold and, with complexity, the waste and harm (though also the profit-taking opportunities). A spiritual retreat is a very good thing if the practice is fully embedded in place. As soon as a plane ticket is required, what benefit is conferred to the individual is far outweighed by all the complex and wasteful infrastructure necessary to speedy travel to distant lands. Which… are not where the body lives and therefore not in much of a relevant relationship with that body. So is there anything much to be gained at all? Better to go sit in your own backyard, not buying, not doing, not causing others to do, and learn all you can about the beings that share your life, human and otherwise. And then go consume wisely. Which is to say simply.
Wisdom is also, crucially, local. “Wisdom sits in places,” you know. That is what simplicity is. It is not stuff-free. It is not a style. It is not necessarily free from elaboration and fancy. It is most definitely not free from the necessary work of consuming. But it is always embedded in place. Fully.
Or as fully as is possible in this system of rapacious profit-taking…
Now, one last thing… the icing on the cake (which is a thing that is not, I know, simple). That consumerism critic, or perhaps Kaza’s interpretation of his words, framed this whole discussion in terms of identity. “Shifting a person’s identity away from work.” I brushed past this above for good reason. This is not something that can be addressed with parenthetical snark. It is perhaps right down there in the snarled root ball of all our culture’s problems.
Identity is a word often bandied about in this context. We give consumers labels, often derogatory (also often with racist and misogynist implications, but let’s ignore that for a moment). Labels are names, identities. This is so very important, because it reveals one very important flaw in our thinking — that identity is self-created. We are talking about this whole mess is if it is an identity crisis, and it’s just not. Because while there are shopaholics, among many other forms of addiction searching for connection with the wider world, trying to mend the gaping wounds gouged into them by our culture with exactly the wrong medicine, they do not see themselves, they do not identify, as addicts. (Not until they try to stop anyway.) They are not Consumers. They are doing over-consumption to fill the void in their lives. They are not creating an identity. They are trying to escape their lives, running from how they are, not who.
This phenomenon of shopping-toward-identity is not very common in the world. For one thing, few people have the wherewithal to support shopping therapy. Nor is it who we think they are. There are undoubtedly hoarders and other forms of resource guarding and greed, but it’s not the woman who has a closet full of bulk toilet paper bought at Costco. It’s not the old guy who has all the newspapers ever delivered to his home stacked in the attic. It’s not even the bored teen who has more clothes than she could wear in a year. It’s the man who has Italian shoes, tailored suits, several sports cars in his five-car garage, at least three homes, and a time-share in Bali. Also probably at least one mistress and a few illegitimate children whom he does not support. That is the person who is the sum of his transactional relationships. And yet, he probably doesn’t identify as such.
The other side of that “shifting a person’s identity away from work” — and toward consuming — is also complicated and not strictly true. There may be workaholics who also try futilely to fill the void with labor, usually of the least productive and most remunerative varieties of work. And in our culture where that remuneration is a sign of status and therefore goodness, people do sometimes develop an identity around work. But it is around work, not as much tied to the work done as it is to the conferred status. You don’t often hear people say “I’m an accountant” as if that is their identity. They are announcing what they do, mostly because they are forced to do something to earn wages. It is not what they are, and they will often rush in to tell you all the other things that they do, and to a lesser extant, what they are. Lesser, because we are very unclear about that in our culture and have been for longer than we’ve been a culture.
What people are talking about when they use that word is not identity — What label fits me? — but justification, explication, explanation, ontology of me-ness. It’s not so much Who am I? as Why am I?, How am I? What am I? For what purpose am I? and the endlessly bedeviling corollary of that: Is there a purpose to I-ness? (Or any purpose at all…)
Can I point out that these are not questions that are asked by people who live simply…
If you live embedded in a small community, doing life as it comes, you don’t have an identity crisis. You don’t have much of an individual identity at all. You are a being within a larger being and you are just being. Who am I? I am here. This body in this place among these other bodies. Who-am-I is this body and all the daily being that goes into living it. Identity is not a question to answer; it is not a label to manufacture and fill. It is just a name for a specific part of the community. More a thing to clear up communication than a definition.
I know that sounds horrifying to every person ever rejected by their peers. But let me assure you, in a small community, the default is to acceptance. Because the default is to love. The default is that care work. Your community has invested quite a lot in you before you even develop a sense of self. And in such a community — both of humans and otherwise — your sense of self is developed in relationship with them. Even if you are a weirdo, you are loved, and you are part of that loving relationship. That relationship is who and what and how you are. Moreover, in a loving community, there is not homogeneity as is portrayed in our culture (for reasons…). There are weirdos everywhere. Small groups are filled with people doing life in their own unique way — because they are loved and supported, allowed and encouraged to find that uniqueness. But even this is NOT identity. This is life. You don’t say, Carl the Weirdo (unless he really is… in which case he’s probably not deeply embedded in your community). You say, Carl. And you might smile a bit at his quirks, but you don’t identify him as those quirks.
The point is Carl is not confused about who he is. He is Carl. He doesn’t need to add anything to that in the way of labels nor signaling. Though if pressed he might tell you he is the Carl who loves Jessica or the Carl who is daddy to George. Some days, he might say he is the Carl who talks with the wind or the Carl who makes the beer. But that is just a qualification so you can understand which Carl he is, not what Carl-ness is. Carl-ness is just Carl. There is no question or crisis.
Carl also did not create himself. Carl developed in relationship to Jessica and George and wind and beer. Carl is maybe not so much Carl if he is taken away from those relationships. And that too we find horrifying. But consider what we, in self-centered, identity-focused cultures, have lost when we lost those relational bonds. We don’t know why we exist. We are not even completely convinced that we do exist. We don’t know what existence is. We are plagued by doubt and sadness and, yes, loss of the very bonds we broke. And we have to run around talking about labels when what we really want to know is: do I matter?
Carl knows he matters. Every body in relationship knows they matter. It is only people who think we are individual identities who don’t understand what mattering is.
HINT: matter is a body…
But getting back to the matter of simplicity and complexity… the simpler, the more localized and embedded your life, the deeper and more extensive your relationships are. The deeper your relationship, the less individual you feel. The less individual, the less you need to manufacture an identity through things like buying stuff or displaying status. In fact, you very likely don’t believe much in status. Because why would you? Every body you know is part of you. No body is superior or inferior. You are a plurality, a being state stretching out in all directions along with everyone else. In a simple world, you are a jewel in an intricate and elegant web of interconnection and interbeing. This is really not so simple, is it!
But it is also not complex.
And it is completely the opposite of harm…
