Asceticism, or something like it
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SDF user jynx replied[1] to my "delusional ambo fantasies" post (and so did
slugmax[2], thanks to you both!) stating that his "fantasies typically revolve
around living in a cabin like it was 1820". Actually, this is far closer to my
most recent fantasies, too, rather than being an ambulance officer or anything
else.
For I suppose something like a year now I have been increasingly interested in
a only vaguely formed cloud of ideas surrounding asceticism, simple living,
voluntary poverty, self-sufficiency, technoskepticism, so-called "appropriate
technology" and a lot more.
This has been motivated by a lot of things, and while I've used this phlog
previously to discuss things that have lead me to this line of thinking, I
haven't explicitly talked much about it in and of itself, although I always
intended to. As should be clear, I don't like what people are tending to call
"surveillance capitalism", I don't like nebulous cloud services which can be
changed or turned off at a whim leaving the user with nothing, I do not like
planned obsolence, I do not like e-waste or non-sustainability in general. When
you really don't like something, I you broadly have two options. One is to
actively try to make the thing better (e.g. build your own alternative
technology which doesn't have the misfeatures of the mainstream), and the other
is instead to refrain from using the thing you don't like. Well, you have a
third option, which is to complain loudly about how you don't like something and
then continue to use it anyway, but I'm talking about options which are
ultimately satisfactory to the soul.
Realistically, a person can only hope to make much progress with the first
approach in a limited number of spheres, which means that the malcontent person
who intends to take their convinctions seriously ends up doing an awful lot of
doing without. Perhaps to the extent of living like its the 1820s, or perhaps
not (jynx, I'm not erudite enough to know what happened in the 1830s to make
that your cut-off line, feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to discsus
it), perhaps not quite that far back, eschewing proprietary drivers on a modern
computer perhaps leaving you stuck in the very worst case with a distinctly 90s
experience.
It's often not as bad as one might think.
Many of you are probably familiar with the idea of the "hedonic treadmill". You
get some shiny new *thing* in your life, perhaps at great expense either to your
wallet, or your time, or your liberty, and it makes you very happy because of
how great it is and how much it has improved your life. And then after you've
owned it for a week it simply makes you happy. And then after a month or two
you have assimilated it into the background model of your life and you barely
even notice it, and if you want to feel very happy again you have to buy another
shiny new thing. The treadmill never ends and you end up with a house full of
expensive stuff but you don't ultimately feel any better about your life.
I have long harboured the suspicion that this actually works just as well in
reverse, although people don't seem to talk about it much. *Stopping* the
hedonic treadmill is usually most people's goal, but consciously running it
backward seems something not many are interested in. But surely once you get
rid of some material luxury in your life, you agonise over how much harder or
more boring or whatever things are for a month, then you adapt to it and get on
with your life and you're eventually not noticably less happy than you were
before hand. You occasionally hear this about people, e.g. giving up Facebook,
or replacing their smartphone with a dumbphone, or stopping watching television.
What happens if you rinse and repeat the process? But that kind of thing really
could just be the tip of an iceberg. How far back can you go while remaining
satisfied?
Maybe the answer would, in fact, turn out that one is happy living in a barrel.
Even if that were the case, one would still have to justify why one would want
to roll one's life back to that stage. The entire point of the hedonic
treadmill, whether it runs forward or in reverse, is that you can be happy no
matter where you end up on this spectrum. So why choose a barrel over an 1820s
cabin or the life of the 1990s? I guess it comes down what you care about most
in life, what your principles are. If the greatest evil in today's world to you
is surveillance capitalism, you would probably be pretty happy with life from
the mid 90s. Which seems *appalingly* primitive and limited compared to today,
but the fact is that plenty of people, myself included, lived exactly that life
and surived it just fine. If you are also concerned about environmental issues,
or the ills of consumerism, you will probably have to roll the clock back quite
a bit further to be happy.
I dislike all the things I listed above, and I'm not quite sure how much of
modern life I'd have to deprive myself of to be 100% satisfied in these regards.
But I have another motivation for this thought experiment and for cabin
fantasies too, and this is a quote from Henry David Thoreau (who I started
reading somewhere in the middle of the time I've been thinking along these
lines) which I can't actually find right now but which goes something to the
effect of "no man makes a greater mistake than he who squanders the best part of
his life in order to secure it". And I think this is very true. The default
mode of existence today, and the one I exist in, is to spend most of one's
waking hours working at a job that, even if one doesn't outright hate, one
generally doesn't actually *want* to spend most of their waking hours doing,
simply because the alternative is starving. But there are surely different ways
of living which avoid this trade off. They don't even necessarily involve
living a self-sufficient life in a cabin in the woods. If a modern professional
worker making a modern professional's wage voluntarily lived a life which would
seem ludicrously ascetic by modern standards but actually would have been
perceived as entirely acceptable by 1920's working class standards, which we
know for a fact will not kill a person, they could probably save an obscene
amount of money and retire decades earlier than typical, meaning that they
perhaps get to spend more of their waking hours doing what they want to do than
doing something else simply in order to ensure a steady supply of waking hours.
I think dramatically shifting work-life balance in the direction of life is well
worth the contemplation and actual empirical investigation of how little
material comfort you can be happy with.
This line of thinking gets most exciting when you realise that treating the
problem as one of picking some arbitrary point in history, be it 1990 or 1820
and living precisely like people did at that time is a bogus constraint. If
there are some aspects of life in 2017 that do not offend your moral
sensibilities, you are, of course, permitted to take them with you! Even
discarding material/technological advances, simply living in the 1820s with
access to the full suite of modern human knowledge would be a very different
experience to living it the first time around. It's a lot of fun, for me
anyway, to imagine strange hybrid timelines. Some people already live in
fairly mundane hybrid timelines - I have no doubt there are people alive today
who don't own a television, a microwave, or a car, which is in those respects a
kind of pre-1950ish (I guess?) lifestyle, but who certainly do have a computer
and a high speed wireless internet connection, which is a very post-2000
lifestyle. If one of you is reading this, please drop me a line! I'm not
really aware of anybody living a life that is something like 20% 2017 and 80%
1820s, but there is no reason one could not. I suppose off-grid types and some
more extreme prepper types are probably living the most fleshed-out hybrid
timeline lives today.
I don't really know what my ultimate fantasy life is like, but I suspect it
looks ascetic from the standards of 2017. But I hope to find out more about
what it looks like, through both contemplation and experience, in the near
future, and to share this journey here. Thoughts and questions from the
like-minded (or even the non-like-minded!) are welcome.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/jynx//cgi-bin/slerm.cgi%3f20171014.post
[2]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/phlog/more-on-being-a-paramedic
