It’s great to hear of someone living out the ideas I’ve been considering and debating with myself (and others) for years, and trying to implement in some form or other.

I think that there are two dangerous lies that are currently being perpetuated that stand in stark contrast with your approach to the world. The first is the necessity of continuing exponential economic growth, globally – the world gets richer, forever. This is impossible in a finite earth. The second, which is closely coupled to the first, is continuing economic growth, locally, or on a personal level: to spend one’s life accumulating personal material wealth, and to spend lots of time doing so. The result of these two situations is that we apparently need to keep everyone employed full time to fund their mortgage and fancy cars and entertainment, the net result not being a happy society but an overworked, disconnected, stressed society that doesn’t understand why we’re not happy with all these luxuries. And in order to keep everyone employed full time and accumulate said wealth, we need to make and sell lots of junk, thereby using more than our share of the resources that the world can provide.

In contrast to this picture of rampant consumptive self-destruction, the simple life you have explained is a great picture of “less is more”: less work, less stuff to clutter up your life, less debt, less stress equals more happiness, more satisfaction, more chances to contribute to the world rather than taking from it, and more opportunity for others to live a life without daily struggle and grief.

The one question I have is this, the obligatory question of economists (though I am not one myself): if everyone in the Global North lived a life as you have described, what would happen to the local and global economy with the accompanying drop in trade? My simple, thinking-out-loud-late-at-night answer to that question is that it would collapse as it depends on growth for investment. But if our economy (”our” being both global and local, which for me is Australian) were more focused on balance and equality and sharing of wealth rather than growth, it might be possible. This would necessitate paying higher prices for material goods, which means fairer wages for all, simpler lives, and less work hours (as automated labour along with reduced consumption reduces the need for jobs). It would also require a greater shift toward non-consumptive, sustainable service-based economic activity, i.e. less people earning a living by selling useless stuff.

All that aside, it is a joy to live a life that is moving toward simplicity rather than complexity, giving away what stuff you have, catching the train, seeking a balance of life that is outward-looking and generous, and I am encouraged by your zeal and humility in aiming to be a positive, Godly, lightly-treading force in the world.

Keep up the faith.

Thanks,

Christopher
South Australia

For other readers I would point out that my housemate, Cassie, is a model of simple living, herself. Through her solidarity with the poor she disciplines herself to use clothes that didn’t require a purchase of any sort. Rather, she acquires them through trades with friends or through hand-me-downs. Only rarely does she give into even shopping at a thrift store. She also goes out of her way to avoid purchasing pre-packaged food because she is environmentally conscious and doesn’t want to add those packages to landfills. Moreover, her left over food scraps are then dutifuflly fed to her worm bin who turn the refuse into fertilizer that Cassie takes to her community vegetable garden plot. I am deeply impressed by her.

So, Cassie, in response to your caring comment, I recognize the saving vs. savoring dialectic as an important ongoing discernment for me and for us all. I greatly appreciate your highlighting this issue for my attention. I would hate to get to the end of my life and feel that I have diminished life unnecessarily through an over emphasis on one side of the equation or the other.

Regarding the other part of your comments, I can understand how abstract it might seem that there is a relationship between my spending and people that live “oceans away”. Here is my rationale for saying that it does matter: we live in a global market with finite resources. Every time I consume a resource it reduces the availability of that resource on the global market, and thus, due to forces of supply and demand, it makes the resource more expensive and thus less accessible to the poor. The most obvious examples of this are commodities that are traded globally – petroleum, food, natural resources. The huge spikes in oil and food prices over the past year were directly a result of reduced supply and increased demand. Even those commodities that are produced locally are still part of the global supply pool. My consumption of US-grown wheat, California-produced oil or bauxite, or San Diego-produced vegetables means that those items are not then available for someone else, either here or abroad and I have joined the push of elevating their prices beyond the reach of the poor, both here and abroad. I believe the same argument can be even made about labor for services I consume (though that may seem a bit of a “stretch” to you or others).

Secondly, any labor (“life energy”) or money (“stored life energy”) that I don’t expend on meeting my own wants is available for me to use in addressing the needs of the world. By keeping my own expenditures low I increase my ability to help heal pains in our world through charitable giving and volunteered work. As I state in my essay I want to live into the role of being a steward of resources to the world. I want my life, as much as possible, to be an investment OUTward into the world. This, in turn, helps me feel more in flow with God’s will for me and with the inherent creative energy of the world. My hope is to “save my real life by losing it” for the world. However, as you well know, I have a heck of a long way still to go on that spiritual journey. In spite of my decades-old simple living and philanthropic disciplines I can still be amazingly small and self-centered at times.

Finally, I want to respond to your mention of the significance of systemic problems. I agree with your thesis that we all need to work for systemic change. At the same time, I feel that we in our own individual habits help engender and create the world economic systems. I worry when I see people chastise the “system” while their own over-consumption reinforces that which they denounce. I think that criticizing the system becomes a way for people to avoid the hard work of changing their own habits. You, Cassie, are a master at leading a disciplined life to try and build a better world. You clearly are not waiting on the system to change and you clearly seem to think your own efforts have value, even if the system remains solidly in place.

That’s all for now.

Sometimes I do wish he would invest a little more in the “savoring” vs. “saving” part of the equation, like in feeling freer to spend money on traveling to see his friends.

Also, I have a hard time understanding the direct connection between money I don’t spend and the poor in the developing world. I have a hunch that the source of the problem lies less w/ our individual habits of consumption than it does w/ more macro-level economic and political structures that govern resource distribution. IF my hunch is correct, it makes me feel a little better about my “savoring” efforts! Policy advocacy is such a crucial activity to support, in addition to all our individual efforts at reducing our excessive consumption.

But even if a lifestyle of extreme frugality isn’t itself directly helping the poor oceans away (’though maybe it is!), it is at the very least an extremely important symbol for middle class America to be startled by. A commitment like Rick’s serves to stir the hearts of the rest of us, to stop us in our tracks and help us see different ways of living–and not just the specific path of voluntary poverty, but also the challenge to live deeply, intentionally, w/ the good of all the Earth in mind in everything we do.

And you are right — we DO need to weigh how much money we are spending vs what types of human activity we are supporting in our market place. Fair-traded products vs Wal-mart shopping is another good example. Your question points to a whole different discernment around personal economics for building a better world that is of central importance – one which I don’t address in my article.

Thanks for pointing that out.

-rick

Well done!!

I have one question that continues to be a sticking point for me in all of these conversations, and I don’t know if others share it, but I might as well bring it up with you so you might consider addressing it. We debated this a lot at Sojourners, and some in our economics discussions from this past summer at the Hawthorn House.

Is money spent actually equal to resource consumption? In other words, is a certain amount of MONEY the most accurate way to measure one’s “share” of the world ’s resources? While I can see that this is broadly true, I think it’s not quite accurate, because our economic system doesn’t measure a number of ecological “costs” when assessing price. For example, I could buy organically grown apples for twice the price of conventionally grown apples, which by your measurement would mean I’d consumed “more” of the world’s resources — but I would argue that buy paying more in our man-made currency, I’ve actually depleted the world’s “bank” less. Does that make sense? Similarly, there are many items one can “purchase” for a great deal of money (concert tickets, for example) that don’t necessarily have a great ecological cost, which is ultimately the “bank” we’re all sharing (though of course one has to consider that the money could have been used to provide food for a starving child, which is a related but distinct point). The lines are fuzzy, I know, but I’m wondering what you think about some of these issues around currency (US dollars) being the measurement for “consumption.”

That’s all for now — thanks for sharing this post with us!

Laurel

Much Love

Adding in this $2,000 for giving and business expenses to the $10,350 in the budget and subtracting out the $600 line item in the budget for “Gifts consumed” (things I didn’t spend money on but consumed nonetheless) brings my total financial outlay per year to $11,750. That leaves me with a surplus of about $2,250 per year. I invest that surplus capital into a loan fund called OikoCredit (www.oikocredit.org) (www.office.us@oikocredit.org). OikoCredit, in turn, provides very poor micro-entrepreneurs in the Global South (“Third World”) with small loans to help them develop their humble businesses. As an “investor” I earn a nominal interest of 2% per year. These funds that I’ve placed in OikoCredit are always available to me in case of some emergency need that might arise. I drew out some funds once over the past 22 years that I have been an investor at OikoCredit and received the check immediately from them, without any hassle. Meanwhile, the funds at OikoCredit are doing exactly what I would do with them if I were to give it all away, which is to help the marginalized of the world by trying to correct in my small way the global economic system that distributes so much of the world’s resources to us in the Global North while much of the rest of the world gets so little.

Thank you for the affirmation in your post, Brooke, and the question.

-rick