Life Lessons In Limiting Liabilities
Design Simplification, Repairing Things, and Consumerism
I recall having silly conversations with my classmates in elementary school regarding the future and our terrible philosophizing over it.
“I just want to be happy,” we would often say.
Of course, it’s perhaps a simple conclusion, expected of a child, but it contains the seedling of desire that will one day grow into the future of our society.
Now, as an adult, I seek those same values underlying this goal. I want joy and satisfaction. I search for security and health.
Now, my classmates and I are adults. We’re now able to create the world, rather than merely respond to it. Sadly, somewhere along the line our philosophizing slowly morphed from its elementary innocence into an adult perversion.
“How do I make more money?”
An Incorrect Default
Why is “how do I make more money?” an ineffective question?
It is a bad question because making money does not guarantee skill, satisfaction, meaning, intimacy or freedom, those things often mistakenly assumed that money implicitly implies or promises. Having money does not even guarantee a financial education. Chances are, you’d probably lose the money if you got it today.
There are many anecdotes of CEOs, entrepreneurs, retired athletes, or other high-earners experiencing intensely negative mental health after retiring, whereas they’ve realized the true object of their passion was creation or performance in their field.
From The L.A. Times: “The average U.S. household has 300,000 things, from paper clips to ironing boards. U.S. children make up 3.7% of children on the planet but have 47% of all toys and children’s books.”
From Business Insider: “47% of American Households Save Nothing”
Advertisers, marketers, and most business owners have an incentive to keep you in a state of perpetual, manufactured desire. They want you to be asking yourself how you can gain more money. As you gain in income, you also gain in your size as a target for advertisement and manipulation. Why, instead of relying on willpower to counteract lifestyle inflation, don’t we design our lives to forgo that struggle entirely?
Finally, asking how to make more money is a bad idea because it’s unreliable. Are we so bold as to assume that we know what skills are going to be useful or profitable in even 10 years? We’re simultaneously watching the birth of new media and the toppling of industry giants.
It's at best risky to predict what will make a lot of money. At worst it is a waste of your life, your time, the most valuable resource you have.
On the other hand, it’s 100% clear today what your liabilities are. What is taking your time? What are you spending money on that you don’t need to be?
A Better Question
I believe a better question to ask oneself is: “how do I sustainably minimize my reliance on income?”
The first thing to understand is that money is only one slim measurement of well-being.
If you are able to grow food to feed yourself and your family, you can eat less industrial food, eat fresher, tastier ingredients, be healthier, and have greater security in case of infrastructural collapse. Although, you won’t earn any money from it.
If you begin to own, build, fix, repair or at least maintain your own living space, transportation, or clothing, you’ve begun to limit your reliance on a predatory economic system, and gain in personal skills and craftiness. Although, you won’t earn any money from it.
If you have a method to create or manage energy, you aren’t connected to often-near monopolized energy companies. You can power yourself and leverage modern technologies while remaining protected from possible collapse. You won’t earn any money from it.
If you are able to practice temperance (which anyone can), you will be stronger for lack of want, more resourceful, and more immune to political propagandists when they inevitably strike. Although you won’t earn any money from it.
If you are able to self-educate yourself through the use of public libraries, mentors, or the internet, you’re able to receive information directly pertinent to improving your specific life, avoid censorship, boredom, student loans, and bad teachers in institutions. You won’t gain any money though.
If you are able to cultivate, grow, and contribute to a local community, you can trade or combine your skills, knowledge, and goods with your neighbors, benefiting each and creating healthier, happier people. Although… you won’t earn any money from it.
If you geographically locate yourself in a place where things are cheaper, the environment is less polluted, and you have time in your schedule to gain and pursue skills, you will become a more valuable person, and find more time to achieve your goals.
What I’m writing was common sense even 100 years ago. Contribute to a community, help others, gain skills, repair clothes, fix things yourself, read a book, grow a tomato, be in silence every once in a while.
It is not fixed nor promised that the present forces seeking to replace culture with consumerism will last forever.
Food, for example
In 1795, Napoleon offered a bounty for whoever could create a method to preserve food for his army.
In 1809, a French baker won Napoleon’s prize, using glass jars. A year later, in 1810, Peter Durand, a British merchant, received the first patent for preserving food using tin cans.
Further innovations during the industrial revolution (like industrial agriculture, food dispersal, pesticides, and conservation methods), enabled urban living.
Urban living promotes isolated, specialized labor, and life-preserving skills for production and maintenance are entirely off-loaded onto the economy. You lose your ability to be a generalist and to take care of yourself. You cannot farm in dense living situations.
There’s a myriad of issues created by this.
Most of the problems are related to the near-monopolization of the food industry. City dwellers in late-capitalism are at the mercy of a few companies to provide their goods. You have no say in the production of the goods.
They may (and do) freely use slaves, harmful preservatives, and pesticides. They routinely choose their profit over your well-being. They unapologetically destroy the Earth. They consistently lie about the ingredients in their products. In other words, they know they are killing you, and do not care.
In a city, fresh foods are either more expensive or completely inaccessible. With the rise of pre-packaged food, fast food, shrinking kitchens, and disruption of the family unit, the skill of cooking, especially cooking with local ingredients, is being lost. People can’t cook, and aren’t resourceful when they can. Those who do cook must use either worse quality or more expensive ingredients. Either the food tastes worse, or it’s ridiculously expensive.
But remember, if you learn to farm and cook, you’re not making any money from it. Let’s put that another way. If you learn to farm and cook, they’re not making any money from it.
A fast food restaurant makes money from selling food, but they also support a transportation business, they contribute to gas sales, support auto-shops, cause diseases, aid the healthcare industry, place advertisements, and destroy local businesses.
If you farm for yourself and share it with those around you, those cascading effects on the economy are lost. The powers that be have an incentive to keep you subservient and reliant on them.
As money is reducible to a number, it is most easily tracked, thus disproportionately focused on as a metric of success. Money, barring total governmental control, is at best an incomplete picture of the “economic” or wealth-building activity of a person or group of people. An over-reliance on this form of wealth (money) causes a tunnel vision effect, causing stupid things to happen.
A system that disproportionately incentivizes for money is designed to reward repeat customers, thus, to create worse products, plan obsolescence, and cultivate unnatural desire.
A system that disproportionately incentivizes for money is designed to promise freedom only after you’ve been in a physical decline (accelerated by that system!) for 30-40 years.
A system that disproportionately incentivizes for money is designed to keep you from the fullest expression of your own potential.
EN FIN
From the thought of American philosopher Thoreau, to Japan’s tradition of Zen Buddhism, to French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, we find the same connecting thread. We see all around the globe the truism that simplicity is the highest form of sophistication. That simplification, not senseless ornamentation, leads to the greatest design.
Investments in tools, education, skills, plants, media, code, or living spaces are better options that can enable us to become self-responsible and to disconnect from abusive power dynamics.
I understand that it might seem like an insurmountable task. There’s literally thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who’s full time job is to keep you bewitched: fat, sick, apolitical, illiterate, helpless, overstimulated, distracted, tired, stupid, and lazy.
Things don’t have to be this way forever. Try doing something small: repairing a rip in your jeans, saying hello to your neighbors, donating something, learning how to use a tool, volunteering somewhere, or repurposing something rather than throwing it away.
These small actions are indeed small. Their purpose is not to change the world. Their purpose is to reignite those dwindling cinders in your mind, and to remind you that you have agency over yourself and your situation.
"But remember, if you learn to farm and cook, you’re not making any money from it. Let’s put that another way. If you learn to farm and cook, they’re not making any money from it." THAT ONE!