I just finished watching a documentary called Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, and it’s given me a lot to think about.
The basic underlying message of the doc is one of paring down one’s possessions to only the things that actually are useful to your life and to your happiness. It’s about stepping off of the consumer treadmill and taking a good look at your life and what you are doing, and why. It’s about recognizing that consumerism can, very briefly, treat the symptoms of spiritual malaise, but in the long run, it only makes things worse.
It’s like trying to live on junk food alone. Sure, you might be full…. but you’re still starving because what you really need is nutrition.
Note that official, scientific word for starvation is “malnutrition”, not “hungry”.
Much of what was said in the documentary intersects with a lot of the things that I have been saying over the years. It certainly connects with the things I have been saying about how everything that you own, owns a piece of you, and that getting rid of possessions can help you take back all those little pieces of you and make you a happier, more whole, more spiritually fulfilled person.
It also connects with what I have been saying about the absurdity of modern consumerist life. How I find it insane how we all end up with this massive amount of material possessions – so much that we have to rent storage for it – and for what purpose?
If something is in off-site storage and it would take finding the keys and driving across town to get something from it… is it even still yours really? What are the odds you are going to be motivated enough to go get something? What are the odds you will even remember what you have in there?
This is why I hate the thought of “shopping” as a leisure activity. To me, that stands for buying things not because you have any need of the thing but simply for the pleasure you get from buying it. You end up with a massive burden of functionally useless possessions that you have to transport whenever you move and that take up space in your brain without any return in pleasure or happiness.
In other words – they are a liability.
When you talk about things like this, people tend to have a very strong reaction because it feels to them like you are trying to take something away from them.
Which is absurd. I don’t have the power or the inclination to take anything from you. All I am doing is questioning the real worth of your possessions. If that makes you get rid of something, that is your decision, not mine.
But I think the reaction itself is very telling. Materialist values are so deeply ingrained in us that the idea of losing what we own puts us in a blind panic. On some level, even fairly spiritual people feel like their possessions are part of themselves and that to own less things would diminish them.
One of the problems in tackling this issue is that the materialist treadmill does work… for a while. Science backs me up on this. When you are young and poor and building a home and a life with your spouse, everything you buy genuinely adds to your life. Now I have an iron and can iron things. Look, we have a vacuum now and can clean up the place. We finally got some cookware so that we don’t have to rely on the microwave for everything.
The problem comes when we try to keep getting that pleasure when we have everything that we need.
Let me guess… when you read the words “when you have everything that you need”, your immediate thought was “Who are you to tell me what I do and do not need?”, or something along those lines.
But again… I am not actually involved in your life and I am not dictating a single thing to you. It’s up to you to decide what you need. I am just questioning certain things.
Anyhow, there comes a time when the pleasure of acquisition tapers off because we are no longer getting something we need and can use. But people stubbornly persist in trying to get that same high. So they end up buying things they don’t need and will never use and that can only act as a burden in their lives trying to recapture that feeling.
And that is inherently futile. All they are doing is getting tiny doses of the pleasure of acquisition which fade rapidly and, like all addictions, hollow the person out as the addiction takes over more and more of their lives.
But it’s not hard to see why the consumerist disease runs rampant amongst citizens of the modern era. The sad truth is that people get trapped in the consumer/success hellhole because it gives their life purpose.
As long as they are pursuing the next material thing, their lives have a direction and purpose. They know what they are doing and why their are doing it. Each consumer craving carries with it a sense of quest or mission. And as long as you are never satisfied (and how could you be, with such little spiritual nutrition in your life), you don’t have to think about where you are doing and why.
This works especially well for the quest for the next promotion. We tell ourselves that the next promotion will be the one that makes us happy. even though we know, deep inside, that the next one won’t make you any happier than the last one.
However, consciously realizing that would throw the person into the existential void of purposelessness, so those thoughts get buried so deep they become part of a pre-Cambrian layer of soil.
All this stems from the massive spiritual deficit of modern life. Modern society is very good at giving us amusements and distractions but very very bad at giving us a sense of meaning, purpose, or even a basic sense of self-worth. That’s why we cling to consumerist and/or success oriented ideals.
Even people of faith feel this lack. Often they try to fill the void with fervent adherence to their religion, to the point of almost fetishizing it. They surround themselves with reminders of their faith and do their best to make their lives entirely about their religion because that is their addiction and their substitute for true spiritual fulfillment.
They have decided that their religion equals good and that therefore making things more connected with their religion always makes them better.
I consider modern society to be in a state of spiritual crisis that we cannot see or even acknowledge because that would shatter our faith in our existing methods of coping and we need to convince ourselves that we are happy.
The closest we get to acknowledging the issue is to mumble vague things about feeling “empty inside”. Millions of us feel this way but nobody stops to ask themselves why.
The emptiness is simply taken as a given, and we talk about ways to fix it, but rarely do we ask ourselves why it is there in the first place.
It’s because we are all starving in a society that denies the existence of food.
Maybe the solution comes in ridding ourselves of most of our stuff.
Maybe all we really need is permission to say we have enough.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.