To pick up on the theme of “simple living”. In an earlier post I discussed Simple Living- Economy, today I want to consider the philosophy of a simple lifestyle.
In my attempt to live simply, we might even say “sensibly”, I have learned that there are different ideals afloat as to what ‘simple living’ means. The spectrum runs anywhere from a primitive existence to a full-blown modern home.
I suspect that the true definition must fall into a broad range of living conditions. It is also true that what one person considers ’simple living’ would be very different from what others might consider as a simple life. There are no recognized “authorities” to define the term in such a way that becomes a ’standard’ for simple living. Each person is free to develop their own ideal of a simple life. But underlying all the different ideals is a common philosophy, that our lives need not be as complicated as they sometimes are.
If we are willing to admit a truth to ourselves, it is, that many of the complications we experience have been brought on ourselves by choices that we make or habits that we form. As a society, it would appear that we are prone to let others set the bar as to where and how we should live. This outside influence invariably has some kind of affect on our attitudes. The “American Dream”, which for too many, has now turned into a “nightmare”, may not be the best way for us to live. At one time that dream was defined by the ownership of a decent house and good car. Then came “Hollywood” and TV that showed us the lives of the ‘rich and famous’ to stir up envy in many people. Next came “easy credit”, whereby we all could access things that were impossible in a “pay as you go” economy. Now we have woke up from a dream to find ourselves in a nightmare of debt and frustration, not just in a few individuals, but nearly a whole nation is one paycheck from ‘bankrupt’.
There have been plenty of people who have resisted the “Jones movement” and a few examples have always been around to buck the tide, but we mostly never hear about them. All media sources must, by the very nature of things, promote consumerism. We don’t hear radio or TV commercials telling us we “don’t need all the things we see”. Rather the advertising business must make us think we “need” whatever item they are selling, or they won’t get paid for their advertising.
I should state once again, I am not anti-capitalism or anti-consumer. I will leave that up to some who call themselves ’environmentalists’. These people, who are down on the American capitalist system, show themselves to be hypocrites, for the most part. I do consider myself a conservationist in that I think we should show common sense when using our natural or any other resource. But some seem to think they have a monopoly on conservation by claiming we must “preserve” nature by restricting its use to a “chosen few”, which don’t include us common folk. So they set aside millions of acres for national preserves and then make access to that land so expensive that only the elite can enjoy it. That is not what conservation was in the eyes of the first Americans who promoted conserving natural resources, but I digress.
Simplicity is a state of mind
For those of us who do not want to spend the better part of our life trying to earn a lot of money to leave to the “tax man”, there is a better way of living. It must begin with our thinking process. How we look at life and the world around us. This leads to a philosophy of simple living whereby we find that the best things in life really are free. Each of our lives consist of “time” and, as I have observed before, there is 24 hours in a day, whether you are a rich person or a poor man. How we spend that time is what makes up the content of our lives.
From the time I was a youth it seemed to me a sad thing that so many people lived lives that they “hated”, simply because they did not believe there was a way to escape the ‘leg-hold trap’ that our society has laid for us. Admittedly, it is not a easy road to travel, but you won’t find much traffic on the highway of “volunteer poverty”. By that I mean, some of us are willing to live our lives at a lower than average “standard of living” if by doing so, we can escape the 40 hour a week salary trap. Of course, 40 hour weeks are rare for “salaried” workers these days. But the point is some of us want to live as self-employed persons, even if that employment does not pay as well as having what I refer to as a “real job”. Personally, I have not had such a job since the spring of 1988, that is going on 24 years. During this time I have had a lot of different kinds of income, but all of it as a self-employed person.
Another part of our societal thinking is that for one to be “self-employed” they must start a business that will eventually have employees. It is only reasonable to assume this is necessary if one wants to become ’wealthy’ or have what is called a “good business”. However, it was not my intention to trade an ‘employer’ for ‘employees’. For a person who wants some “freedom”, employees are not your best ‘investment’. Invariability the owner of such a “business” is more entrapped in his “job” than he was as an employee. It is a rare business man who can leave his place of business in the hands of someone else and continue to be successful. I see nothing “simple” about the lives of most small business people. I know too many of them to be deceived into thinking that this was my answer to a “simple life”.
If I had to define “one element” of our lifestyle that has made this life possible it would have to be “money management”. Most of the time, there was not that much money to manage! However, the key to maintaining our independent condition was in the fact that, very early in the experiment of living without a regular paycheck, we realized we had to save all the money we could for the “lean times” in my self-employment. By avoiding debt as much as possible and not spending all our money as it came in, we actually learned that we did not need to have as much money as we thought. The formula gets simple very quickly, when you don’t know when your next paycheck might come, you form a habit of holding onto some reserves instead of spending everything you earn. It is not a hard habit to form when you don’t know ‘when’ you will have free-lance work, which is what my self-employment consisted of. But on the other hand, people who feel “trapped” in a job that pays a regular wage, feel free to buy more on credit because they are confident they can make their payments. It becomes a vicious cycle of always reaching to have more and better things. It is understandable that hard working people feel they ’deserve’ to have the things they work so hard for, and they do, but until the cycle of debt and payments gets broken, there can be no real progress toward simplifying our lives. That is, if a simple life involves giving up a regular paycheck in order to spend our time at other pursuits than a “job”.
This modern “leg-hold trap” is hard to extract oneself from. It does become easier if you don’t have a very good estimate of what you will earn next month. A “budget” under those circumstances gets to be very basic. As in keeping track to the bills that you have to pay, like house and car payments, phone and things that are fairly predictable. I found out early on that it was vital to keep enough money in reserve to pay these necessary bills, whether I had income or not. In that situation it also became easier to save money. The motivation gets pretty high when you decide you would rather be independent than have the “latest” model of automobile, or any of the other items that we are told by society that we need.
Many types of self-employment jobs are affected by the seasons of the year, especially if it involves outdoor work. My particular work was as a Hardwood Lumber Inspector. My work activity was to inspect lumber for any number of different small sawmill operations. (I use the past tense, even though I still inspect lumber, but much less than in the past.) In MN most of the logging is done in the winter when the ground is frozen and timber is more accessible. Of course there is some logging that takes place year around, but generally speaking winter will see a much greater harvest of logs than any other time of the year. It was a tradition in times past for farmers to go logging in the winter, after their summer crop work was done. This is how the great “logging camps” operated in the hay-day of American expansion, roughly up until the 1st Great Depression. (We have not admitted the fact of the 2nd one yet, the government is better at ‘cooking the books‘ now.) They cut the logs in the winter and piled them up on the frozen ice. When spring breakup came, the logs would be floated downstream to the mills, where they would then be sawed into lumber.
Those logging camps are history, but a certain part of the tradition is still in practice, purely from the fact that timber is easier to get over frozen ground than any other time. Every year, at least for the last 25, come spring there is a rush of logs from the winter landings to the sawmills. Consequently there is a rush for the mills to get the logs sawed into lumber, inspected and sold before warm weather damages the fresh lumber. The inspection part is where my work comes in. Thus, from around January up until about April my work would be very steady, often in the early years when I was after all the work I could possibly make time for, I would find myself working 6 and, at times, 7 days a week. By late May things would start to slow down and often in June I was out of work entirely.
It only took a couple yearly cycles to see how this worked out in my particular line of work. Once I understood how things worked, it was rather a pleasure to see the first of June come. Because I learned to save some money from lots of work in the winter, I was able to enjoy the slow season, which just so happened to be the best time of year for fishing, which was one of my passions in years past.
Since I don’t intent to write a ‘biography’ here, I must find some way to close this post! So here is my take: Simple living is really a state of mind that everyone must define in their own terms. But if you find that you are constantly stressed, over worked or just plain discontented, maybe you should consider ways in which you can “simplify, simplify, simplify”!
In future posts I will discuss what I consider as necessary or helpful “Skills” to simple living.
wherein we attempt to live in such a way and within the means we can reasonably and honorable obtain, without destroying the rights of others to pursue their own dreams of what life should be. There are many people who are very good at creating wealth and who enjoy spending that wealth on a lifestyle that is far different than what most of us aspire to. I don’t fault them in the least, they are the people who have raised our standard of living by inventing all kinds of goods and services that makes living in the USA the envy of the world. What I resent, is the ideal that money is the end-all to a happy life. If that were the case, most of us would be out of luck, for it is not possible that everyone can be “equal” in a free society, as far as ‘wealth‘ is concerned. We should be equal in the ‘right’ to work toward whatever life we want, but the reality has always been that it is only a few, among the masses, that attain the upper levels of the wealth train. Our nation has, in its history of capitalistic freedom, produced more wealthy people than any nation in history, I would believe. In most cases, people become wealthy by a combination of hard work, exceptional skills, ambition and a desire to improve the state of their financial worth. I speak in terms of common people who create wealth by their own business or vision. I am not speaking of those who were born into wealth, nor of those who become wealthy by immoral activities. I say “immoral activities” rather than “legal activities”, because there are many “legal” methods of becoming wealthy that are by no means “moral”.
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