I want to thank all of you who follow my blog. As you can see my posting is falling off in frequency. I could make ’excuses’, but the fact of the matter is that my ambition and time slip away very quickly. Due to the minor detail that I have lost almost a month of productive work in the woodshop, I am now way behind where I should be on projects. That however, is not really an excuse since I barely have the energy to work 5 hours or so each day and this only by forcing one foot in front of the other. For the most part I save my energy for the one day a week that I grade lumber, when I have no choice but to exert all my strength to get that job done.
I have also been spending some time thinking about the direction I want to take this blog in. One thing seems clear to me; if I don’t write about subjects that really interest me, then having a blog called “Ernie’s World” is rather misleading. It might seem that a common working person’s world would be rather dull, but the truth is, for every individual, their world is very important to “them”. In school they taught us, that when writing an essay or such, one should never use “I”, supposedly this was taboo to proper writing. But to borrow a thought from Henry Thoreau, he said, he would not use the personal pronoun “I” so often, except it was the only way he knew to express that it was “him” making the statement or opinion. (Or something to that effect, that is not a direct quote.)
There are many subjects and opinions that I am bound to touch upon while expressing myself on matters that are important to me. I find a couple of themes that constantly come to the forefront of my mind when I sit down to make a post. One, since we are in an election year, I can’t help but express my very strong feelings about how this should go. It is unavoidable that those opinions are going to offend “someone”, which is not my wish at all, however, how can it be avoided? Everyone has heard the old saying, that the two subjects that should be avoided to “remain polite” is religion and politics. I heard a “Dr. of Theology” one time that made the statement that people avoid religious discussions because the don’t care about it. In my experience, that is not the case. The only reason people avoid politics and religion is because they don’t want the “heated emotions” that come from the discussion. “Heated emotions” do not come from a passive subject, but rather from a subject that we take very seriously and hold dearly. This is why religion and politics are prone to get the “blood pressure” raising.
The fact of the matter is that religion and politics are going to affect everything we do, believe and practice. So it does not seem unreasonable to me that I express my opinions on either subject. There can be no mistake that the state of the U.S. economy and our foreign affairs will have something to do with the welfare of each and everyone of us. We might not acknowledge that in an attempt to ignore all the controversy and conflict, but don’t make the mistake in thinking that it has nothing to do with “you”.
It might be true that there is not much, if anything, we can do to influence the outcome of elections, but at least we can inform ourselves as best we can concerning the politicians involved and make some kind of decision and vote for who we think will be the best person for the job. Setting aside the fact that most of us will have little or no ’vote’, in who our particular political party puts on the ballot in November. My thinking is that I can vote for the lesser of “evils” and hope for the best, realizing the ultimately God is in control of nations and knows what he is doing, whether I understand it or like what I am seeing taking place.
The other subject that is constantly in my mind, as it has become a ‘way of life’ for my family, is the ideal of “Simple Living” and how best to live in a manner that attempts to avoid a lot of the “stress” associated with modern life. These two subjects, politics and simple living will be the things I find most interesting to write on. I could easily get started on religion and faith, but if I go there I think it will be necessary to start another blog just for that subject. I have mostly avoided doing that for several reasons, mainly I don’t get the time to faithfully post on this blog, how could I keep two blogs going with very limited writing time? In addition to that, there is a lot of blogs dedicated to Christianity and faith already and I am not sure that I could add a great deal of useful thoughts to the subject.
As I am writing this, the morning is slipping away and the shop is almost warm enough to begin work. By the time I finish up my day there I will not have the energy left to think straight, so I write this before getting my day started and will post it this evening.
I see it is also snowing outside my window, but I don’t think it will amount to anything that will require my snowplow, that is my hope anyway.
Showing posts with label Simple Living. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simple Living. Show all posts
Friday, January 27, 2012
Monday, December 12, 2011
Simple Living-Recreation
Continuing with one of my favorite themes, ‘simple living’, consider recreation and its many facets. Americans, common people I am speaking of, work hard and generally put in a lot of hours on the job. But we have learned the benefit of recreation, our generation has made it a major industry. I will not claim to have saved much money on my chosen forms of recreation, but since money is so important a commodity in a simplified lifestyle, the question begs to be ask, “What kinds of recreation is found compatible to a simplified life?”
Since this is “Ernie’s World”, I am expressing my own ideal of recreation and the ways I go about enjoying those pursuits. Some forms of recreation is just plain unsuitable to someone who has chosen a life, whether by choice or circumstance, that does not produce a high income. Many things that Americans consider ‘normal recreation’ are just too expensive for my pocketbook, even if they appeal to my appetite. These days travel is a great recreation and enjoyed by a large number of people. I traveled a fair bit in my younger days, but seldom for pure recreation. I find the tourist “traps” to be expensive places to visit and more often than not, turn out to be a letdown in that the hype was more than the reality. No matter how you go about traveling in these times of high energy costs, it is a costly undertaking.
If one lives in a city and practices a simple living philosophy, there are lots of low-cost activities to do for recreation. I would be found in a library pouring over the oldest books on the shelves, libraries are free for public use and great places to visit.
Living in the backwoods calls for other forms of recreation. First, it costs us a considerable amount of money just to make our necessary trips to town. I have given up the recreation of local runabout trips. Where we currently live there is not much to see, when you have seen one farm, you have mostly see the what represents a central MN farm. They don’t vary very much, even in details.
When we lived 50 miles north of here, we were in the lake and forest country. There was always something to do close by. Lots of good fishing lakes and rivers. Thousands of acres of state and paper company land within walking distance of our house that was free for the exploring, hunting or hiking.
Ruling out leaving home, our forms of recreation are somewhat limited, but only by our imaginations. My main activity that can be described as recreation is conducted from early September to mid-November in the form of deer hunting with bow or rifle. I won’t claim it is a “cheap” sport, because if the truth is told, what hunters spend on license, bows, guns, clothing etc., adds up to enough money to buy a lot of meat, if that is the only consideration. The facts in the case are that very few hunters are hunting for the “meat”. Rather we are hunting because we simply want to be in the woods. Bow hunting requires a lot of time in the woods, since any shot must be up “close and personal”, the bow hunter will have a lot fewer opportunities to take a deer. On the other hand, he will see a lot more deer than those who only hunt the rifle season, due to the amount of time spent in the woods and the undisturbed conditions of the wildlife.
My ideal of hunting has changed over the years. No longer do I enjoy “suffering” the cold and stiffness that results from sitting in a tree stand for several hours every day. To cure this, I built what we call a ‘hunting shack’, it is really a glorified ground blind, but since it is built for comfort we call it a shack. It is fully insulated, including the floor and ceiling. I have installed a box stove that once fired up will turn the small space into an oven, if I get too free with the wood. I don’t have a recliner, because that might make too much noise if I want to position myself for a shot out one of the 4 windows built for the purpose. Instead I found a swivel rocking chair that is quiet and I can still prop my feet up on a stool for maximum comfort for the “grim vigil” as I call the hunts. Of course to make the time more enjoyable, I also take along something to read. Usually my little Acer netbook that I have downloaded hundreds of free books on. Now that is recreation!
Since my business is mostly conducted at home, the only escape I get from seeing work to be done is to get out of sight. Woodworking used to be one form of recreation, but that got ruined when I started building furniture for income. Somehow, at least some of us, when we turn our recreation into income producing affairs, we lose something. No longer is it relaxing to turn wood into something useable and nice, it becomes “work”. I have determined that the only difference in building a piece of furniture for our own use and building a piece for profit, lays in my subconscious. For a piece to be sold I expect a minimum number of flaws, whereas pieces for our own use I feel less pressure to make a “perfect piece”, which, incidentally, has never been made in my shop.
There are other forms of ‘homegrown recreation’ that is compatible with simple living and does not ‘break the bank’.
My wife combines her love of gardening with the necessity of producing good food. Now I used to enjoy garden work. But the garden lays too close to “my job” for me to find any relaxation in leisurely puttering in the garden. For, all the while, my eyes roam to the woodshop or lumber yard that always has some work a-waiting. I find that I barely make time to even see the garden during the season that it is most interesting. That would be just before the harvest work begins, when the plants are young and thriving but not yet producing “more work”! I can make “recreation” out of ‘consuming’ the products from the garden however, but since the over consumption of food is also a “hazard” not to be overdone, I am not sure where the boundary is between eating a meal and ‘recreational eating’, I am thinking it is somewhere between beans and watermelon.
In our household there is no question that we find more recreation by reading than anything else. We don’t have TV, but all three of us are bookworms. I find it nearly impossible to sit through a movie, I would much rather read than observe, but that is only a personal taste.
Other forms of recreation that are easy on the wallet include; writing, which is one area that I am working on. Some of us go through our whole life being readers and just naturally think of writing “someday”. Since time waits on no one, it has become clear that if I am going to do any writing, I best get with it before my brain gets any weaker, this blog is my “test” and I have already learned that it takes a degree of discipline to force myself to sit down and write a post, but once I get started if is a form of recreation. Whether I will write anything beyond this blog and my daily journal for my children and grand children is yet to be seen. Then there are hundreds of outdoor things that we can do in a rural area that can’t be done outside a city ‘backdoor’. Like shooting our Blackpowder guns or modern rifles.
Speaking of shooting rifles, I will close this blog entry out with some humor about shooting. It was not very funny at the time, but it is now. We raised two hogs for meat this past summer, something we do every year or two. We have never had any trouble at all with the ‘health’ of the pigs we have raised, until this year. For one, it was a rainy summer and one of the hogs got pneumonia. Now pneumonia in a hog is not what one might expect. There is no sign of sickness except the pig will go “off its feed” and just not grow. No sign of hard breathing or anything, one of them just would not eat. After some research and then medicine, it was ok. But then one day me and our daughter was shooting our Blackpowder rifles and shot for an hour or so. For several days after the event the pigs we off their feed again and both of them seemed to be ‘sick’ or at least did not act like a normal rambunctious pig. They finally started eating and we did not know for some time what the problem was that time. Until the early goose season opened. My wife was out feeding on morning. The pigs came bouncing out of their house like normal to get their breakfast when some goose hunters let loose with a string of shotgun blasts. The pigs took to their house and would not come back out to eat all day. That is when we discovered that they were “gun-shy”! I have been around hogs much of my life and never heard of one being “gun-shy”, but these two surely were and that explained why they went off their feed when we were target shooting, which was right close to their pen to begin with. It must have been a horrifying experience for the poor dumb creatures. I have know many dogs that were “gun-shy” and a few people, but never a pig! Just goes to show that living in the country is always a “learning experience”, if nothing else.
Since this is “Ernie’s World”, I am expressing my own ideal of recreation and the ways I go about enjoying those pursuits. Some forms of recreation is just plain unsuitable to someone who has chosen a life, whether by choice or circumstance, that does not produce a high income. Many things that Americans consider ‘normal recreation’ are just too expensive for my pocketbook, even if they appeal to my appetite. These days travel is a great recreation and enjoyed by a large number of people. I traveled a fair bit in my younger days, but seldom for pure recreation. I find the tourist “traps” to be expensive places to visit and more often than not, turn out to be a letdown in that the hype was more than the reality. No matter how you go about traveling in these times of high energy costs, it is a costly undertaking.
If one lives in a city and practices a simple living philosophy, there are lots of low-cost activities to do for recreation. I would be found in a library pouring over the oldest books on the shelves, libraries are free for public use and great places to visit.
Living in the backwoods calls for other forms of recreation. First, it costs us a considerable amount of money just to make our necessary trips to town. I have given up the recreation of local runabout trips. Where we currently live there is not much to see, when you have seen one farm, you have mostly see the what represents a central MN farm. They don’t vary very much, even in details.
When we lived 50 miles north of here, we were in the lake and forest country. There was always something to do close by. Lots of good fishing lakes and rivers. Thousands of acres of state and paper company land within walking distance of our house that was free for the exploring, hunting or hiking.
Ruling out leaving home, our forms of recreation are somewhat limited, but only by our imaginations. My main activity that can be described as recreation is conducted from early September to mid-November in the form of deer hunting with bow or rifle. I won’t claim it is a “cheap” sport, because if the truth is told, what hunters spend on license, bows, guns, clothing etc., adds up to enough money to buy a lot of meat, if that is the only consideration. The facts in the case are that very few hunters are hunting for the “meat”. Rather we are hunting because we simply want to be in the woods. Bow hunting requires a lot of time in the woods, since any shot must be up “close and personal”, the bow hunter will have a lot fewer opportunities to take a deer. On the other hand, he will see a lot more deer than those who only hunt the rifle season, due to the amount of time spent in the woods and the undisturbed conditions of the wildlife.
My ideal of hunting has changed over the years. No longer do I enjoy “suffering” the cold and stiffness that results from sitting in a tree stand for several hours every day. To cure this, I built what we call a ‘hunting shack’, it is really a glorified ground blind, but since it is built for comfort we call it a shack. It is fully insulated, including the floor and ceiling. I have installed a box stove that once fired up will turn the small space into an oven, if I get too free with the wood. I don’t have a recliner, because that might make too much noise if I want to position myself for a shot out one of the 4 windows built for the purpose. Instead I found a swivel rocking chair that is quiet and I can still prop my feet up on a stool for maximum comfort for the “grim vigil” as I call the hunts. Of course to make the time more enjoyable, I also take along something to read. Usually my little Acer netbook that I have downloaded hundreds of free books on. Now that is recreation!
Since my business is mostly conducted at home, the only escape I get from seeing work to be done is to get out of sight. Woodworking used to be one form of recreation, but that got ruined when I started building furniture for income. Somehow, at least some of us, when we turn our recreation into income producing affairs, we lose something. No longer is it relaxing to turn wood into something useable and nice, it becomes “work”. I have determined that the only difference in building a piece of furniture for our own use and building a piece for profit, lays in my subconscious. For a piece to be sold I expect a minimum number of flaws, whereas pieces for our own use I feel less pressure to make a “perfect piece”, which, incidentally, has never been made in my shop.
There are other forms of ‘homegrown recreation’ that is compatible with simple living and does not ‘break the bank’.
My wife combines her love of gardening with the necessity of producing good food. Now I used to enjoy garden work. But the garden lays too close to “my job” for me to find any relaxation in leisurely puttering in the garden. For, all the while, my eyes roam to the woodshop or lumber yard that always has some work a-waiting. I find that I barely make time to even see the garden during the season that it is most interesting. That would be just before the harvest work begins, when the plants are young and thriving but not yet producing “more work”! I can make “recreation” out of ‘consuming’ the products from the garden however, but since the over consumption of food is also a “hazard” not to be overdone, I am not sure where the boundary is between eating a meal and ‘recreational eating’, I am thinking it is somewhere between beans and watermelon.
In our household there is no question that we find more recreation by reading than anything else. We don’t have TV, but all three of us are bookworms. I find it nearly impossible to sit through a movie, I would much rather read than observe, but that is only a personal taste.
Other forms of recreation that are easy on the wallet include; writing, which is one area that I am working on. Some of us go through our whole life being readers and just naturally think of writing “someday”. Since time waits on no one, it has become clear that if I am going to do any writing, I best get with it before my brain gets any weaker, this blog is my “test” and I have already learned that it takes a degree of discipline to force myself to sit down and write a post, but once I get started if is a form of recreation. Whether I will write anything beyond this blog and my daily journal for my children and grand children is yet to be seen. Then there are hundreds of outdoor things that we can do in a rural area that can’t be done outside a city ‘backdoor’. Like shooting our Blackpowder guns or modern rifles.
Speaking of shooting rifles, I will close this blog entry out with some humor about shooting. It was not very funny at the time, but it is now. We raised two hogs for meat this past summer, something we do every year or two. We have never had any trouble at all with the ‘health’ of the pigs we have raised, until this year. For one, it was a rainy summer and one of the hogs got pneumonia. Now pneumonia in a hog is not what one might expect. There is no sign of sickness except the pig will go “off its feed” and just not grow. No sign of hard breathing or anything, one of them just would not eat. After some research and then medicine, it was ok. But then one day me and our daughter was shooting our Blackpowder rifles and shot for an hour or so. For several days after the event the pigs we off their feed again and both of them seemed to be ‘sick’ or at least did not act like a normal rambunctious pig. They finally started eating and we did not know for some time what the problem was that time. Until the early goose season opened. My wife was out feeding on morning. The pigs came bouncing out of their house like normal to get their breakfast when some goose hunters let loose with a string of shotgun blasts. The pigs took to their house and would not come back out to eat all day. That is when we discovered that they were “gun-shy”! I have been around hogs much of my life and never heard of one being “gun-shy”, but these two surely were and that explained why they went off their feed when we were target shooting, which was right close to their pen to begin with. It must have been a horrifying experience for the poor dumb creatures. I have know many dogs that were “gun-shy” and a few people, but never a pig! Just goes to show that living in the country is always a “learning experience”, if nothing else.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Simple Living- The Philosophy
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”.
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”.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Simple Living
Seems that the days in which we live are filled with utter chaos. At least if one is so foolish as to listen to the news broadcasts, or read the news items online. But then, it could also be considered ‘foolish’ to put our head in the sand and ignore what goes on in the world at large.
My lifetime goal has always been to lead a life that I consider as “simple”. That means I don’t try to be someone I don’t want to be, in order to keep up with the proverbial Jones’s. We all face life choices from various different backgrounds and experiences, whether it is a genetic trait that pulls us in a certain direction or our environment, I will leave up to those who speculate on such things. My personal opinion is that it boils down to a combination of all circumstances that lead us to make the choices we make.
One thing appears to be certain. Those who have a clear vision of what or who they want to become are far more likely to reach that goal than, what seems to be the mass of people, who go along with the flow without ever back paddling or fighting the current to make their dreams reality.
To attempt to live a simple lifestyle in a ’world gone crazy’ is certainly a challenge. There are many forces that fight against simplicity. The marketplace of the world is constantly telling us we “must have” this or that new gadget, garment or ’varmint’. (Varmint, being a word I coined to refer to the 4-wheelers that disturbed my quiet former home. Don’t be offended, I do own one. There is always a bit of hypocrisy in all of us, more on those modern machines in another post.) This is the reality of commerce, which any sane person cannot deny has brought us a wonderfully inconceivable standard of living. But at a cost to simple living.
Our attempt (that would be the wife and I) to live a simple lifestyle has come to understand that somewhere, lurking in a foggy state of confusion, there is a balance wherein a simple lifestyle can take advantage of modern conveniences to improve our lives, without taking “control” of us. For example, many people gauge independence and simplicity by whether or not they are hooked up to the electric grid. Seems to us the reality is, at least in our way of life, the cost of electricity is offset by the value we derive from its use. Most people I know who want to be disconnected from the power company end up spending a lot more money and time tinkering with some alternative power source than it would take to earn the money to just pay the electric bill and be done with it. Now that is fine if alternative energy is your hobby, but for me it would be better to just do away with everything that requires electric than to try ‘beating the system’ by spending precious time and money in an attempt to be a power plant. This is what I mean by using the modern technologies to simplify our lives. In our situation it is just not feasible to turn the power off to save money. Our lives would suddenly become more complicated.
On the other hand, if our electric fails, we have the necessary backup plans to deal with an outage so that it would not put us in too much of a crisis to do without it for a few days or weeks for that matter. We can obtain water without electric. We heat our house with wood, thus we can also cook on the woodstove if necessary. We do have a small generator that can be used to keep the freezer food frozen by running the generator for a small amount time each day, which would also be used to charge some deep cycle batteries that can power some lights, phones or other items requiring power.
Our vision of simple living is this. As far and soon as possible one should strive to be debt free. If there is any ‘monkey hard on the back’, it is debt! There is nothing simple about living under a load of debt that must be paid to the bank or other institution on a regular basis. When people are young and buying a house, car and other modern ‘near necessities’, debt is a bedfellow that they must live with. Unless they make a lot more money than I ever did. But thankfully, by the time we reached the age of 50 or so, we were able to operate our small business and had our home paid for. However, that was a long sought after goal that was a priority for many years of our lives. I have lived in both pair of shoes and can assure you; the pair without debt is a lot easier to walk in!
It is true that one can live in the midst of a large city and still maintain a ‘simple life’. It all depends on an individuals likes, hobbies, jobs and other factors that play into our lives. For me a city is not my idea of the simple life. I prefer to be as far away from a big city as possible. In younger years it would have been nice to have lived as far from a small town as we could get and still have civil contact. As we approach those misnamed “golden years” it is clear that for simplicity we need to be within a reasonable range of things like doctors, drug stores and a suitable church.
Many people seem to thrive on social activity that requires them to have everyday and evening of their lives filled with comings and goings. If that is your lifestyle, I am not one to judge you. Yet, often I hear those same people bemoan their hectic life while at the same time taking no action to make the changes they say they want. This I can’t understand. Is it an addiction that people simply cannot break? Maybe. On the same hand, often times it seems that what the very active social folks really need is just a break in their constant running. Personally I spend a lot of time on the home place. Except for about one day a week most all my work is done at home. Generally I am content to just stay put, doing my shop work and a dozen other projects that are always about a small farmstead. But once in awhile I get the urge to ‘escape’ and make a trip to town or even the city, it becomes a ’vacation’ of sorts to simply escape from ones normal enviroment and go somewhere different.
More on simple living later.
My lifetime goal has always been to lead a life that I consider as “simple”. That means I don’t try to be someone I don’t want to be, in order to keep up with the proverbial Jones’s. We all face life choices from various different backgrounds and experiences, whether it is a genetic trait that pulls us in a certain direction or our environment, I will leave up to those who speculate on such things. My personal opinion is that it boils down to a combination of all circumstances that lead us to make the choices we make.
One thing appears to be certain. Those who have a clear vision of what or who they want to become are far more likely to reach that goal than, what seems to be the mass of people, who go along with the flow without ever back paddling or fighting the current to make their dreams reality.
To attempt to live a simple lifestyle in a ’world gone crazy’ is certainly a challenge. There are many forces that fight against simplicity. The marketplace of the world is constantly telling us we “must have” this or that new gadget, garment or ’varmint’. (Varmint, being a word I coined to refer to the 4-wheelers that disturbed my quiet former home. Don’t be offended, I do own one. There is always a bit of hypocrisy in all of us, more on those modern machines in another post.) This is the reality of commerce, which any sane person cannot deny has brought us a wonderfully inconceivable standard of living. But at a cost to simple living.
Our attempt (that would be the wife and I) to live a simple lifestyle has come to understand that somewhere, lurking in a foggy state of confusion, there is a balance wherein a simple lifestyle can take advantage of modern conveniences to improve our lives, without taking “control” of us. For example, many people gauge independence and simplicity by whether or not they are hooked up to the electric grid. Seems to us the reality is, at least in our way of life, the cost of electricity is offset by the value we derive from its use. Most people I know who want to be disconnected from the power company end up spending a lot more money and time tinkering with some alternative power source than it would take to earn the money to just pay the electric bill and be done with it. Now that is fine if alternative energy is your hobby, but for me it would be better to just do away with everything that requires electric than to try ‘beating the system’ by spending precious time and money in an attempt to be a power plant. This is what I mean by using the modern technologies to simplify our lives. In our situation it is just not feasible to turn the power off to save money. Our lives would suddenly become more complicated.
On the other hand, if our electric fails, we have the necessary backup plans to deal with an outage so that it would not put us in too much of a crisis to do without it for a few days or weeks for that matter. We can obtain water without electric. We heat our house with wood, thus we can also cook on the woodstove if necessary. We do have a small generator that can be used to keep the freezer food frozen by running the generator for a small amount time each day, which would also be used to charge some deep cycle batteries that can power some lights, phones or other items requiring power.
Our vision of simple living is this. As far and soon as possible one should strive to be debt free. If there is any ‘monkey hard on the back’, it is debt! There is nothing simple about living under a load of debt that must be paid to the bank or other institution on a regular basis. When people are young and buying a house, car and other modern ‘near necessities’, debt is a bedfellow that they must live with. Unless they make a lot more money than I ever did. But thankfully, by the time we reached the age of 50 or so, we were able to operate our small business and had our home paid for. However, that was a long sought after goal that was a priority for many years of our lives. I have lived in both pair of shoes and can assure you; the pair without debt is a lot easier to walk in!
It is true that one can live in the midst of a large city and still maintain a ‘simple life’. It all depends on an individuals likes, hobbies, jobs and other factors that play into our lives. For me a city is not my idea of the simple life. I prefer to be as far away from a big city as possible. In younger years it would have been nice to have lived as far from a small town as we could get and still have civil contact. As we approach those misnamed “golden years” it is clear that for simplicity we need to be within a reasonable range of things like doctors, drug stores and a suitable church.
Many people seem to thrive on social activity that requires them to have everyday and evening of their lives filled with comings and goings. If that is your lifestyle, I am not one to judge you. Yet, often I hear those same people bemoan their hectic life while at the same time taking no action to make the changes they say they want. This I can’t understand. Is it an addiction that people simply cannot break? Maybe. On the same hand, often times it seems that what the very active social folks really need is just a break in their constant running. Personally I spend a lot of time on the home place. Except for about one day a week most all my work is done at home. Generally I am content to just stay put, doing my shop work and a dozen other projects that are always about a small farmstead. But once in awhile I get the urge to ‘escape’ and make a trip to town or even the city, it becomes a ’vacation’ of sorts to simply escape from ones normal enviroment and go somewhere different.
More on simple living later.
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