Honest Evaluation of Costs and Benefits, Profit and Loss
Sharon March 26th, 2009
No, this one actually isn’t about the economy. This post came out of a question that was asked at the end of my talk at the New York State Museum last week, a question I get a lot, and always feel inadequate answering – how do we deal with our sense of loss, with what we don’t get in a world where we either by necessity or because it is the moral things to do choose to live with less, choose to make hard choices about what we can have
I don’t want to deny that people really do endure substantial costs here – they truly do. I believe that much about the low impact, adaptive life is good and valuable, but there are things that are inconvenient, and if events make things necessary, that will be a heck of a lot more than inconvenient, and by virtue of time invested, my situation may be easier than most. I do not mean to understate loss.
And yet, I think it very important that we consider seriously how we look at and evaluate the costs of our new lifestyle, in order to really understand them. Because one of the insidious things about our society – probably any society – is that we are accustomed to paying certain prices for the society we live in, so accustomed that we understate these costs, and rarely fully acknowledge them. Unfamiliar costs and negatives, we tend to overstate. This plays out in nearly every area of our thinking about the future, and distorts our reasoning. To some degree this distortion may be inevitable, but I think it is worth trying to balance it as clearly as possible.
What do I mean by this? Well, one easy example would the costs of a car-rich vs. car-free society. I think when many of us (perhaps not so much my blog readers, but most people more embedded in the culture) think about life without a car, early on we leap to a scenario in which we cannot rush our desperately ill or injured family member to the hospital. And this is, in fact, a concern. There is no doubt that in a society without private cars, where one has to rely on public ambulances, some people who might not otherwise die or be seriously harmed would die or be seriously harmed.
But what we don’t think first off is “Oh, thank heavens – that means that the million people per year who die in car crashes and the 7 million per year worldwide who are maimed by them will mostly not die or be maimed.” That is, we are so used to the cost of having cars in our society – even when it means death and suffering – that we find it very hard to recognize that cost and look at it objectively. Now I truly cannot say whether more people would benefit or lose because of the absence of cars – but I doubt most of the rest of us can. Our instinctive tendency to overstate the consequences of the unfamiliar and understate the consequences of the familiar undermines our conversation.
This is really true across the board – for example, I often run into people who spend a lot of time deploring the drudgery of domestic or agricultural labor - even though there is considerable evidence that most agrarian societies work fewer hours than we do, or manifestly, that many of our jobs involve a heck of a lot of things that some people would call drudgery. It isn’t self-evident to me that inputting data or writing reports is less mind-numbing than tending young children or hoeing crops - or even that it is dramatically less physically demanding, because I know how stiff and sore I am after rising from a day in front of a computer. If we calculated in the extra weight many of us carry, the health consequences of the lack of exercise – what would be the end result in an honest calculation of which work is better for us? I don’t claim to know – but I do think that we understate the costs of the unfamiliar, or of things that industrial society trains us very carefully to devalue.
Time calculations work this way in a host of areas – often people do X or Y thing because it saves them time, without fully bothering to calculate whether the time required to earn the money for the labor saving device, to clean and repair the labor saving device, etc… is actually sufficient to justify it. We assume from familiarity that labor savings are a given – that powered equipment reduces human labor. Sometimes it truly does – and sometimes it does not. For example, I find that with good knife skills, I rarely bother with my food processor, which takes some time to set up and clean afterwards - I really have to be cutting a lot of vegetables at a time in order to justify the actual time. But I only figured this out by actually doing the strange thing of sitting down and timing it several times. The power of the assumption of the familiar claims of labor reduction are so great that the unfamiliar claims of human power receed. I know someone who routinely packs his two children into their carseats to drive 15 minutes to their nearest fast food restaurant for dinner and back – in the 45 minutes this takes him, including herding children, getting everyone clothed, shod and buckled, drive time, ordering, etc.., he could easily make any number of simple meals – and yet he perceives fast food as “easier and quicker.”
Our sense of our own suffering and trauma sometimes works this way as well. In _Depletion and Abundance_ I tell the story of talking to my husband’s grandmother about washing cloth diapers. She was horrified that I’d taken on this project, and said “Oh, dear, I remember boiling them on the stove.” I asked her, “Was that awful?” And she stopped, and thought for a moment, and said no, it really wasn’t – she had a pot dedicated to it, and while she had to feed the stove, the diapers just needed the occasional stir. But it seemed so strange to her through the lens of 50 years of washing machines, and was so strange to everyone who had not done it that she got into the habit of treating it as though it were unbearable. I’ve done the same thing – now with a washing machine I can remember the burden of hauling my laundry a quarter mile to the laundromat on my back. But at the time, I found it only mildly annoying, a chore I’d just as soon have skipped, but not one that even registered in my quality of life.
So does our sense of things we value, like freedom and justice. For example, many of us praise the success of industrial feminism – the fact that women are now free to do many things they were not. And there are some real merits to this. But it is also the case that in our newly “equitable” society, most women are not free to, say, stay out of the industrial labor force long enough to fully establish good breastfeeding, or even stay home for the period of their nursing. We have been freed from constraints that prevented women from equitable education and participation in the public economy, but the price of that is that women have been freed from the right to *not* participate in the public economy – the net effect of moving women into the industrial economy has meant that few households, particularly low income ones, can afford to stay out of the industrial economy. It is not self-evident to me that women are freer when they work for AIG than they are when they work for their families at home. As a society, we call the chance to work for a boss in an office “freedom” and we call the chance to work at home in the subsistence economy backwards and repressed – and yet, it isn’t at all clear to me that we’ve done a full calculation of what freedom really means in this situation.
It is very easy then to look at the work we’d have to do in a lower energy world, the time that it would take, and not see the fact that unfamiliar jobs become familiar quickly, and get integrated into routines, that we can find time by not doing other things – by spending less time shopping (6 hours per week), watching television (3+ hours per day) and other things not necessary if we give up some of the elements of industrial life.
Of course, the problem is that not all of us can give up many or most of the ingredients of industrial life – that is, we’re trying to pile our preparedness activities on top of our other life, and that makes the whole thing look undoable. And some parts of it may be – or it may be necessary to struggle to reach an aggregate point at which you can afford to reduce working hours, say, because the subsistence activities and reduction in need opens time – and for some people that will never happen. But even our sense of our own exhaustion tends to include time for familiar activities, but not unfamiliar ones. That is, we can spend the weekend running the half marathon, resealing the deck or going to the kids’ games because these are activities we are familiar enough with and comfortable enough with to categorize them as pleasure. But with practice and time, we can become equally familiar with growing, building, cooking, sewing – and while not all of these will be favorite activities, many are for enough people – that is, they are considered hobbies by a big chunk of the population – that we can say that it is mostly lack of familiarity and comfort that is preventing us from seeing them not as a burden on our strained time resources, but as a pleasure we might take up in our limited leisure time.
I honestly do not know how the balance sheets of profit and loss will end up – I suspect the answer is different for all of us. But what I do demand is that alongside dealing with our true sense of loss at the future we’d imagined, we do a genuine accounting, and one that adjusts for our tendency to exaggerate the misery, fear and hardship of an unfamiliar future and to elide the existence of any price paid for our present way of life.
Sharon
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- Comments(22)
As a farmer work is never a drudgery to me. The work is always there and it will be there tomorrow if I don’t get it all done today. There are not too many days when I don’t enjoy milking cows. It is funny how I’ve come full circle to once again pasture our cows just like my grandfather did.
I’m sure I’m not unlike many of your readers who, every day, feel the real and heavy costs of the industrial society in which we currently live. It feels like my very life energy is being traded for fax machines. For me, the work of the homestead, while not always cheery, is infinitely lighter and more rewarding than commuting, sitting behind a desk, taking care of problems after the fact instead of preventing them in the first place. *sigh* -Shosh
Once again, your insightful thoughts serve to uplift us all. I didn’t get a long way past the introductory question of “how do we deal with out own sense of loss?” However, the rest of your post just further expanded the question and, hopefully, will expose us all to this dilemna.
Me feeling is that we deal with loss by learning to become less attached. All of life involves loss. Basic Bhuddist precept, after all. In the end, it’s all going to be lost anyway. So, why hold on and suffer from the needless, ego-centered clinging that humans are so inclined to do?
I absolutely agree with an understand the proposition that the moral thing, these days, is to learn how to live with less. My thought is that, as you lessen your needs, you’ll also lessen your suffering when you realize that your plate isn’t always going to be full.
Peace and Best Wishes,
Bill
I simply keep saying that the 21st century is going to be one long exercise in giving up things. There is a lot that can be unpacked from that simple statement. It is easy to keep in mind, and once one has accepted it, then it becomes just a bit easier to get on with it.
I sometimes succeed in getting my friends to come over, have a home grown salad and a switchel, and just watch the shadows climb Jasper Mountain, and then the stars come out.
At first, it doesn’t seem like something they’d want to do a lot of. Then they get it — life doesn’t have to revolve around American Idol, the Super Bowl and Nascar. It revolves around the sun and the rain.
The list of things we need to own to be able to watch Jasper Mountain is very, very short. It’s fun seeing everyone’s “aha!” moment around that …
A very good statement of the problem(s).
I think part of the problem is that we are constantly bombarded with advertising/information which is DESIGNED to make us dissatisfied. And whether it really hits us as individuals, or not; it does affect the majority of us- which keeps pulling all of us down that path. Peer pressure works.
And there is no real counter-pressure; no organized message of “you have ENOUGH; you can be/SHOULD be- satisfied with where you are, and what you have.”
The whole attitude is deeply embedded in the current dominant culture- a person who has “no ambition” – is pretty much despised.
Figuring out how to sell that idea successfully, to “the masses” – would be a huge huge achievement.
Maybe a new religion!
The Church Of Enough, Already.
This is sooo my life right now.
But all my parents tell me is you can’t raise a baby in 400 sq feet of a basement. :giggle: Like babies are genetically designed to require their own room, and will refuse to breast feed if they don’t have a complete nursery set.
My hubby and I are about to have our first child, and for me to have a few months with baby we’ve decided to move into a bedroom in my friend’s basement. My parents are sure we’ll be miserable and cramped and they hate the thought of us “downsizing.” But all I see when I look at it is less house to clean, longer time with my baby and a release from the stresses of trying to find the money to afford our own place. I really don’t care that I might have to get rid of the couch. I really don’t care that I’ll be sharing a bathroom and kitchen with my friend. Baby certainly won’t mind sharing a room with hubs and I.
Thanks so much for this. I think for many people it takes less “mental” time and effort to do something the familiar way, without thinking, than the alternative – even if the alternative would take less actual time.
I hope everyone starts make the transition now, as it does take several years to get used to incorporating the knowledge and rhythms of a home-made life – gardening, preserving, cooking, baking – into the psyche. I know I’m still working on it.
[...] Here’s the link. [...]
This is *exactly* what I was trying (and failing) to say in an argument the other night. Thank you for clarifying the words!
[...] the Cost Sharon Astyk has a great post on her blog about honestly evaluating the costs and benefits of living a simpler life. Astyk is a liberal (I [...]
As a female who is voluntarily unemployed, I find far more satisfaction in my life now doing the work at home required to live a lower impact and more sustainable life. I spent most of this morning harvesting a huge quantity of greens from our own garden and processing them for many future meals. This felt so much more empowering than, say, my last full-time (temp) job where I was poring over data on a computer spreadsheet to check accuracy and logic. Ironically, all the data collected and analyzed, re-collected and evaluated ended up being tossed to the side when its conclusions were inconvenient. While it might be a tad inconvenient to take the extra time to ride my bike to the Farmer’s Market instead of driving, the effort is not lost because I also get physical exercise.
Part of our desire to get relocated and settled is to move a little further out of the industrialized mode of American life and further into the mode we think most American life will be in eventually. The sense of loss I experience now revolves around flushing potential humanure down a toilet in a rental house, wasting gas because we can’t insulate and upgrade someone else’s house, and being unable to commit to a huge garden in a rental yard full of crappy soil. I want my own place for all this energy to go!
[...] (yes, still work on Friday). As I read my schedule in print I am reminded of an article I read in Causabon’s book about the cost of our ‘lifestyle’ and it has made me think; is my family really [...]
I recently experienced just what you wrote about here. I got a milk goat and had to learn to incorporate milking twice a day into my life. The first few weeks were really hard! I wanted to quit, I hated the interruption to my day, it was too stressful! Now, it is just part of my day. And I’m starting to enjoy it a bit. I know it will get easier and more enjoyable as I do it longer.
I like making bread. I like making jam, pickles, preserves etc. Every pot of jam I make saves about $2 and so on. This means that if I had to do a boring job (if I could even get one) it would cost me in a whole heap of other ways and it would cost me the fun of making lots of food. It would also cost me my community and my family life. It would cost me the time I spend being an artist too.
Having more money to buy more things just isn’t worth it. I would like to be a little more secure financially but I leave that up to hubby who loves his computer work even if it doesn’t pay all that well. The result is a community who we help and who help us.
That makes it all worth while.
viv in nz
Thank you Sharon for addressing the question I asked at the museum on this site. As I read, I realize that you didn’t quite answer it, perhaps because I didn’t articulate it clearly. I’m pretty clear that simplifying will bring many benefits.
What I meant to ask was “How do you speak to people for whom that grief of losing what they perceive to be the safe, the familiar, the only way to survive is so big that they are in denial either about the possibility of actually experiencing the loss or the possibility of being able to survive if it comes to pass?”
I guess I realize the answer is that you don’t speak to them about it. They aren’t ready to hear it, except perhaps as a story or metaphor that touches that place without referring directly to it. But framing a story like that requires considerable skill and experience as a healer and is probably best approached very cautiously.
Risa B seems to have had some success at this when she writes “I sometimes succeed in getting my friends to come over, have a home grown salad and a switchel, and just watch the shadows climb Jasper Mountain, and then the stars come out.” and how they “get it” that life “revolves around the sun and the rain.”
Perhaps that is a skill to master. Something of a “natural human being whisperer” who can talk to the part of us that still remembers the simple pleasures of sun and rain, mountains, rivers and trees without the fearful, culturally conditioned part getting in the way.
There are as many ways to do that as there are people who will try. I’d love to hear more stories….
Thank you for this post. I don’t have children yet, nor am I married, but I see many of my coworkers struggle with their family and work life. I see the pregnant women carefully calculating how much vacation time they can add to their maternity leave, and I see them realize that they only get two, maybe three, months home with their child after he is born. It makes me wonder if it is worth it, and I appreciate you writing it our so clearly. I think you are absolutely right that we don’t clearly perceive the costs and benefits of familiar verses the unfamiliar.
You folks have answered the question posed by Steve, that was the basis of Sharon’s article.
A sense of loss implies a void. Can you provide something to fill the void?
risa b talked of inviting people over to watch the sunset on Jasper Mountain. She had a way to fill the void, before it ever formed!
I laughed at Jennie’s post. From 1980 to 1984, I was in the Peace Corps in Swaziland. Maybe American babies are genetically programmed to need their own room. Swazi babies are genetically programmed to stay with their parents. Many Swazis would be horrified about placing a baby alone in a room by itself, all night.
Over the last year and a half my wife and I have been simplifying … living with less.
We owned/operated a log house business for the last 10 years, and have 3 kids who are now 10, 9 and 8. To say that the last decade has been exhausting is an understatement.
When we decided to simplify we sold or house and moved onto our business property after we renovated the 600 sqft office as a house. As a consequence we were traveling less (to and from work) so we stopped insuring one of our vehicles. We also started eating better and not eating out frequently … the list goes on and on.
In many ways we are living with less now, and it seems that every decision to simplify is accompanied with trepidation and fear of a different way of doing things.
However, we have never tried to quantify our and our kid’s happiness as we spend more time together, and more importantly time doing things as a family. At times five of us living in such a small space can be tense, but it certainly has not been as stressful as maintaining two properties and two vehicles!
Most of us believe in a lifestyle (the American dream or call it what you will) that has sold us a bill of goods. It is challenging to look at an alternative to this lifestyle.
I believe that our lives are richer even if we are not keeping up with the Jones.
Thanks everyone, as always, for sharing your thoughts.
One thing to consider is that we don’t have to aim for complete self sufficiency. Trading, like language, is a universal human trait. I hate sewing, but I love working in the garden. There are people living within a mile or two of me who love sewing but hate gardening. I know at least one of them.
Rather than self sufficiency, we might better work on perfecting our own special skills and forming communities of people with varied skills. This is nothing Sharon and others have not already said, but it seems appropriate to throw it in here as a reminder that most of us will not be living in isolation.
I spent three hours last night helping a friend clean out her clothes room. Mostly offering moral support.
I always feel like we have too much – too many obligations, too much stuff, too much work, too much space (which, clearly, we do – now three of us take up a house that a few years ago held 6). But I realized that most of the people I know have walk-in closets (many that can’t actually be walked into) or entire junk rooms in their houses. We have a friend who I suspect has a hoarding problem, who has 2 bedrooms for stuff in her house, and one bedroom for people. And few of the people with rooms or garages packed full of stuff, enjoy that aspect of their lives. It’s a drain of time and energy and money and emotional effort.
Some possible solutions for the dilemmas mentioned by Chile:
>The sense of loss I experience now revolves >around flushing potential humanure down a >toilet in a rental house,
–>Set up a bucket toilet alongside the flush one. Lots of folks I know have done that.
>wasting gas because we can’t insulate and >upgrade someone else’s house,
–> Add insulation by hanging blankets/tapestries on the walls or ceilings. Or use 2x4s and drywall to build a “room within a room”. Stuff cloth, newspaper, plastic bags, etc., into the space between your temporary wall and the permanent wall.
>and being unable to commit to a huge garden >in a rental yard full of crappy soil.
Build raised beds, and take the soil with you when you go.
We renters can’t afford to wait to move into “our own places” to get started with all we want to do!
Hope these ideas are helpful!