Archive for the ‘instant pleasures’ Tag

The Circus Comes to Town   29 comments

An entry in How To Be Poor

As has likely been noticed by regular readers, the How To Be Poor series on voluntary poverty has not seen a new entry in over two months. In the last post in the series, Ending Our Exuberance, I wrote of my intention to address some of the ways in which I would have to manage a new living situation so as not to fall into the traps of an overly abundant lifestyle, instead staying focused on my attempts to scale back my life and live within modest means. I planned to write about ways to craft the context of my living so as to assist me in my goals, making that the subject of the next few posts in the series.

A few occurrences have conspired to keep me from that goal, however. First of all, I find I need more time to figure out something of a coherent philosophy and set of behaviors for how to live well on the grid. I’ve been spending some time thinking on this, but I’m not yet ready to write any particularly helpful posts in that regard. Furthermore, as I noted in my last post, I recently slipped into some bad habits and a resulting mental funk that has distracted me from this blog and some of the behavioral goals the blog is about. That accounted for much of my quiet over the last few weeks. However, it also has provided me the opportunity to think about the subject of distractions and habits and how they relate to my attempt to live a simpler life. And so, being an opportunist, I want to recalibrate the current thrust of this series to address the topic of distraction.

This isn’t a complete reversal from the previous topic of context, as distraction is a part of the context of my current living situation. Of course, distraction has been available at every place I’ve lived—the difference lies in what kinds of distraction are available and prevalent. Ultimately, the reality of distraction comes down not to the specific place I’m living, but my own behavior and mentality. The simple truth is that I tend toward distraction, in ways that can border on, and even slip into, addiction. I’ve known this about myself for awhile now. For instance, I spent a good chunk of my childhood addicted to television, consuming it for hours on end and losing much my life to the flickering images of easy emotional comfort. I grew overweight and depressed watching TV, which tended to reinforce my addiction. It wasn’t until I started to play basketball that I began to watch less (but still plenty of) TV and dropped quite a bit of weight, playing myself into a healthier state.

Coincidentally, basketball is my current distraction. Not playing it, though, but watching it on TV—which is available in the place I’m living. The NBA playoffs are in full swing and I’ve been watching them for a month now. Anyone who happens to be familiar with the NBA knows that, up until the championship series, there is generally one or more games on every single night. And while I certainly haven’t watched every game, I’ve watched enough that I’ve given a majority of nights over to this particular distraction.

While I don’t consider watching basketball a sin of the highest degree, it is most certainly a distraction from the multitude of goals I have for myself this year, particularly with the gardening season in full swing. I work two jobs (though even between the two, they don’t make for a full 40 hour work week) and am trying to get a large garden going. I’m also writing this blog and aiming to get a full compliment of homesteading activities in place. Add into all that my propensity for reading, a desire for semi-regular socializing, the urge to revive my fiction writing, household chores, cooking, and the fact that I’m the sort of person who enjoys and benefits from a decent amount of rest or recreational time to think and reflect, and I’m looking at a mighty busy schedule—provided I follow through at least somewhat on all these goals. Such a schedule requires not just a general lack of significant distraction, but also an avoidance of negative, patterned behavior.

Except that significant distraction and negative, patterned behavior is exactly what I’ve provided myself throughout much of the last month.

Watching basketball most nights not only took away from the various aforementioned activities, but worked to slip me into a pattern of negative behavior that saw me actively avoiding much of that work. I still did my regular jobs, of course, and kept up with my obligations to others, but the work that depended on my own personal motivation began to fall by the wayside. Aside from watching basketball, I spent more time clicking around aimlessly on the internet. I started to fall into a trap that I know too well, in which I shirk certain duties for a bit too long, causing me to then double down and avoid them out of guilt for having not already taken care of them. It’s a bad pattern of behavior to get into and I fell head on into it.

Now, before I roundly flog myself, I will note that I did accomplish some things. I worked up a couple beds in the hoop house and planted tomatoes. I started to go up to the farm I lived at last year for some socializing with newly arrived WWOOFers. My work hours picked up a bit. But there still were many days with multiple free hours during which I could have done more work on the garden or experimented with some homesteading, written posts for this blog, responded more readily to comments, did some reading, or revived my long-dormant fiction writing ways. There was no shortage of productive work I could have been doing; just a shortage of motivation to do it.

This is an interesting phenomenon to think about. I don’t think I’m particularly alone here in America in falling into this trap. While I know plenty of people who are much better at getting to work than I am, I also have seen countless others who lose an incredible number of hours to television or the internet, video games, movies or other distracting media. At the risk of sounding like a broken record—but keeping within the theme of this blog—I can’t help but see the tie to an overabundant lifestyle. Much as it’s bizarre to speak of voluntary poverty as a challenge, it’s a bit bizarre to speak of doing the work that needs to be done as a challenge. This isn’t because work can’t be hard—it certainly can be, though it can also be invigorating and joyous—but because we live in an overly abundant society in which distractions are available and pervasive. Furthermore, we live in a society in which we are cultured to partake in these distractions at every possible point, and at the expense of a more meaningful and satisfying life. This is bizarre not just because of its ability to disconnect us from good work and good living, but also because it’s rooted in an abundant wealth that provides the possibility of our turning away from the necessary work of making our living, instead outsourcing it to the industrial economy.

That’s odd. Every other animal goes about making itself a basic living and acting out fairly natural behaviors. Humans, on the other hands—in recent centuries—have gained access to amazing amounts of temporary wealth and resources and used that odd happenstance to specialize to an unprecedented degree and plunge a significant percentage of the population into a life that centers, as much as anything, around manufactured distraction. The circus is forever in town and we’re handed a loaf of bread and a ticket to the main event each day after our allotted work schedule. Our agency plummets, our unease rises, and society crows about how all its ducks are in a row, even as the ducks teeter and topple. Every night the circus tent looks a bit more ragged and the loaf of bread is smaller, but we continue to watch the ever-more-chaotic show.

How odd, then, that as I write this blog about skipping the circus, breaking away from the allotted work schedule and at least occasionally baking your own bread, I found myself suddenly spending more and more nights at the circus, unhappy and disappointed in myself, yet still somehow enthralled by the spectacle. It’s nothing new for me; I’ve spent much my life vacillating between activities that are a distraction from larger goals and the necessary work of achieving those goals.

It’s been a long road for me, getting away from the spectacle and distraction, and I’m only partway down it. I take occasional detours. I get discouraged by the long haul and at times explore a side path, even if I know I need to stay focused on the long term goal. Not to mention—and I’m going to be talking about this more down the line—I live in this house alone and it’s hard not having a partner to help keep me on track. I’m most effective in keeping my obligations to others. When I have only to keep an obligation to myself, I’m far more likely to fail. I think that reality grows out of feedback patterns as much as anything else. I don’t tend toward having a dominant will. It shows up at times, granted—I can get on a tear under the right conditions—but I’m far more likely to go with the flow, to move within the current. That makes this path much harder, as the cultural and societal current is very much going in the opposite direction from where I want to go.

That’s why it’s important for me to craft a different sort of life, featuring different pillars of support and encouragement than our standard society offers. I need others around me who understand and at least somewhat support what I’m doing. I need the natural feedback that the land and the seasons offer. I need those glorious moments of accomplishment that confirm the beauty and necessity of what I’m doing. I need sunny and warm days, or enthralling storms, or the quiet doings of the many other creatures around me, always somewhere within my view, ready to remind me of what’s real and honest and important. I need nights of good socialization, with drinks and campfires and home cooked pizzas and the ease of a night on the farm, the soft glory of a warm summer evening, laughter and shared experience and a place where this life is normal, not bizarre and contradictory.

I also may need, on occasion, the promise and opportunity of a 90 by 40 foot patch of tilled earth staring me in the face. As I wrote in the last post, it was the sudden and unexpected sight of that soil on a warm and sunny day a couple weeks ago that brought me back to a good place. The farmer within me responded with a surprising ferocity and I grew giddy at the thought of what I might be able to do with that gardening space. Since then, I’ve planted potatoes, lettuce, chard, kale, cabbage, broccoli, spinach, parsley—and I keep adding more tomato plants in the hoop house and will soon be getting in peppers, summer and winter squash, a couple globe artichokes, basil, direct-seeded carrots and beets and, well, so much more. I’m a bit slow going on the garden, but every time I get out there and work on it, it brings me a joy and confirmation and sense of purpose that just resonates throughout me. It’s so, so good. It’s so much better than an evening spent watching basketball.

However, I’m still doing that on occasion. Should I? I don’t know—it’s debatable. But I’m watching the Western Conference Finals, which is playing every other night. On Tuesday, I watched it after a long day of building fence and hauling wood, followed up by a few garden maintenance activities. It felt earned at that point and I watched without guilt. Yet, at the same time, my intention to write this post after the game ended gave way to the fatigue brought on by the long day of work. If I had skipped the game, I likely would have finished this post and had it up Tuesday evening. So there are trade offs.

Yet the distractions aren’t going to go away anytime soon. Much of it may yet go away in my lifetime, but I’m not going to get the easy out of all these societal distractions suddenly no longer being available. I’m going to have to either make them more unavailable to me or become better at avoiding them, at choosing the good and necessary work. Or I’m going to have to fail in my goals. These really are my options and I think they’re the options for many people attempting a path similar to mine.

Voluntary poverty, voluntary simplicity, a simpler way of living, a life lived with less resources—whatever you want to call it, it necessarily involves a lot of work, much of which is not sanctioned by our society. It’s the sort of good work that the media-based distractions so prevalent in our society are designed to lead us away from. A life with more agency, more community, and more good work is a life that leads one to spend less, to be less dependent on the industrial economy, and to tend toward a greater degree of self-determination and, I dare say, a greater degree of skepticism toward the so-called leaders in our society. There’s a reason that all this distraction exists: it serves the existing power structures well. That’s not to say it’s a vast conspiracy, as I don’t believe it is. It’s just that there’s money to be made, a system to be maintained, and power to be held onto and the various distractions available to us in America and in many other industrialized nations serve those goals. They arise naturally out of the system.

As such, any attempt to live one’s life in a scaled back and more self-sufficient manner is going to necessarily involve divesting oneself of many of those distractions. They reinforce behavioral and thought patterns that are antithetical to voluntary poverty and consistently reinforce the values of a society that is actively hostile to such a life. I speak from way too much experience on this topic. In the coming weeks, I’m going to use that experience to explore some of the ways in which our society offers up distraction, how we can go about avoiding those distractions, and how we can turn the natural desires and needs that those distractions target away from the destructive fulfillment that society at large offers and toward a more human-centered set of behaviors. I’ll be exploring different forms of media, what they’ve become in our industrial society, and in what ways they might serve as a healthy part of a community. Then I’ll be turning this all back to an exploration of the necessity of human community in a world of restricted wealth and resources.

That’s the goal, anyway. We’ll see how many detours and side paths I discover on my way there.

Posted May 31, 2012 by Joel Caris in How To Be Poor

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A Matter of Habit   15 comments

I am very good at avoiding work.

I think many of us are. I don’t say that to absolve myself, because this is one of my key challenges and I don’t intend to avoid the responsibility of it. Further, I know people who are very good at diving into work and busting their ass. I currently live with just such a person and she impresses the hell out of me. Yet, many of us—even those who do insane amounts of work—are also quite good at avoiding work. For me, it’s very tempting to fire up the laptop and get on the internet rather than study something challenging. It’s easy to settle into a good book when I should be accomplishing some other task, working my body in some way.

It’s also easy for me to not write. I’ve loved to write since the third grade, when my fantastic teacher, Mrs. Edwards, implemented a mandatory half hour of daily writing after completing a workshop on building students’ writing skills. We could write whatever we wanted and, during those sessions, I quickly fell in love with the art of storytelling, beginning a long story about the luckiest kid in the world. It wasn’t a brilliant story, but it helped me figure out the art of narrative and started me on the path of a life of sporadic writing.

Up to that point, I had imagined being a veterinarian when I grew up. Over the next couple years, that dream morphed into becoming a published writer. As I became enamored with the young adult horror genre (and obsessed with Christopher Pike) I started to write similar stories. I wrote a short novel in sixth grade titled Revenge and soon after that began my next project, Nightmares. I convinced myself I would become a bestselling author, and suspected it would happen before I was done with high school. It was an ambitious plan and became derailed by only one small oversight: I largely stopped writing.

Granted, even if I had continued to write, I imagine I wouldn’t have become a bestselling young adult horror writer by the age of, say, seventeen. However, I didn’t even give myself the chance. I never finished Nightmares and after that, I would often think of ideas for new stories and novels but rarely actually write them, and generally only when a deadline for school prompted my necessary completion of the story. What I discovered during that period of my life was that, as much as I loved to write, it was work. Sometimes it flowed effortlessly, but even more often it would be a struggle to get going. Often, the words came out wrong or I didn’t know where to take a story next. Sometimes I would write something that seemed brilliant; more often I would write something mundane and disjointed. It became easier to watch TV or read a book than write—and so that was what I did.

Of course, the more I failed to write, the harder it became. The longer I waited, the more the urgency of whatever idea I had come up with faded and the more challenging it became to string together effective sentences. As work, writing requires practice, and I had stopped practicing. That made it harder, creating a negative feedback loop that reduced the frequency of my writing to the point that, eventually, I started to mirthlessly refer to myself as a writer who didn’t write. Ever that was a lie, of course. I wasn’t a writer at all.

This process has played itself out in my life multiple times, though the details vary. As I said at the beginning, I’m good at avoiding work. It’s a terrible skill to have, especially in a world full of tempting distractions. I’ve come to believe that the many distractions our society and culture provides—the internet, television, movies, reality shows, celebrity culture, sports, gambling, so much more (and understand, I’m not saying all of these things are devoid of usefulness, though some of them arguably are)—serve at least partly the function of distracting us from the murderous outcomes of the way we live our lives. Our levels of affluence and consumption are devastating the world we live in, enslaving other humans and non-human creatures, ripping apart ecosystems, destroying traditional cultures and risking the future of all living beings (except probably rats and cockroaches.) To go on with this way of life, which is simultaneously stripped of much of its meaning and fulfillment, is to be necessarily distracted from its realities and consequences. In turn, we then are distracted from good work and shielded from the idea of what good work even is. This means that we often fail to do such work and instead spend our time engulfed in meaningless distraction.

For the last few days, I’ve felt this intensely. I’ve been trying to write a new blog post since Friday, to an obvious lack of success. I have instead spent a good chunk of the last few days poking around on the internet—wasting, for many intents and purposes, my very life. I’ve not been doing what I idealistically want to do. I’ve wasted hours absorbing largely useless information and distraction when I could have been writing, studying or doing. I’m good at this wasting of time. I wish I wasn’t.

The future we face is one in which we are going to have to ruthlessly cut out such distractions so that we get done the work that desperately needs doing. Hell, it’s the present we face, as well. Enumerating and breaking down that work is part of this blog’s point. But so is going over the process of getting there, which is a process I’m very much in. I think there are many people out there who, like me, are good at avoiding work. Hopefully, they are less good at it, but I imagine the skill is there, for it’s one of the more common skills in our current society. Yet it’s one that we need to abandon and we need to do it as fast as possible. There is too much good work that needs doing—that desperately needs doing. I can’t emphasize this enough. We would be very smart to avoid the consequences of not getting that work done, no matter how much the dominant culture provides us with easily-accessible distractions (and more importantly, no matter how easy it is for us to allow ourselves those distractions.)

The blog post I’ve been attempting to write for the last two days is, theoretically, about working with animals. I have some thoughts on that, based both in recent and years past experiences. I think they’re good thoughts to share. But I’ve failed in writing that post and, in fact, never even started it. Last night, long after the sunlight had faded, as I grew too tired to even fool myself into thinking I might yet write the long-delayed post, I felt a certain disgust at what I had done. I had spent hours on the internet, reading some good things but basically avoiding the work I needed to do. I had lost another day and I very much felt the reality that it was gone forever—that I was poorer now for having lost that time. I had impoverished myself, and not in the smart and effective way that I will be advocating on this blog over the course of this year. I had impoverished myself spiritually and mentally, and I had impoverished myself in habit. I had, over the previous day, avoided the work I knew I needed to do and, in so doing, had made it harder to get back to that necessary work.

For work, ultimately, is about habit. Good work can be a real joy to do. It can also be a great challenge. But it’s very satisfying and I never regret doing it. My avoidance of good work is not about avoiding pain, misery or drudgery so much as it is a weakness of habit. I fall easily into distraction and its instant pleasures. However, I gain far more from good work than I do from those instant pleasures. The tendency toward the easy escape, I think, is as much in the habit as anything else. It all in that initial moment of deciding what I’m going to do next. It’s very easy, in that moment, to start engaging in distraction. It’s much harder to start engaging in good work. But once good work has been engaged, it’s far more satisfying.

A focus of mine this year, then, is to work on building the habit of engaging in good work rather than distraction. These habits, after all, or going to have to be my own doing. If I want to have an excellent garden this year, which is most surely the plan, then I’m going to have to get myself started on the work of gardening. If I want to regularize a series of homesteading activities, which is also the plan, then I have to do that via my own motivation. The same for regularly writing this blog, doing non-blog writing, studying, meditating and building my salvage skills. All of these are goals I’ve set for myself this year, and all of these will happen only if I motivate myself to do it. They aren’t paid work, I don’t have a boss, and there’s no one who’s going to scold or fire me if I don’t follow through (aside from, I might hope, the readers of this blog.) It’s up to me to build my own habits of work, upon which I’ll better be able to build the life I want.

This post right here, then, is one of the small successes of that habit, though it’s a qualified one. I eventually set aside the post I planned to write on working with animals and instead started the introductory post to my How To Be Poor series. I worked on that for much of today, alternating between it and occasionally the internet—a small failure, each time, of habit. But then I realized at a certain point that that post wasn’t coming together, either, so I decided it made sense to start again on something new, something that felt like maybe it would come together. And that is this post, which is today’s small success.

The last two days I largely wasted. Today was a partial success. Tomorrow will be better. This is the task at hand: a slow building of the habit of good work. It’s just as important as understanding the work that needs to be done. Later tonight or tomorrow I’ll return to the post I began today but did not finish and I’ll finish it. Beyond that, I’ll perhaps write some more, and I’ll continue to read Steve Solomon’s Gardening When it Counts and planning my garden. There will be more good work, as well, and minimal instant pleasures. That’s the goal, and the more I tend to that goal, the more I’ll habituate myself to good work and the easier it will be to accomplish the tasks at hand. For there are many tasks at hand and each one avoided is another bit of impoverishment I can no longer afford.

Posted January 15, 2012 by Joel Caris in Work

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