Dikwels hoor 'n mens van predikante en teoloë dat ons sug na uiterlike dinge sleg is. En dan swaai die vinger op die preekstoel met die stem wat verhef word.
In die artikel wat ek vandag in die NYT lees word op 'n ander nie-godsdienstige manier hieroor gepraat. Maar die implikasies vir 'n geestelike bepeinsing oor die onderwerp is waardevol.
'n Mens kan ryk wees, maar arm aan liefde, vriendskap en ondersteuning. Dit weet ons almal. Maar min word 'n bietjie dieper gedink: rykdom kan 'n mens ongelukkig maak. Dit kan jou emosioneel onder hoë druk plaas en jou stress-vlakke deur die dak jaag.
Dit is nie die eerste keer dat ek so iets lees nie. Al hoe meer kom dit in die media na vore dat hoe ryker 'n mens is, hoe meer sorge het jy.
Tyd om goed hieroor na te dink. En as geestelike leiers en mense diepsinniger met ander oor die kwessie te praat en te dink as wat ons deur stereotipering en vinger-wysings gewoond is om te doen.
Die remedie is ook nie net om liefde en verhoudinge te versorg nie. Die heling vir ons oppervlakkigheid kom deur te breek met 'n harde, verbruikersmentaliteit, deur 'n lewe van wonderlike, geseënde eenvoud, deur God se skepping te help versorg en te leer ken, en - belangrik - materiële dinge te sien vir wat hulle is: "dinge."
Hier is die artikel wat my op hierdie geseënde sewende dag dubbel mooi gemaak het:
I LIVE in a
420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have
six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main
dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room
table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I
once did.
Graham Hill
cleaned the inessential items out of his life.
I have come
a long way from the life I had in the late ’90s, when, flush with cash from an
Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff — electronics
and cars and appliances and gadgets.
Somehow this
stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up
consuming me. My circumstances are unusual (not everyone gets an Internet
windfall before turning 30), but my relationship with material things isn’t.
We live in a
world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping
opportunities. Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge
themselves with products.
There isn’t
any indication that any of these things makes anyone any happier; in fact it
seems the reverse may be true.
For me, it
took 15 years, a great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the
inessential things I had collected and live a bigger, better, richer life with
less.
It started
in 1998 in Seattle, when my partner and I sold our Internet consultancy
company, Sitewerks, for more money than I thought I’d earn in a lifetime.
To
celebrate, I bought a four-story, 3,600-square-foot, turn-of-the-century house
in Seattle’s happening Capitol Hill neighborhood and, in a frenzy of
consumption, bought a brand-new sectional couch (my first ever), a pair of $300
sunglasses, a ton of gadgets, like an Audible.com MobilePlayer (one of the
first portable digital music players) and an audiophile-worthy five-disc CD
player. And, of course, a black turbocharged Volvo. With a remote starter!
I was
working hard for Sitewerks’ new parent company, Bowne, and didn’t have the time
to finish getting everything I needed for my house. So I hired a guy named
Seven, who said he had been Courtney Love’s assistant, to be my personal
shopper. He went to furniture, appliance and electronics stores and took
Polaroids of things he thought I might like to fill the house; I’d shuffle
through the pictures and proceed on a virtual shopping spree.
My success
and the things it bought quickly changed from novel to normal. Soon I was numb
to it all. The new Nokia phone didn’t excite me or satisfy me. It didn’t take
long before I started to wonder why my theoretically upgraded life didn’t feel
any better and why I felt more anxious than before.
My life was
unnecessarily complicated. There were lawns to mow, gutters to clear, floors to
vacuum, roommates to manage (it seemed nuts to have such a big, empty house), a
car to insure, wash, refuel, repair and register and tech to set up and keep
working. To top it all off, I had to keep Seven busy. And really, a personal
shopper? Who had I become? My house and my things were my new employers for a
job I had never applied for.
It got
worse. Soon after we sold our company, I moved east to work in Bowne’s office
in New York, where I rented a 1,900-square-foot SoHo loft that befit my station
as a tech entrepreneur. The new pad needed furniture, housewares, electronics,
etc. — which took more time and energy to manage.
AND because
the place was so big, I felt obliged to get roommates — who required more time,
more energy, to manage. I still had the Seattle house, so I found myself
worrying about two homes. When I decided to stay in New York, it cost a fortune
and took months of cross-country trips — and big headaches — to close on the
Seattle house and get rid of the all of the things inside.
I’m lucky,
obviously; not everyone gets a windfall from a tech start-up sale. But I’m not
the only one whose life is cluttered with excess belongings.
In a study
published last year titled “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,”
researchers at U.C.L.A. observed 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and found
that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent
dealing with their belongings. Seventy-five percent of the families involved in
the study couldn’t park their cars in their garages because they were too
jammed with things.
Our fondness
for stuff affects almost every aspect of our lives. Housing size, for example,
has ballooned in the last 60 years. The average size of a new American home in
1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37
people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6
people. This means that we take up more than three times the amount of space
per capita than we did 60 years ago.
Apparently
our supersize homes don’t provide space enough for all our possessions, as is evidenced
by our country’s $22 billion personal storage industry.
What exactly
are we storing away in the boxes we cart from place to place? Much of what
Americans consume doesn’t even find its way into boxes or storage spaces, but
winds up in the garbage.
The Natural
Resources Defense Council reports, for example, that 40 percent of the food
Americans buy finds its way into the trash.
Enormous
consumption has global, environmental and social consequences. For at least 335
consecutive months, the average temperature of the globe has exceeded the
average for the 20th century. As a recent report for Congress explained, this
temperature increase, as well as acidifying oceans, melting glaciers and Arctic
Sea ice are “primarily driven by human activity.” Many experts believe
consumerism and all that it entails — from the extraction of resources to
manufacturing to waste disposal — plays a big part in pushing our planet to the
brink. And as we saw with Foxconn and the recent Beijing smog scare, many of
the affordable products we buy depend on cheap, often exploitive overseas labor
and lax environmental regulations.
Does all
this endless consumption result in measurably increased happiness?
In a recent
study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen linked consumption with
aberrant, antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen found that “Irrespective
of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the
same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and
social disengagement.” Though American consumer activity has increased
substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have flat-lined.
I DON’T know
that the gadgets I was collecting in my loft were part of an aberrant or
antisocial behavior plan during the first months I lived in SoHo. But I was
just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up when I
met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff quickly
came apart.
I followed
her to Barcelona when her visa expired and we lived in a tiny flat, totally
content and in love before we realized that nothing was holding us in Spain. We
packed a few clothes, some toiletries and a couple of laptops and hit the road.
We lived in Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Toronto with many stops in between.
A compulsive
entrepreneur, I worked all the time and started new companies from an office
that fit in my solar backpack. I created some do-gooder companies like We Are
Happy to Serve You, which makes a reusable, ceramic version of the iconic New
York City Anthora coffee cup and TreeHugger.com, an environmental design blog that
I later sold to Discovery Communications. My life was full of love and
adventure and work I cared about. I felt free and I didn’t miss the car and
gadgets and house; instead I felt as if I had quit a dead-end job.
The
relationship with Olga eventually ended, but my life never looked the same. I
live smaller and travel lighter. I have more time and money. Aside from my
travel habit — which I try to keep in check by minimizing trips, combining
trips and purchasing carbon offsets — I feel better that my carbon footprint is
significantly smaller than in my previous supersized life.
Intuitively,
we know that the best stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships,
experiences and meaningful work are the staples of a happy life.
I like
material things as much as anyone. I studied product design in school. I’m into
gadgets, clothing and all kinds of things. But my experiences show that after a
certain point, material objects have a tendency to crowd out the emotional
needs they are meant to support.
I wouldn’t
trade a second spent wandering the streets of Bangkok with Olga for anything
I’ve owned. Often, material objects take up mental as well as physical space.
I’m still a
serial entrepreneur, and my latest venture is to design thoughtfully
constructed small homes that support our lives, not the other way around. Like
the 420-square-foot space I live in, the houses I design contain less stuff and
make it easier for owners to live within their means and to limit their
environmental footprint. My apartment sleeps four people comfortably; I frequently
have dinner parties for 12. My space is well-built, affordable and as
functional as living spaces twice the size. As the guy who started TreeHugger.com,
I sleep better knowing I’m not using more resources than I need. I have less —
and enjoy more.
My space is
small. My life is big.
