Imagine relatively few possessions

The New York Times recently published a human-interest story about an Austin family — Aimee and Jeff Harris and their two kids — who are professing to get rid of most of their possessions.


I'm not sure how a family in Texas gets a long article in a New York newspaper devoted to their lifestyle change. But whatever. Let's see what exactly they're doing.

They say on their blog:

We have no need of a 12 piece, breakable set of dishes and will replace them with enamel coated metal dishes, cups, bowls for traveling and camping with. I have no need of high heeled shoes and purses and will replace them with some sturdy Goodwill boots and a back pack. Things of that nature.

I certainly can't fault them for giving away so much to charity. But for a family who's pitching themselves as abandoning possessions, they sure sound like they have a lot of shopping to do.

They're also going to give away their current cars ... and get new cars (again, not exactly monastic behavior) ... and drive all the way from their current home in Texas to Vermont (where they've never been) to start a new life. I'm not sure how driving across the country — which is to say, using up the world's resources and unnecessarily contributing to carbon emissions, just to give a partial list of the evils of driving — is part of simplifying your life and returning to nature. Americans are so obsessed with our car culture that using a car doesn't even register as something that goes against the ideals of simplicity, counterculture, anti-consumerism. Thus, the Times write-up never mentions their car situation, and I doubt that the writers had a second thought about this. Or if they did, it was quickly dismissed: "Come on, you have to have a car!"

I'm not sure exactly what their financial situation is, but it's probably pretty cushy in the first place for them to even consider doing this. Aimee says that part of what's making their project feasible is that Jeff will be able to keep his full-time job because he can do it from anywhere with high-speed internet access. How much are they really vouching for the idea of leading an ascetic life if it's powered by technology in a way that would have been unthinkable just a couple decades ago? You know, it took a lot of people, using a lot of money and possessions, to get to this point.

The family also reminds me of Jason, who's described in the book Your Money or Your Life (blogged previously). He had a countercultural, anti-money life philosophy.* He deliberately avoided getting a "real job." The result was that the lack of income caught up with him, forcing him to flail away looking for any odd jobs he could come up with since he was so desperate to have enough money to get by. His radical ethos caused him to be all the more tied down by material things:

Jason's "money isn't important" attitude was just as limiting as [his girlfriend] Nedra's search for happiness in tangible possessions. Because he refused to participate in the standard cultural job-and-money game, his choices in life were severely limited. He found that he spent more time in making do and making trades than he would have in working at a steady job.

I of course wish the Harrises the best — particularly the 1- and 5-year-old children, who, like all children, aren't consenting to be confined by their parents' values. But who's to say that the ultra-austere focus on minimizing possessions won't just lead this family to become all the more fixated on possessions? After all, you need some things to survive, and this project seems to emphasize and even glorify those relatively few (but surely still numerous) possessions.

If that ends up happening with this family, or if they just plain don't go through with it, I'm guessing that won't get written up in the New York Times.

* In case you have the book, the character appears throughout Chapter 2.

Double negative

I didn't set out to blog about grand themes, but that's how it's been shaping up. I can't imagine sustaining a rate of a post every couple days, always on a topic of life-or-death importance. At some point I'll either have to slow down the pace or lighten up the subject matter. But for now, here's another post on life, death, etc.

Having recently graduated from law school to embark on a career, I figured it's an opportune time for me to read up on managing one's personal finances. The consensus seems to be that Your Money or Your Life is the book to get, at least for the big picture of how your money should fit into your life. (Go here for the official "detailed summary" of the whole book.)

So I'm reading it. I'm in no position to critique the book as a whole -- I'm just a couple chapters in. But I do have a couple problems with it. Not only do the authors, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (hereinafter YMOYL), set out to frame your life as negatively as possible (which seems excessive!), but they also botch some basic facts.

They try to break down the amount of time you have left to live. If you're an average 40-year-old, you have 37 years left to live, which is 329,601 hours, which they call "life energy." That's all fine with me. Moving on: "Assuming about half of your time is spent on necessary body maintenance -- sleeping, eating, eliminating, washing and exercising ..." Again, still sounds reasonable -- I have no problem with that assumption. But they go on: "... you have 164,800 hours of life energy" -- that is, only half of the rest of your life -- "remaining for such discretionary uses as:

• your relationship to yourself
• your relationship to others
• your creative expression
• your contribution to your community
• your contribution to the world
• achieving inner peace and ...
• holding down a job." (pp. 55-6)*

You see the problem, right? Now, this is from the revised edition of the book, so no one pointed this out to them in seven years. Assuming they're right that 50% of your time is spent on body maintenance, it doesn't follow that you only have 50% of your time available for things other than body maintenance. You can eat food ... while developing a relationship with someone (or yourself!). You can go for a walk or a run (which, as he says, is body maintenance because it's "exercise") ... while trying to achieve inner peace. You can think creatively in the shower. If you're lucky, you can write a song in your sleep.

The bottom line is they've implicitly eliminated "half of your time" from what counts as your real "life." I don't think that's a minor technicality! As I said, I'm still expecting to get a lot out of this book ... but I have to question whether someone who makes such a consequential calculation error is the person I should be taking advice from about how to make a budget.

This got me thinking about Thomas Nagel's essay Death, from his book Mortal Questions. He asks whether death is really so bad (assuming there's no afterlife).**

Here's Nagel's argument in a nutshell: If death is bad, it is “bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.” His proof of this is that we consider it unfortunate to have a relatively short life, while no one thinks it's unfortunate to be dead for a relatively long period of time. No one would say that Haydn is less fortunate than Schubert because Haydn died in 1809 and has thus been dead for longer than Schubert, who died in 1828.

OK, so death is bad because it takes away life, and life is good. Well, if that's what's bad about death, then death is always bad, because death always takes away your chance at living more life, even if you live to be 100. (This is still Nagel's argument, not mine.) The fact that it's normal to die before you reach 100 should be no consolation: if everyone died in agony, that would plainly be bad even though it would be normal. Death at a ripe old age is really "just a more widespread tragedy" than dying young. And here's the last sentence of the essay: "If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all." That's it! No uplift!

Well, that's about the coldest, most impersonal philosophy of life (let alone death) that I've ever seen. Isn't a whole huge dimension missing from this? Life isn't just some constant that you either have more or less of. It's not just quantity -- it's quality too.*** To point out the obvious, people have different attitudes toward different stages of life. When you expect that something will probably happen (death at an old age at the end of a full life), you're well prepared to accept it. Acceptance is a reasonably good feeling, and feeling good is good. I don't think any further argument is needed to justify a feeling of acceptance (unless it's actively causing harm somehow, e.g. accepting the smell of a gas leak). It may be an arbitrary fact about the world that death at 80 is normal, whereas death at 40 is shocking. But once we take that arbitrary fact as a given, it's not arbitrary to structure our expectations around it.

But that's just what I think, and I'm just a blogger, so what I say has no credibility because it hasn't been checked. If you want to know what the experts think -- the ones who have credibility because their words have been printed on dead trees -- it's: you only have half as much potentially enjoyable life as you thought you had, and ... it will end tragically.

But it's even worse than that. I don't have the space to list all the ways YMOYL tells you your life is not as good as you thought. But suffice it to say that they seem to write off most of your time spent at work, as well as any time running errands. (I'm sure that later on in the book they'll give examples of people who enjoy their jobs, but that's certainly not the picture they've painted so far.) When you add all this up -- or I guess I should say, subtract all this down (?!) -- you really don't have much life left that's enjoyable rather than drudgery. But, as we learn from Nagel, it's all over much too quickly.

Now, aren't Nagel and YMOYL**** both making the same mistake? They both seem to be assuming that experience -- or, in other words, living -- is this fixed thing that's just sitting there, waiting to be objectively analyzed, assessed, weighed. But really, given a particular experience (say, working at your current job), you have tons of flexibility in how you experience it. No matter what you do, you can certainly choose to experience it as meaningless drudgery. (Incidentally, the next essay in Nagel's book is about whether we should see all our endeavors as meaningless.) But unless you have a really low-quality job (I'm thinking coal miner here), it's a pretty good bet that you can decide to just go ahead and be energized by your work, feel a sense of "drive" and "mission."***** OK, I'm making that sound a lot easier than it is, I know. But so far (again, just a couple chapters in), YMOYL makes it sound impossible. And if you can even think about shifting to a more positive mindset for your job, you can certainly do it for walking to the grocery store and buying food to bring home and cook dinner with (all of which the authors would apparently count as wasted time).

I may have an update later, once I've read and absorbed all of YMOYL. But it's 9 steps, and they look like they might take me a while.

* Bullet points and ellipsis in original. [back]

** In addition to excluding the possibility of an afterlife, he also excludes the concerns of people (or things) aside from the person who dies. In other words, he's just asking whether death is subjectively bad for the person who dies, not whether it's an objectively bad thing for the world as a whole. [back]

*** If I'm right about that point, then this has huge implications for a lot of controversial issues. [back]

**** Sorry for the lack of parallelism, but YMOYL is a co-authored book. What was I supposed to say -- "Nagel and Dominguez and Robin both make the same mistake"?! [back]

***** On that topic, I have to eventually read Flow. Without having read it yet, I wouldn't hesitate give it my completely unqualified -- in both senses of the word -- recommendation. [back]