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Wage Slave Rebel Dispatch
Category Archives: Simple Living
The Accidental Minimalist and the Truth About The Internet Lifestyle
I have been afforded the privilege of waking up without an alarm clock, something most people can only dream of. On beautiful, sunny summer mornings I wake up anywhere between 9am and noon and I go for a walk. I enjoy each and every day. When I work, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s not…
Enoughism
As is true for most Americans and likely most people in a late-stage capitalist society, during childhood I developed an unquenchable desire for more. This isn’t a characteristic explicitly taught, but one that is both partially innate and evident enough in others that it can be nurtured by companies for profit and imitated by children to acquire normality. Big is better than small, tall is better than short, new is better than old, more is better than less.
This view is so pervasive and rarely challenged primarily because our economy depends on it. As long as people want more, they will work more to earn more to buy more so that more can be produced and the wealthy can become wealthier and we can maintain our happy little status quo. For this reason, materialism is our religion. In those times that others might pray, we buy. In those times that others might seek enlightenment, we seek the nearest Starbucks. Things make us happy. Things define us. Things fill the gaping voids in our souls and in our lives.
My Quest for Ignorance
I’ve been intending to write this post for nearly an hour now. Why hadn’t I been able to start? Procrastination? No, it wasn’t procrastination. It was because of my irrational desire to be drenched in irrelevant, ineffective, incomplete, up-to-date information.
As I was sitting down at the computer I noticed my Twitter client had just updated. Someone retweeted an agreeable quote that I thought worthy of a retweet myself, others were having arguments that I rooted for and followed closely for ten minutes, but wouldn’t dare participate in. Such-and-such had just published a new blog post, so I headed over to their site and read that. While writing a comment, my phone vibrated and let out a little chime. Like some bizarre human variation of Pavlov’s dog, I reached for it, salivating at the prospect of whatever untold knowledge would be held within whatever message I’d just received.
And now… well, now I’m no closer to the life I want, no more intelligent than anyone else, no closer to finishing my projects and, to make matters worse, I have a disgustingly accurate and elaborate time line of the goings-on of the Gosselin house ingrained into my mind. Those are neurons I’ll likely never get back.
In Pursuit of Being
On several occasions in my writing, both on this site and elsewhere on the web, I’ve mentioned my need for ‘Flow’. More often than not, readers have interpreted it to mean workflow or the speed at which I can get things accomplished or the ease with which I can switch from one task to another. In fact, I’m not entirely certain anyone has ever actually fully understood what I’ve meant because I’ve never laid out an adequate definition or pointed anyone in the right direction.
In this post I hope to clarify what Flow is, why it’s beneficial and, more importantly, why it is absolutely necessary to your growth and success. To lay this out, we need to start from the beginning…
Save Money By Thinking Like A Marketer
I like to shop and own nice things, but being a minimalist, I don’t own much and tend to avoid spur-of-the-moment purchases with ease.
One friend, taking in a fancy to a relatively expensive new pair of shoes I had purchased, recently asked me: ‘How the hell can you afford to buy things like that?’
My secret is no secret at all: I can afford to buy nice things because I don’t make low-value purchases. A low-value purchase is anything that is of low intrinsic value or even just totally unnecessary for me, personally.
So how does one avoid making low-value purchases? Every time you are in the position to make a purchase, you are up against billions of advertising dollars wielded by people much smarter than any of us who are determined to convince you to buy that t-shirt. Or those earrings. Or that snow cone. Or those Beanie Babies.
Not only that, but every single moment of every day is a potential consumer experience. You can just as easily buy a new digital camcorder from your recliner as from the local Best Buy, and if you really need to get your fix for the day, why not use your iPhone to One-Click purchase a new pair of running shoes from the bathroom? How easy is that?
So that’s the consumer environment we’re living in, and I deal with the same temptations as everyone else. How do I dodge the marketing missiles, unravel the urge to acquire and pulverize the passive payment predisposition?
I learn as much as I can about marketing.