Asceticism, or something like it

SDF user jynx replied[1] to my "delusional ambo fantasies" post (and so did

slugmax[2], thanks to you both!) stating that his "fantasies typically revolve

around living in a cabin like it was 1820". Actually, this is far closer to my

most recent fantasies, too, rather than being an ambulance officer or anything

else.

For I suppose something like a year now I have been increasingly interested in

a only vaguely formed cloud of ideas surrounding asceticism, simple living,

voluntary poverty, self-sufficiency, technoskepticism, so-called "appropriate

technology" and a lot more.

This has been motivated by a lot of things, and while I've used this phlog

previously to discuss things that have lead me to this line of thinking, I

haven't explicitly talked much about it in and of itself, although I always

intended to. As should be clear, I don't like what people are tending to call

"surveillance capitalism", I don't like nebulous cloud services which can be

changed or turned off at a whim leaving the user with nothing, I do not like

planned obsolence, I do not like e-waste or non-sustainability in general. When

you really don't like something, I you broadly have two options. One is to

actively try to make the thing better (e.g. build your own alternative

technology which doesn't have the misfeatures of the mainstream), and the other

is instead to refrain from using the thing you don't like. Well, you have a

third option, which is to complain loudly about how you don't like something and

then continue to use it anyway, but I'm talking about options which are

ultimately satisfactory to the soul.

Realistically, a person can only hope to make much progress with the first

approach in a limited number of spheres, which means that the malcontent person

who intends to take their convinctions seriously ends up doing an awful lot of

doing without. Perhaps to the extent of living like its the 1820s, or perhaps

not (jynx, I'm not erudite enough to know what happened in the 1830s to make

that your cut-off line, feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to discsus

it), perhaps not quite that far back, eschewing proprietary drivers on a modern

computer perhaps leaving you stuck in the very worst case with a distinctly 90s

experience.

It's often not as bad as one might think.

Many of you are probably familiar with the idea of the "hedonic treadmill". You

get some shiny new thing in your life, perhaps at great expense either to your

wallet, or your time, or your liberty, and it makes you very happy because of

how great it is and how much it has improved your life. And then after you've

owned it for a week it simply makes you happy. And then after a month or two

you have assimilated it into the background model of your life and you barely

even notice it, and if you want to feel very happy again you have to buy another

shiny new thing. The treadmill never ends and you end up with a house full of

expensive stuff but you don't ultimately feel any better about your life.

I have long harboured the suspicion that this actually works just as well in

reverse, although people don't seem to talk about it much. Stopping the

hedonic treadmill is usually most people's goal, but consciously running it

backward seems something not many are interested in. But surely once you get

rid of some material luxury in your life, you agonise over how much harder or

more boring or whatever things are for a month, then you adapt to it and get on

with your life and you're eventually not noticably less happy than you were

before hand. You occasionally hear this about people, e.g. giving up Facebook,

or replacing their smartphone with a dumbphone, or stopping watching television.

What happens if you rinse and repeat the process? But that kind of thing really

could just be the tip of an iceberg. How far back can you go while remaining

satisfied?

Maybe the answer would, in fact, turn out that one is happy living in a barrel.

Even if that were the case, one would still have to justify why one would want

to roll one's life back to that stage. The entire point of the hedonic

treadmill, whether it runs forward or in reverse, is that you can be happy no

matter where you end up on this spectrum. So why choose a barrel over an 1820s

cabin or the life of the 1990s? I guess it comes down what you care about most

in life, what your principles are. If the greatest evil in today's world to you

is surveillance capitalism, you would probably be pretty happy with life from

the mid 90s. Which seems appalingly primitive and limited compared to today,

but the fact is that plenty of people, myself included, lived exactly that life

and surived it just fine. If you are also concerned about environmental issues,

or the ills of consumerism, you will probably have to roll the clock back quite

a bit further to be happy.

I dislike all the things I listed above, and I'm not quite sure how much of

modern life I'd have to deprive myself of to be 100% satisfied in these regards.

But I have another motivation for this thought experiment and for cabin

fantasies too, and this is a quote from Henry David Thoreau (who I started

reading somewhere in the middle of the time I've been thinking along these

lines) which I can't actually find right now but which goes something to the

effect of "no man makes a greater mistake than he who squanders the best part of

his life in order to secure it". And I think this is very true. The default

mode of existence today, and the one I exist in, is to spend most of one's

waking hours working at a job that, even if one doesn't outright hate, one

generally doesn't actually want to spend most of their waking hours doing,

simply because the alternative is starving. But there are surely different ways

of living which avoid this trade off. They don't even necessarily involve

living a self-sufficient life in a cabin in the woods. If a modern professional

worker making a modern professional's wage voluntarily lived a life which would

seem ludicrously ascetic by modern standards but actually would have been

perceived as entirely acceptable by 1920's working class standards, which we

know for a fact will not kill a person, they could probably save an obscene

amount of money and retire decades earlier than typical, meaning that they

perhaps get to spend more of their waking hours doing what they want to do than

doing something else simply in order to ensure a steady supply of waking hours.

I think dramatically shifting work-life balance in the direction of life is well

worth the contemplation and actual empirical investigation of how little

material comfort you can be happy with.

This line of thinking gets most exciting when you realise that treating the

problem as one of picking some arbitrary point in history, be it 1990 or 1820

and living precisely like people did at that time is a bogus constraint. If

there are some aspects of life in 2017 that do not offend your moral

sensibilities, you are, of course, permitted to take them with you! Even

discarding material/technological advances, simply living in the 1820s with

access to the full suite of modern human knowledge would be a very different

experience to living it the first time around. It's a lot of fun, for me

anyway, to imagine strange hybrid timelines. Some people already live in

fairly mundane hybrid timelines - I have no doubt there are people alive today

who don't own a television, a microwave, or a car, which is in those respects a

kind of pre-1950ish (I guess?) lifestyle, but who certainly do have a computer

and a high speed wireless internet connection, which is a very post-2000

lifestyle. If one of you is reading this, please drop me a line! I'm not

really aware of anybody living a life that is something like 20% 2017 and 80%

1820s, but there is no reason one could not. I suppose off-grid types and some

more extreme prepper types are probably living the most fleshed-out hybrid

timeline lives today.

I don't really know what my ultimate fantasy life is like, but I suspect it

looks ascetic from the standards of 2017. But I hope to find out more about

what it looks like, through both contemplation and experience, in the near

future, and to share this journey here. Thoughts and questions from the

like-minded (or even the non-like-minded!) are welcome.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/jynx//cgi-bin/slerm.cgi%3f20171014.post

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/phlog/more-on-being-a-paramedic