Enoughness

Happy Birthday

youngdave — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:10:18 +0000

I went to Walgreens to buy a birthday card for my Dad yesterday and it was a terrible experience. For one thing, the greeting card section of the store was totally ransacked, a regular occurrence at this particular store, but that is beside the point. The greeting card “industry” is the point. Do we really need a greeting card industry? Wouldn’t it be more meaningful to write a few words of your own. I typically try to find cards that don’t have any words in them, plain cards or very simply stated cards to which I can add my own sentiments, but none of these were to be found yesterday at Walgreens. I could find cards that played songs and recited lines from movies, cards with pop-up, three dimensional dioramas, cards with long winded and honey sweet monologues that sounded nothing like anything I would actually say. Finally I bought a card that was written in Spanish. Freed from the difficulty of trying to find a card that sounded like me, I could buy a card that I liked the look of. My Dad won’t know what it says either, but he will be able to read the thoughts that I wrote down in the margin and hopefully that will mean more to him anyway than the canned verse he would otherwise have gotten. The thing that gets to me, and has for a long time, is that there is a greeting card industry in the first place. This is a prime example of a business or group of businesses engineering an artificial need. It is so firmly ingrained in our culture that you have to go to the card store or pharmacy and buy these things to send or give to your friends and relatives for every holiday or special occasion that you seem like some kind of ruffian if you don’t do it. But why should Hallmark or American Greetings get to put three to five dollars of my money in their pockets every time I need to say happy birthday or get well soon or congratulations? It’s not the money, I’m not that cheap. If I could find a decent card I wouldn’t mind paying for it, or better yet if the money was going to some legitimate artist that had created a card that I thought was truly appropriate for the occasion, I would gladly shell out the cash. But to give some faceless corporation money for the privelege of sending someone a card that expresses a sentiment that was not likely mine in the first place, I don’t think I can do that anymore. If you are a friend or relative of mine and you don’t receive a greeting card from me, don’t think I forgot about you. I’m just ideologically unable to send them anymore. Instead I’m making a vow to resurrect letter writing. I’ll write you a letter, on paper, and send it to you in lieu of a sappy card, how’s that?

Selfish Americans are saving when they should be spending

youngdave — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:38:36 +0000

There were a couple of interesting articles in the New York Times this past Saturday. I yanked a couple of excerpts from them because they point to an underlying problem that we have in this country, a problem of perception. There is no doubt that the collapse of the housing bubble and the recession that followed it have had devastating consequences for Americans, indeed for people everywhere as we seem to have touched off a global economic retraction. This has no doubt caused much undue suffering and I don’t mean to make light of the hardship that has befallen many households, both here and abroad. The problem, as I see it, is that there was a pretty plain lesson to be learned from all of this and a lot of people don’t seem to be learning it. It seems that economists and politicians won’t be happy until we get back to where we were before the start of the “great recession,” but the reality of the situation is that getting back to where we were will only set us up for more hardship. It seems pretty obvious now that when an entire culture learns to live in a manner that is entirely unsustainable, learns to live beyond it’s collective means through wildly free credit based largely on ridiculously overblown real estate prices and gambling on the likelihood of risky borrowers to default on their loans, bad things can happen. So maybe we should try something different.

In an article titled Jobs Report Highlights Shaky U.S. Recovery, Peter S. Goodman details the facts of a recent report on our unemployment situation. It’s interesting how the news vacillates from day to day. One day, signs point to the end of the recession being near, the next day it’s all doom and gloom again. I thought this bit was interesting: “… After years of borrowing against homes and cashing in stock to spend in excess of their incomes, many Americans are tapped out. Austerity and saving have replaced spending and investment in many households, constraining the economy.” Taken out of the context of the article, that sounds like good news. But I guess if the world is waiting for us to spend our way out of this situation, like we’ve always done in the past, it’s a bad thing. He goes on to say that “As many Americans transition from living on home equity loans to sustaining themselves on paychecks, weekly pay continues to effectively shrink: Over the last year, average hourly earnings for rank-and-file workers — some 80 percent of the labor force — have increased by 2.5 percent. But average weekly earnings have expanded by only 0.7 percent, less than the increase in the cost of living, because employers have slashed working hours.In September, the average workweek edged down by one-tenth of an hour, to 33 hours.” Again, it seems like transitioning from living on home equity loans to living on your paycheck would be something to be commended, but I’m no economist. Personally, I think that having the average work week notch down even further might be a good thing. Maybe if Americans didn’t spend all of their time to trying to make enough money to pay for all of the stuff they’ve already bought and don’t need, they might be a little happier.

In another article in that same day’s paper, titled Retailers Expect Flat Christmas Sales This Year, Stephanie Rosenbloom writes that consumer spending is not likely to improve until the unemployment rate falls, maybe not until next year. In the meantime, “Analysts say that many consumers are still worried about their jobs, their stock portfolios and the value of their homes. They remain hamstrung by a tight credit market.” Isn’t this also a good thing? Enforced fiscal responsibility might be a good start, to, you know, stop being stupid.
Today I read this article, again from the New York Times, that was pointed out on the Rowdy Kittens blog. It was nice to see that a lot of people smarter than me think that maybe picking up the consumerist slack is not in this country’s best interest. I like this fact, from Bernard Baumohl, a lot: “Indeed, the amount American consumers spend in one year is greater than the entire G.D.P. of China, India, Canada and Russia — combined!” That might not be a compliment. I guess what this all means is that unless we get back on that horse that threw us, China is going to be sitting on a lot of cheap plastic crap.

What is enoughness

youngdave — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:51:21 +0000

I thought that I was the originator of the word enoughness but it turns out that I’m not. A google search of the word turned up 35,700 results. So much for my cleverostity. The word has been used in print by such esteemed authors Bill McKibben, John Naish, and Vicki Robin. Still, I like the word and I think it effectively sums up my philosophy. I think that enough is a good way to live your life. If you stop eating when you’ve had enough, you won’t get fat. If you stop buying when you’ve got enough, you’ll save money. If you stop working when you’ve made enough, you’ll live well. Enough has always been around but it seems to have fallen out of fashion for our culture in the last 100 years or so. There are many reasons for for this and I’ll explore some of them in future posts. More important than the why, however, is the how – how we can move forward through the too muchness of our world to the enoughness that can satisfy us on a deeper level. I think that right now, in the midst of the “great recession,” we have a perfect opportunity to re-institute enoughness and I think that the survival of our civilization depends on it. Hopefully, my humble blog will provoke some thought and some action. Not too much thought or action, just enough.