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As many of you know, I love thinking and talking about ‘enough’ – about striving for a life of sufficiency. A reader recently pointed me to a couple of websites that provide a good starting point for anyone interested in this concept. The Simpler Way and The Simplicity Collective both share actionable advice about reducing our dependence on consumer culture.
What I’m particularly interested in is how money, and our default attitude of wanting to attain ever more of it, stands in the way of living a content life. What usually happens is that we end up in this self-perpetuating cycle of more work, more money, more consumption. The Simplicity Collective has a lovely phrase for this – ‘the upward creep of material desire’ – and argues that by embracing the simpler way we can swap that material desire for free time:
“The basic idea here is that if people can embrace simple living and stop the upward creep of material desire, they can take some or all of their pay rises or productivity gains, not in terms of more consumption, but in terms of more free time. And this raises the questions: Are we forced by the ‘curse of labour’ to work so much? Or are we freer than we think we are? The Simplicity Movement is an example of a social movement where people are enjoying the benefits of exchanging money and consumption for more free time.”
I think one of the best ways to prevent our entrenched attitudes about money from hijacking our lives is to work out our individual ‘enough mark’ – the point where more money just ends up fueling that ‘upward creep’ but does little to actually enhance our lives.
During lockdown, I wrote about how I used a simple budgeting tool to figure out the income required to sustain a basic version of my lifestyle. Understanding how little I actually need to get by felt incredibly empowering.
There is this misguided belief that budgeting is something only people on low incomes need to do, and not doing so has therefore become an expression of status. But it’s just another one of those silly attitudes about money that we should rethink. Budgeting, and especially understanding your most essential expenses, holds a crucial key to escaping the consumption treadmill, no matter how much you earn.
– Kai
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of technology, design, ethics and sustainability. Writing to you is Kai Brach, also the editor and publisher of Offscreen Magazine. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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No Nuisance Marketing SPONSOR
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A guide to marketing for the self-employed
The new book Build Your Audience teaches you to attract the clients you want and build trust to keep them coming back for more. With an introduction to the world of trust-based marketing, you’ll learn how to create consistency in your marketing and build the right audience without being intrusive.
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Apps & Sites
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A catalogue with currently 52 beautiful “professional-grade fonts that are 100% free for personal and commercial use”, created by Indian Type Foundry.
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Another great-looking (and great-sounding) alternative to Calendly that comes with a lot of included features on the free plan.
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A long Wikipedia list of common misconceptions. You’ll learn, for example, that “Christopher Columbus was not the first European to visit the Americas.” or “Stretching before or after exercise does not reduce muscle soreness.”
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Visualising the age of buildings
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A Dutch data engineer wanted to find out the age of the building his son lives in and ended up creating a map, visualising the age of all of the Netherlands’ 10 million or so buildings.
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Worthy Five: Pat Allan
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Five recommendations by community-focused web developer and events organiser Pat Allan
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A question worth asking:
One I keep coming back to again and again, from poet Omar Sakr in his essay Head in the Sand: "Ask yourself: what will you do if things don’t get better, and also the world doesn’t end? Who will you show up for, and how?"
A concept worth understanding:
The concept of ‘punching up’ is most often discussed in comedy – jokes should be made at the expense of those who have more power/privilege, rather than those who have less. This reflection should apply to everything we make or say: Who are we helping? Who are we giving power to? Who are we paying?
A video worth watching:
Kae Tempest’s performances of Hold Your Own and Peoples’ Faces are filled with heart and have provided so much solace and strength – especially over the past year.
A book worth reading:
Ruby Hamad’s White Tears, Brown Scars provides an excellent and thorough overview of the harm both racism and sexism together have wrought, and how these intersections of injustice still continue to impact our society.
A word worth knowing:
The Japanese word Omoiyari means ‘having empathy and consideration’ – qualities that never go astray. Musician Kishi Bashi has both a recent album and forthcoming documentary titled Omoiyari, weaving this concept into stories of the internment of Japanese Americans.
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Better relationships at home & work
This new book by two masters of interpersonal skills sounds very promising: learn how to take your relationships “from shallow to exceptional by cultivating authenticity, vulnerability, and honesty, while being willing to ask for and offer help, share a commitment to growth, and deal productively with conflict”.
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The rise and fall of urban civilisations
Another intriguing recommendation by a reader who, concerned about climate collapse, discovered this book on how ancient civilisations first thrived, then crumbled. “Acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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People used to get married and have kids when they were very young because they couldn’t go on the computer.
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Food for Thought
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An excellent piece by internet scholar/activist Ethan Zuckerman, asking us to imagine what social media and the web would look like if they actually served the public interest. “A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. ... We’ve grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our democracies that we’ve thought very little about how we might build new networks to strengthen societies. We need a wave of innovation around imagining and building tools whose goal is not to capture our attention as consumers, but to connect and inform us as citizens.”
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This episode of How to Save a Planet interviews the individuals who started organising within Amazon (a company with 1.3 million employees) in order to push upper management to commit to stronger emission targets. It’s not just a great example of collective workplace action with potentially huge ripple effects, it also shows how social/racial justice is deeply intertwined with the climate movement and how both can build on each other.
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A great supplementary read to my opening remarks from last week with some practical advice towards the end: “It means educating our children about humility and connectedness, rather than vanity and individuality. It means changing our relationship with consumption, breaking the spell of advertising, manufactured needs and status. It means political organising, generating demand for a politics that sees beyond the nation state, and beyond the lifespan of the currently living generations.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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During the COVID waves that swept Germany, photographer Jörg Gläscher spent a lot of time in a forest near Hamburg, gathering deadwood to construct these giant wave-like structures. “I was working (with the idea of) the pure power of nature, the all-destroying force, which brings one of the richest countries in the world to a completely [standstill].”
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It’s so much fun watching German design studio Schultzschultz play with photos and typography and explore creative concepts.
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These dome-shaped buildings may not look like much from the outside, but they are the first houses that were 3D-printed from raw earth. “The process coined Tecla (standing for technology and clay) is eco-sustainable and environmentally friendly due to the production being zero waste and needing no materials to be transported to the site as it uses local soil. It took just 200 hours for multiple printers to construct the 60-square-metre prototype in Ravenna, Italy.”
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There is something about Self Modern that really makes me want to use it in a project. I absolutely adore the italic style. “The starting point of Self Modern were specimens of traditional serif Japanese typefaces, called Mincho, found in magazines and books.”
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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