Not Buying It... as much as we can help it

A year or so ago I heard a story on NPR about a group called The Compact out of San Francisco. As I understand it, it was comprised of your ordinary middle class White Americans, and they decided to go one year with out buying anything new as a way of breaking it themselves out of "the shopping cycle." The cycle: If it breaks, buy another one. If it rips, buy another one. Screw repairmen and seamstresses.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a book about this specific experiment, but I found something a little more extreme: Not Buying It by Judith Levine. Levine goes hard core. She doesn't buy anything for a year... except food. (Her partner even takes up home brewing.) Of course, she breaks once or twice, but her failures help illustrate the psychology behind purchasing. It's a fun, quick read with a glut of delicious liberal rants. I doubt the book would sway any conspicuous consumers. She's truly preaching to the choir, but perhaps we'll sing louder now.

So partly because of this book and partly because of my new ararchist BFF Tom H., Bryan and I are taking a modified-Compact approach to 2010. What exactly does that mean? Well, we're not going to buy anything new, but we have a list of areas where we can cheat. The main one is the house. We're remodeling the house, and though we'll try our darndest to avoid new hardware, I just don't trust that the Habitat for Humanity resale shop is going to have faucets that I'll be happy with for the next few years. Snotty? Probably. Sincere? Oh totally.

Other execptions:

• School books (several of our texts are damn near impossible to come by new)
• School supplies (surprisingly, second hand acupuncture needles are hard to come by)
• Anything contributing to our DIY-ness (yarn and needles for knitting, cultures for cheese, etc.)
• Socks, underwear, toiletries

But don't mistake our goal here. This isn't one of those "FOR ONE YEAR, I WILL" type gimics that have swarmed the bookstores the past two years (though several of those were excellent). Self-sufficiency is what we want out of our lives; it's how we believe people are supposed to live. We're just getting started.

Anarchy in the UK

Something's been brewing for a while with me. A nagging annoyance with the world. And while I feel like I'm generally positive about things, I've found myself increasingly frustrated by stupid shit like billboards and the need to go to the grocery store almost every other day in order to eat "fresh" foods.

A few months ago I went to an art therapist. I wanted to learn about this mode of therapy since I'm training to be a counselor, but also I hoped to figure out some way to express or understand this frustration. "So what's the problem?" she asked. And I all I could think to say was "advertisements" which made her instinctively check the crazy box on my intake form. Then she asked me to draw a picture of what the word "frustration" would look like to a martian or some shit. And that was it for art therapy.

Since then, I've been able to describe my frustration more effectively. I'm 29, about to be 30, and I've accumulated enough stuff for a lifetime, yet there's always something else to buy, to need. The world is plagued by chronic dissatisfaction, and I can't seem to break free of it. How is that possible when I supposedly have everything I need?

When the student is ready the teacher will come. And for me, it came in a book by Tom Hodgkinson extolling the virtues of an idle life. Idleness is not about leading a slothful life, though that can be a pleasant byproduct; it's about taking full responsibility for every moment and making every moment yours. But how can you be idle if you've got to work to get all of this stuff we're supposed to buy?

Want less. And the stuff that you do want, make it yourself.

So that's what this is all about. Learning to do it myself and dismissing the rest.