Short post today, simple idea: I want to recommend a strategy that we at Sunnyside have used to help us take control of our consumption and reassess how we're living: if something breaks or stops working, don't replace it right away. Let it be. Go without the item at least long enough to assure yourself that replacement is really necessary.
Let me mention three moments in the life of Sunnyside in which we followed this strategy, though before I do let me also say that at the time these events occurred we had not necessarily decided on "let it be" as a conscious strategy. Only recently have we come to consider it the normal procedure.
About three years ago what broke down was our microwave, and yes our first reflex was to go out and purchase a replacement. At Best Buy though, we found ourselves oddly disturbed by how cheap a replacement would be. Fifty dollars? Fifty dollars? was that the true reflection of the costs of production? Or was that low price simply a function of the fact that the machines were being put together by underpaid labor abroad, in countries with no enforcement of environmental laws, and furthermore with such cheap components that in a few years we'd be back at Best Buy to purchase yet another? We decided to do without the nuker for a time. A few months passed. We cooked and cooked. The microwave stayed absent. We found we liked the extra counter space (a scarce resource in our kitchen). We also found the culinary inconvenience represented by the absence of the microwave to be minor. Yes the thing had been good for warming up muffins, and for softening butter, and also for cooking rice, but these few uses failed to justify a niche for it in our (necessarily concise) pantheon of appliances. So. The microwave oven's temporary absence was graduated to permanent banishment. We never replaced it. One less piece of electric trash for the landfills. Or actually probably two or three right? Because we'll never have to replace the replacement either, or replace the replacement for the replacement.
A second and somewhat more spectacular opportunity to apply the strategy of "let it be" came about a year later. That was when our clothes washer gave up the ghost. In this case the potential cost of replacement encouraged procrastination; we might have repaired the thing, but even that would have set us back a couple hundred bucks. For a few weeks I took the clothes to the laundromat, until, thinking back to my childhood in India (and the dhobis there) I realized there was another possibility: I could try doing the work by hand. And that's what I chose to do. By now, hand-washing the laundry is a permanent part of my life as a domestic laborer, and I'm perfectly content with it. In fact, this afternoon as I tried to review in my mind the three examples I wished to offer up to my readers here for consideration, I had to walk around the house to re-discover this second one. Apparently the way I wash the clothes has become so transparent to me that most of me has forgotten there was a mechanical way! (For readers who have not yet read about my antique washboard, clothes racks, and plunger of cerulean hue, the specifics of this continuing adventure are recorded here and here.)
Finally I'll mention that, in early September, Sunnyside's DSL went on the blink. The three-week-long customer service trial that followed involved more than a dozen phone calls and three technician visits, eventually causing me enough frustration that I asked my wife whether, at least for awhile, we could do without web access at home. She said she was game, and so Sunnyside is now officially off the web. I'm sure I'll write more about this choice as time goes on. For now though, I'll say that on the whole the change has proven freeing and bracing. Another filter between the inhabitants of Sunnyside and the experience of good-old-fashioned straightforward reality has been removed.
Now, I realize that this strategy of "let it be" could be parodied, and pretty ruthlessly. "Eyeglasses destroyed in a bicycle accident? Consider a white cane! Shoe missing a sole? Make do for awhile with newspaper and twine!" But I don't mind taking the risk of being thought a nut, or being satirized. I think it's important for us to reflect on our possessions and how powerfully (often without our noticing) they shape us. Not only is there, for environmental reasons, a desperate need to reduce what we as a human population manufacture and use, but there are also real personal costs to thoughtless use of our possessions. After all, if it really does prove I need such and such an item as badly as I believe, well then maybe something important is missing in my life, and maybe the possession in question is serving as an anodyne or substitute for that absence. Then how much better it would be me to act to fill the real lack than to continue with the pretense of "I'm just fine, as long as I have my Grand Theft Auto. Or my eleventh handbag. Or my texting machine."
Of course there's nothing to say that "letting it be" has to end in forswearing ownership of the item under review. Not at all. But even if, in the end, you do decide to replace the thing, it will still have been useful to your sense of ethical physics to have done without it for a time; if for no other reason than that the item's temporary absence from your life will almost certainly increase your appreciation for it once you have it in your possession again; in the same way that the discipline of fasting reminds us of the goodness and the blessing of food, or the way that not seeing a good friend for a few weeks increases our pleasure in the friendship once that friend has been restored to us. It's common to say that we take everything for granted until we no longer have it, but that doesn't make the observation less true.
In any case, the next time something in your home goes on the fritz (or threatens to break its pledge of allegiance to your sanity) consider doing what your teachers and your mother always told you not to do; consider letting it be. Consider procrastination and delay. Consider doing, at least for a time, without. You might just find yourself on a vivid, counter-cultural, nine-volt nomadic adventure!
HB
Until Saturday the 26th!
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