2022-06-13 - The Simple Life, edited by Larry Roth
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Introduction
============
In reading through these contributions, you will note that in many
cases the writers encountered a crisis or decided on a goal that was
seemingly beyond their financial reach. Frugality was seen as a
solution--a means to overcome their crises or reach their goals. ...
Frugality, in other words, is not an end for us. It is a means to an
end.
In this book you will learn frugality has no fixed definition. What
one person believes is frugal others will find not so frugal.
How Do You Define the Simple Life? by Edith Flowers Kilgo
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But most of all, creative downscaling is about making people a
priority over things.
Authors Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin point out in Your Money of Your
Life that material goods are what we get in exchange for our very
lives. Every gadget, gizmo, and gewgaw that comes into anybody's
house is purchased with a piece of life that was exchanged for a
salary. [Assumptions about employment and living conditions.] Would
most of us still want that gizmo if we truly comprehended what it
cost? I, for one, am not willing to exchange a portion of my life
for frivolous goods.
External Cost
<gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Externality>
For you, the simple life is what you believe it to be. You'll know
you are there when contentment takes the place of stress, when you
can sleep soundly through the night, when you can spend as much time
as you need with people you care about, and when the term "short
fuse" applies to an electrical problem and not your problem-solving
approach.
The Pleasures of Frugality by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
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Let's explore the word "frugality" to see if we can't redeem it...
We looked up "frugal" in a 1986 Merriam-Webster dictionary and found
"characterized by or reflecting economy in the expenditure of
resource." That sounds about right... Yet digging deeper, Webster
tells us that "frugal" shares a Latin root with "frug" (meaning
virtue), "frux" (meaning fruit or value), and "frui" (meaning to
enjoy or have the use of.) Now we're talking. Frugality is enjoying
the virtue of getting good value for every minute of your life energy
and from everything you have the use of.
Frugality means we are to enjoy what we have. To be frugal means to
have a high joy-to-stuff ratio.
There's a word in Spanish that encompasses all this: aprovechar. It
means to use something wisely... It's getting full value from life,
enjoying all the good that each moment and each thing has to offer.
There's nothing miserly about aprovechar; it's a succulent word, full
of sunlight and flavor.
A Gentle Survivalist by Laura Martin-Buhler
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Paradoxically, the things we think we own really own us, consuming
our time and energy. Very few precious hours are left for service to
others or non-material pursuits that lift our minds and spirits. If
you feel unfocused and pressed for time, look around your home and
identify the things that demand regular attention or maintenance.
Are they worth the time and energy expended on them?
I agree with the great playwright Henrik Ibsen, who wrote: "Money may
buy the husk of things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but
not appetite, medicine, but not health, acquaintances, but not
friends, servants, but not faithfulness, days of joy, but not peace
or happiness."
As mentally competent individuals, we are only truly alive in
relation to our understanding and practice of eternal laws of truth,
our independence from commercialism, our avoidance of conspicuous
consumption and addictions, and our embracing of love, light,
charity, and service.
As I wander through the orderly vegetable and fruit displays in our
area's new techno-megamarket, I hear thunderclaps and the sound of
soft rain as overhead misters automatically spray the vegetables. In
the egg and dairy section, I am serenaded by mooing cows and clucking
hens. By the meat an fish counter I hear the sounds of the ocean and
the piercing cries of seagulls. In the pet section, I am reminded to
buy the kitty her cat food with the plaintive meows of hungry kittens
and barking dogs. I know store managers are subtly trying to
manipulate my natural foraging instincts by attempting to make me
feel like a self-sufficient primitive hunter/gatherer, or at least
like I'm back on the farm, filling my basket with earth's fresh
bounty. The recordings seem to delight most shoppers and their
children, but they do nothing buy annoy me. I resent any form of
sales manipulation, especially on the subliminal level.
Simplicity, in the deepest sense, means throwing every form of dark
and weighty ballast overboard and like the balloonist, rising higher
toward the light. This process, while often painful, gets easier
with practice. As we put our priorities in order, we find that our
lives are filled with service, peace, and focus.
Simplicity is never as simple as it sounds. It requires a childlike
approach to the universe, a sense of awe and gratitude, the
discarding of worldly desires, false pretenses, the praise of men,
and every other form of vanity and excess materialism. True
simplicity requires that we forgive others and stop wasting our
personal energy wallowing in past hurts and injustices. To live a
life of honest simplicity has implications that extend light years
beyond Webster's definitions and calls forth the very best we have to
offer.
How I Learned to "Live Cheap" by Larry Roth
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Though I remained frugal, I bought into the corporate culture a
little too enthusiastically. I had to travel on my own time, meaning
I would put in a full day at my desk in Austin, go to the airport,
catch a red-eye, fly to (usually) Baltimore, attend a meeting, catch
a red-eye back, and report to work the next day. Why did I put up
with this? Well, first, the company convinced me that their stated
policy ("We don't pay you to sit on an airplane") was right. Second,
everyone else accepted the policy. It was only after I finished a
meeting in Baltimore early one Friday and changed my reservations so
that I could catch an earlier flight that I began questioning this
policy. I ran into one of our vice-presidents at the Dallas airport
while we both waited for our connecting flight to Austin.
"What are you doing here this time of day?" he asked.
"I finished my meeting, and I couldn't see any sense in not catching
an earlier flight," I said. I think he knew I was wondering what HE
was doing in Dallas during working hours. And I couldn't help but
notice he was flying first class while I had to wedge my
six-foot-seven-inch body into a coach seat. I wondered why a company
that demanded so much from its workers was so lenient with its
executives. Then it occurred to me that I was cramming my body into
a space made for a midget on my own time, and my employer took it as
a given that *I owed them my time and discomfort.*
In late 1991 I was involved in a major proposal effort for my
employer, Company L. The dollar value of this proposal exceeded a
billion dollars. By a lot. My boss put me in charge of making sure
the subcontractors' part of the proposal, more than half the dollar
value of the whole shebang, got in on time, in a format we could use,
and was analyzed, audited, massaged, and squeezed into the proposal
we would send out customer.
Company L, like most major government contractors, shut down between
Christmas and New Year's Day. This was no secret, but it did seem to
be a source of envy with many of our government customers. To
"punish" Company L for being so lenient during the holiday season,
many government agencies requested that proposals be completed and
submitted by the end of the year, which meant, in reality, they would
have to be done a week earlier. And these government requests are
ALWAYS issued late, and they are ALWAYS a mess. Requirements for
government programs--especially billion-dollar government
programs--are confusing, and the government employees who issue these
requirements, bless their pointed heads, follow one rule above all
others. When in doubt, put it in.
So we people in the trenches had to inspect these things, pass the
"real" requirements on to our suppliers, and put the thing together
in an artificially abbreviated time frame. During these proposal
efforts, our jobs truly became our lives. We went full-speed seven
days a week. Some people even brought sleeping bags, futons, and the
like to the office and literally lived there.
A couple of days before our Christmas break of 1991, I shipped our
part of the proposal out. As I was loading the packages on a dolly,
I caught my shirt on something and ripped a hole in it. In spite of
the loss of a good shirt, I was elated. I'd done a hell of a job,
and everyone knew it.
I wound down over the Christmas holidays, and I came back to work in
early 1992. One day during the first week of January, in an
early-morning staff meeting, it happened. One second I was sitting
there, ready for the challenges du jour. The next second I was
somewhere else, looking down on the meeting and myself through
something like a porthole. And a voice inside my head asked, "Is
this REALLY the way you want to spend the rest of your life?" I
snapped back into my body, and I don't think anyone else in the room
noticed my "momentary absence." But, once the question was in my
mind, I had to admit the answer was, "No, this is NOT how I want to
spend my life." But I was, after all, forty-three years old, ad I
didn't know how to change course.
Was my experience at the staff meeting some sort of New Age
kundalini? Or should I ascribe it, as Scrooge did Marley's ghost, to
"an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a
fragment of an underdone potato?" Do you believe it? For that
matter, do I believe it? I have no answers. But I can tell you
this: It happened on some level--in reality or in my imagination--and
though it would take three more years, the experience set me on a
course that would take me out of Company L and corporate America.
It would not become apparent for some months, but Company L was
changing as well. It was out with the old, people-oriented
management style and in with a cold new style of management that
viewed employees as expendable at best and enemies of management at
worst. As the working environment deteriorated I became more
convinced I had to leave. The job I left paid well... but no amount
of money was worth the toll that job was taking on my life and my
mental and physical health. Within a year of my leaving, both my
supervisor (at age fifty-three) and the man who took up my job (at
age forty-nine) had open-heart surgery. Stress does take its toll.
Radical Simplicity or Good-Bye Accrual World by Catherine Roberts
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Leach and Britt Leach
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We think it's important in the telling of our tale to be honest about
things. Make that THINGS. Voluntary simplicity does deal with them,
their surfeit, the way their accumulation distracts from what's
really real. But we were never into them. So we never had to give
them up. ... Maybe we need to call ourselves radical simplicists to
distinguish us from those voluntary simplicists who held a bonfire of
their vanities and moved to a yurt.
We began thinking about things (as in all of life, not materialism)
when Britt was informed [by their doctor] that he was drinking too
much booze and his triglyceride level [was through the roof].
We gave up red meat. This was about 1980. It wasn't an ethical
choice; it was very much an ego decision called saving one's rear.
People who become vegetarian and stay with it for a while usually
have made at some point an ethical commitment even though their diet
evolution often starts as a simple move toward healthy living. But
when you stop eating the animal something happens: you start actively
thinking about it. And to think about another creature is ethics...
So what might start as a health matter becomes an ethical matter.
And when animals are included in a moral system it opens up that
moral thinking, makes it more inclusive. You allow yourself to
consider EVERYTHING ethically when you include in your moral system
the beasts you once ate.
We seem to be making a claim here for a gastro-ethical-spiritual
connection and wouldn't dream of going into its physiology or its
theology in detail. It's not the subject of this odyssey, but
believe us when we say that becoming vegetarian sensitized us.
Becoming vegetarian made us start thinking about how our choices
affect others. Ethics.
An animal diet provides a way to think about our relationship with
the world. When we changed our diet we changed our relationship with
the world.
What television really sells is this message: "Your life, television
viewer, is worthless. We will make you whole with our products. You
are ugly, sexless, and you smell bad. Right this way."
The entertainment business is the biggest business in the world. It
grows with the collective malaise. "Opiate of the people" comes to
mind.
One of the best quotes from Duane Elgin's Voluntary Simplicity is,
"The moderation of our wants increases our capacity to be of service
to others, and in our being of loving service to others, true
civilization emerges."
How Much Will My Funeral Cost? by Lisa Carlson
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Unfortunately, the funeral industry has committed such wide-spread,
documented abuse that the federal government was forced to pass
consumer protection regulations that--among other things--told
funeral directors they could no longer lie to the public.
Enforcement of these regulations is weak and far from ideal. Once
you are gone, it is your survivors who are vulnerable to manipulative
sales tactics at a time of grief. With most states having far too
many funeral homes, it is a situation that invites abuse.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that mortuaries give
prices over the telephone. By stopping in person, however, to pick
up a "general price list" (GPL), you may learn a great deal more.
Does the price list using disparaging language such as "basic
disposal" or "incineration container" for cremation? Is a low-cost
casket displayed with the same dignity as the higher-priced ones?
The first price to check, regardless of what kind of funeral you and
your family might want, is the fee for "basic services of staff an
overhead." Although the national average for this fee is $1,025
(1996), you need to remember that is little more than a
funeral-planning charge... At a chain-owned mortuary [which most of
them are by now], this fee will be 50 percent to 90 percent higher
than the already-inflated average.
What should this fee be, you might ask? Well, if your travel agent
doesn't charge for planning your vacation, and the car salesman fills
out all the paperwork as part of the sale, what are you willing to
pay to have someone else plan your funeral? The level at which this
fee is set may be a quick indicator of the pricing ethics at a
particular establishment, which is why it's worth your time to take a
look at several and compare.
Carefully total the cost for everything and then ask, "Will there be
any other charges?"
Plan a memorial service without the body present.
The FTC requires that funeral homes offer a package price for
"immediate burial" and "direct cremation." If the local prices seem
too high, you should consider using a low-cost funeral director from
another community to transport the body directly to a crematory or
cemetery.
Many people find that, without a casket present, a memorial service
shifts the focus to the more spiritual and personalized aspects of a
life well lived.
Immediate cremation is almost always the least expensive offering on
a mortuary price list if body donation is not chosen. But be sure to
ask if the price includes the actual cremation process. I know this
sounds like a stupid question; after all, how can you have an
"immediate cremation" without the cremation? Basically, the FTC
permits the funeral home to leave that charge out and bill it later
as a "cash advance" item if it doesn't own the crematory.
The crematory is not likely to accept a body unless everyone agrees.
Hard feelings may erupt among surviving siblings, for example, if
there is no unanimity on the final method of disposition...
The funeral home is likely to try to sell you an expensive urn for
the cremains. Pier 1 has brass vases at a fraction of the prices
charged by most funeral homes. Or perhaps you know a potter. Then
again, the simple cardboard container in which the cremains are
shipped from the crematory is perfectly acceptable for most purposes.
This is the only country where embalming is widespread, and to no
good end. According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention it serves NO public health purpose whatsoever. [Yet it
was written into Oregon law that embalming is required after 24
hours, prompted by the owners of chains of funeral homes.]
Consider handling all arrangements without using a mortuary. Caring
for your own dead is permitted in forty-two states... the eight
restrictive ones are Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan,
Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York.
My book, Caring for Your Own Dead, tells what permits are required in
each state, where and when to file them, plus a great deal of other
practical information for anyone choosing this meaningful way to say
good-bye.
Memorial societies were started in the late 1930s as a result of the
rising cost of funerals due to embalming and manufactured caskets.
Spurred by an angry minister who thought that expensive funerals were
a terrible waste of our resources, a group in Seattle got together
and founded a cooperating mortician.
There are now 150 memorial societies across the United States and
Canada. They are nonprofit, nondenominational, educational,
organizations, most of which are run by volunteers. Many of these
memorial societies do an annual price survey of area mortuaries.
In the early sixties, the societies banded together and formed a
federation to fight for better funeral consumer protection
nationwide. This group was influential in getting the FTC to pass
the original Funeral Rule, the regulation that makes it possible for
consumers to pick and choose only those funeral goods and services
they want and to get prices over the telephone. That right to
choose, however, has been eroded by the industry's abuse of the
nondeclinable fee. Until this nondeclinable fee is abolished, the
cost of funerals will be insulated from any market forces that would
benefit informed consumers. FAMSA is seeking new changes in the
Funeral Rule. By joining a local memorial society, your membership
supports this effort.
To find a memorial society near you, call 1-800-765-0107.
[Or visit:
<https://funerals.org/>
Sadly, there are none in Oregon.]
A 1994 loophole in the FTC's Funeral Rule now allows mortuaries to
add all overhead to a nondeclinable basic charge for planning the
funeral, a fee that at $100 per hour, should be less than $400.
However, the absence of limits on this fee has given rise to a
situation that invites abuse of consumers, especially in areas where
there are far more funeral homes than can be supported by the death
rate. With funeral directors treating this fee as guaranteed income,
it has risen $1,000 to $2,000 or more in just one year, with all
other costs such as the casket and funeral service being added on top
of that.
Closing Thoughts by Larry Roth
==============================
Whether enough people are embracing frugality and simplicity to
constitute a movement is not important. YOU are important. And
whether you incorporate frugality and simplicity into your own life
is important only to you. And the choice is yours and yours alone to
make.
Resources
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History and Philosophy
----------------------
* Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin
* The Simple Life by David E. Shi
* The American Transcendentalists by Perry Miller
* American Transcendentalism by Paul F. Boller, Jr.
* Transcendentalism in New England by Octavius Brooks Frothingham
* The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists, edited by
Catherine L. Albanese
Intentional Communities and Co-Housing
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* Communities Directory: A Guide to Cooperative Living by
Fellowship for Intentional Community
* Communities Magazine by Fellowship for Intentional Community
* CoHousing by The CoHousing Network
[Book list truncated for this log entry.]
author: Roth, Larry
detail: <https://www.larryrothsblog.com/2019/01/
a-promise-finally-fulfilled-my-2000.html>
LOC: TX158 .S515
tags: book,spirit
title: The Simple Life
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spirit
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