Action
Design and build a life(style) that you like.
Discussion
If you like your life, you can’t be sold to. If you like your life, you can’t be convinced that you need to buy XYZ bullshit product in order to finally be happy.
You’ve heard of FU money? This is an FU lifestyle. If you like your life, and somebody comes along and tells you to do something you don’t want to do, you tell them FU.
If you have a life you like, then you can’t be tempted to sacrifice your values for “more”, because “enough” is unassailable. You can always come back to your refuge if your experiments or efforts fail.
The key to this pattern is to build a life that you like, not a life that you think you ought to like. Not the life your parents like, not the life your culture says you should like, not the life you thought you’d like when you were 16 years old.
This Pattern is one of the most difficult to pull off. It requires an uncommon level of self-understanding. It requires a brutal level of honesty. It requires a lot of experimentation, open-mindedness, iteration, and tolerance of failure. It requires the courage to be disliked.
Enough!
Perhaps the biggest barrier to building a life you like is that our culture does everything it can to make sure you don’t like your life. People who are content with their lives cannot be sold stupid bullshit to. One of the aims of consumer advertising is to convince everyone that they are unhappy, that their current lives are not enough, that they are not enough, fundamentally. This is in order to incept the idea that maybe, just maybe, if you buy stupid bullshit XYZ (a fast car, a new video game, a pair of shoes, a Netflix subscription, whatever), you will finally be enough, have enough, be content, be happy.
Building a life you like, then, is to deliberately unlearn decades of programming, learn yourself to a high level, and discover what you really want out of life.
The core insight of voluntary simplicity is that, for almost everybody, we don’t need so much stuff to be happy. We need enough stuff to be well fed, healthy, secure, and have a little bit of status. After that, most of our subjective well being comes from things like healthy relationships, creative expression, and the fulfillment of other values that can’t really be bought with money.
In other words, just enough is plenty. And more than enough, or rather the pursuit of more than enough, tends to spoil the project of building a life we want. We get stuck in the loop of hedonic adaptation and spend our lives chasing an illusion of contentment.
The key insight for building a personal strategy of Deep Response is that it takes way less money to build a life you like than we’re told. It is possible to build an amazing life that you genuinely love and that supports you in all of your aims in life for very, very little money indeed.
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