Note: This is supposed to be a pragmatic field manual. But I can’t stop myself from contextualization and philosophizing. I’m going to put all that stuff here in the Introduction, which it is perfectly fine for you to skip to get to the good stuff.
This is a field manual for adopting and internalizing post-consumer mindset and practices at the individual and household scale. The categories of practices are
- autonomy via frugality or wise resource stewardship,
- resilience and adaptability via polymathy, and
- internal coherence and values alignment via systems thinking.
These practices are understood as, or believed to be, prerequisites for the creation and cultivation of post-consumer societies and cultures that will and are arising out of the unfolding ruins of industrial consumer society.
Regardless of when that ever happens, these practices will increase your individual and household autonomy, resilience, adaptability to unfolding unpredictable events, ability to live the life of your choice, and capacity to bring your unique gifts to the world. I can’t promise you that these practices will make any ultimate difference in the trajectory of human civilization. I am very confident that these practices will make a large positive difference in your own life.
The body of this book is (going to be) practical, pragmatic, brass tacks, with very little theory or philosophizing. I am going to put a lot of effort into making it concise and useful for people who aren’t interested in wading through any fluffy stuff that isn’t actionable or useful in their own practice.
However, I can’t help myself from doing some amount of contextualization — connecting some dots, drawing connections and conclusions from principles and observations. I’ll do my best to confine this kind of thing to this introduction, which you can skip if you want to get right to it.
This introduction is meant to serve as a brief argument (or explanation) for why anyone would want to ‘internalize post-consumer praxis’ – aka adopt a Deep Response in their own lives – in the first place. The rest of the text will be the how.
I think it’s easy enough to explain why you might want to go at least partway with this practice. If you reduce your expenses by quite a bit you can save more of your income. If you have savings then you are more buffered from economic crises like recessions, health events, or blown head gaskets. Also if you don’t need to earn much money to pay your bills, then a wider array of income-earning options are available to you. Also, if you live below your means then you have the option of simply working less, and spending more time on things you actually want to be doing, like playing with your kids, reading, having sex, backpacking, tuning cars, racing motorcycles, climbing, activism, gardening, urban exploration, writing, painting, traveling, building businesses, etc. If you go far enough with the savings then eventually you’ll be able to declare yourself ‘financially independent’ and will have the option to not work for money ever again if you don’t want to.
If you put a little bit of effort into learning various skills then you will be able to spend even less money (with all of the benefits listed in the previous paragraph) while maintaining an equal or higher quality of life, and you will be less dependent on professional services to keep your household running. Think about knowing vs. not knowing how to unclog your own toilet in an apartment building of March or April 2020 for why having a few DIY skills could actually have quite an impact on your household beyond just your monthly expenses. In other words, possessing broad skills and the attitude that you can pick up further skills as you go along increases your personal and household resilience and adaptability.
And if you begin the lifelong journey of internalizing systems thinking and learning to practically apply it to the operation of your own life and household, the benefits get a little spooky. At first you just start to notice little frictions that you can lubricate and ‘open loops’ that you can close – this is the classic permaculture principle of using waste from one process as food for another – but then you start to notice strategic misalignments in your actions and you begin to tweak things. Eventually your life as a system works much more smoothly and requires less effort to maintain. Not only that, but you start to notice unplanned beneficial outcomes. Serendipity seems to show up more often than it used to. Opportunities come your way more often, and you have the bandwidth to pick them up and run with them. ‘Random’ opportunities unfold in ways much more exciting than you had planned, and you learn to trust the process more than your own rigid planning.
These benefits are sound enough to convince some people to put a bit of effort into post-consumer praxis, and if that’s all that feels compelling to you then that is fine. Even a little bit of this content will serve you well.
But I do believe that the deeper you go, the further you’re willing to travel along this path, the more profound the benefits become. I suspect also that the deeper you get, the greater the potential for scaling the logic of post-consumer praxis beyond the bounds of your own lifestyle and household. We become capable of connecting the dots at the group level, and potentially creating something greater than the sum of the parts.
To make any dish you need good ingredients and sound instructions. If culture and societies are dishes, then individuals and infrastructure are ingredients and social customs and governance are the instructions.
These volumes are about making – about becoming – good ingredients. There is much work to be done on the instructions side of things – alternative social customs and rules governing the organization of humans and infrastructure etc – and indeed many people are working on this. But appropriate ingredients will be necessary as well. This is a both/and situation.
A major assumption of my work is that you can’t build a post-consumer society with people who act in accordance with consumerist ideology (even if they have nuanced anti-consumer critiques). You can’t change your ways using the same kind of thinking that got you in trouble in the first place, and there’s a difference between knowing about something because you’ve read it in a book and knowing something deeply because you practice it every day in your life.
So even for the work of figuring out the group level instructions – the governance, the social rules, etc – of alternative societies, I think that internalizing post-consumer praxis at the individual and household level is a necessary early step. I think that at least some of the failures to create enduring alternative forms of community have to do with the involvement of people who have not yet internalized alternative ways of living in their own lives in any kind of practical or functional, as opposed to merely aesthetic, way.
It is for this reason that people who perceive Deep Response as being too individualistic or not concerned with society at large or lacking in compassion for other people have missed the essence of what I’m driving at. A world filled with a diversity of cultures and societies that are fundamentally post-consumer in nature is my hope and vision for this world.
I think it’ll be good for us humans, for our art and science and philosophy and literature and everything else, but also for the trees, for the dolphins, for the oceans, and forests, and bees, and grasslands, and caribou herds and buffalo. I don’t think we have to choose between having a flourishing human culture OR living on a healthy, non-wasteland of a planet. I think we can have both. I simply think that starting with ourselves is the only responsible way to begin.
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