path: root/unused/downsizing.txt

Part of our decision to hit the road was to travel, which is fun in its way, but another part, the far more important part, was to change the way we live our lives -- the amount of stuff we have, the amount of space we have and so on. People in the U.S. often ask why? And here, as the saying goes, be dragons.

No one in the U.S. wants to talk about it, or even to think about it, but ours is a society in decline. The nation-state we call the United States has been in its declining phases for, depending on who you ask, fifty to ninety years. In your head, when you finished that last sentence, you immediatedly formulated at least three examples to prove to someone, not me, because I can't hear what's happening in your head, but someone that that is absolutely untrue. Think about who you're trying to prove that too.

I've never been much interested in the decline of the U.S. empire and broader society because I've never really felt like part of it anyway, but I am fascinated by the decline of Faustian culture more generally, which, if you haven't read Spengler, is an instructive term to refer to the culture that arose out of the ashes on the Roman empire along the banks of roughly the Thames, Seine and Volga rivers beginning roughly around 1000AD, which is to say, what we usually call western culture. Given that our planet is round, there really is no west in way that's useful for talking about cultures so Spengler came up with the term Faustian.

Whatever the case Faustian culture is the long process of winding down. It will take at least another 300 years for it finish up, some years of what later cultures will refer to as dark ages, but which probably won't be all that dark to those living through them, and then some new culture will arise from those ashes, for reasons I won't go into here I think it's highly likely one of those future cultures will grow out of the great lakes area.

What the holy living fuck does any of that have to do with moving your family into a vintage motorhome?

An author I coined a lovely little turn of phrase to suggest one method of dealing with a society in decline which is: collapse now, avoid the rush.

Which is to say moving into an RV is a way of learning to live in ways that most of us have forgotten, to struggle out way through situations most of us have forgotten and have a little bit of fun along the way. It is a way to downsize our lives without the pain that comes from downsizing because you lost your job, or because your house was underwater or whatever system of the stuttering march alng the downslope of decline happens to befall you.

I already *know* solar energy is super useful to the individual, totally useless to society. I already know that there's almost always a way to fix mechanical things. I already know how to build a fire from nothing, I know how to emotionally handle a variety of situations with some degree of grace that I would never have learned to deal with if I had not chosen to collapse my standard of living long before it was necessary.

And I was able to bring my family on this journey, see a million beautiful things we'll never forget and take charge of the raising of our kids in ways that we would never have been able to do if we had not abandoned the normalcy of our lives as defined by current standards of the United States.

Here's the thing though. The bus was always a half way step. Societies don't, sorry hollywood distaster movie fans, collapse, they decline. Individuals collapse, societies, cultures, they just decline and fits and starts and they do it so subtly most people never even notices it. Long after what we call the end of the Roman Empire there are plenty of authors still singing the praises of Rome and talking about how all the contemporary problems will work themselves out, just you wait, they'll find a solution. Sound familiar? The only different between those authors and the ones saying the same thing now is that we can see the future they got, it's our past, but our future looks just like theirs.

Now that we've learned to live in the bus, without all the convenience of a house it's time to let go of the bus. It's time to learn how to live without a vehicle to get us where we want to be, yes, that's the loss. And of course there's the emotional loss of our home, but one thing we learned from the last homes we gave up is there there's plenty to gain as well. We'll be nearly out of the iron triangle that has imprisoned most of us all our lives -- house, car, job. Each requires the other in an endless viscous cycle.




The only thing I don't like about that phrase is that some people take it to mean that some kind of hollywood style societal collapse is coming, which neither I, nor the author of that phrase, nor Oswald Spengler would want you to think is true. THERE IS NO COLLAPSE, just very subtle, long drawn out decline.




Now by modern U.S. standards our lives were never particularly extravagant. We were a family of five living in a 1200 square foot house. We considered it a bit extravagant though.