Practicing Contentment in a Consumerist World
Less is more.
We’ve all heard it. The problem with it is that these days you’ve got a whole industrial complex convincing folks to take it literally.
Post-capitalist hyper-commodification. Call it whatever fancy words you want. Right now “they” — the machine/system/corporatocracy — is making bank off your best intentions. I don’t care how many lotus flowers and positive affirmations it’s doctored up with, an ad is an ad is an ad. Our social media feeds tell us you’re not even a person if you haven’t "branded" yourself. (Yes, just like sheep). Somewhere, somehow, they got us convinced that in order to live simply, eat clean, and otherwise pull our pathetic messy selves together, first we need to buy a lot of stuff.
It’s water.
Here’s a story about how even one of our truly essential needs can easily become warped:
It’s fall, the air feels nice and crisp outside, and you’re shaking off the lethargy of a hot sticky summer. I want to clean out my system, you think, start fresh. I gotta start drinking more water.
So you google water delivery services and find a local company that seems reasonable. You fill out the online application and an email reply informs you Thank You and you can expect your first delivery tomorrow. Ok, but I wanna start right now. So you head out to Whole Foods to buy a big bottle of water.
Approaching the water aisle, you get sidetracked by a display of “tonics” in tiny pop-top cans. ENERGIZE reads one label. CLEANSE invites another. Hm, yeah, maybe I should get some of these. Curious, you scan the label. Essence of reishi mushroom. Chaga. Tulsi. Shatavari. Maca. Not really sure what half the ingredients are, you toss five or six into your cart and head into the water aisle.
Now the choices get serious. Vitamin water. Smart water. Mineral water, sparkling and still. Lime-raspberry spritzer water. Hmm, that sounds good. You load up on flavored bubbles and throw in a bunch of Vitamin Waters for good measure. Vitamins are good, right?
Fifty-seven dollars lighter, you take the elevator up to the roof. Loading your tonics and spritzers into the car, realization hits. Ferchrissakes, you hiss heading back to the elevator. I forgot to buy water.
Of course you don’t need reishi mushroom tonic to hydrate your body any more than you need fancy pants to take a yoga class or a special cushion to meditate. And I think on some deep level, we know that. We know we don’t need at least three quarters of the shit we buy to be healthy, happy people. We know we’re better than the consuming numskulls we’ve become. But we’re bored. We’re confused. And above all, we’re distracted. And that’s just how the system wants us. Distracted, and spending.
So, what can we do about it?
How can we not only consume less, but also create more? How can we clean out our clutter and make space for things that matter? How can we focus?
How can we shine?
Ideas Matter. Actions Matter More.
Before I left urban life and all its complicated conveniences behind to create an off-grid permaculture farm in Ecuador (yes, really), I taught yoga for sixteen years. I still find the philosophy a good one to try and live by generally. Without being ponderous, the tenets found in yoga can have profound and lasting real-world implications and effects — if we apply them.
In the Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali frugally employs short, explosive threads of thought that, well, really make you think. Basically, it’s a set of guidelines to help us end our suffering and achieve liberation, practical guidelines for the most part. Amongst them are two in particular that address consumption and clutter. Taken together, saucha and santosha, commonly translated as cleanliness and contentment, offer a lens through which to see our patterns and make necessary positive changes.
Personal cleanliness in terms of hygiene is just one way to interpret saucha. There’s also cleanliness of thought and action, such as not giving in to gossip-talk, not getting caught up in opinion contests, and not wasting time or energy with unproductive or counter-productive activities, like arguing on Facebook or scrolling Instagram for an hour. Imagine how much more time and energy we could harness for creation if we didn’t fritter it away with our thumbs.
Santosha, or contentment, can also encompass a sense of satisfaction at having enough. Given the very wide spectrum of what can be seen as enough, let’s narrow it down to our basic essentials — food, water, sleep, shelter — along with a basic modicum of comfort — friends, support, time to enjoy and ways to enjoy it. Santosha is the clarity of knowing when enough is enough.
Pare it down.
Ok, but how? How on this seemingly unstoppable and careening out-of-control bus called modern life can we find a sense of satiety, of sanity?
In recent years, having flung myself headlong from the consumption bus to see what would happen, I’ve picked up some neat life hacks along the way.
Living in a rural outpost in a small developing country, at first glance I might seem “deprived” of choices of consumer goods, recreation, and instant unlimited high-speed WIFI. But what I’ve found in this experience is that having fewer choices to make about inconsequential things (the CLEANSE or the ENERGIZE tonic? Power Yoga or Yoga for Runners?) actually frees up my brain space to make choices that do.
Less time spent online means making the time I do spend online really count. I still interact in the “real world” but I’ve read more, learned more, and gotten more worthwhile things done in the past four years than I did in the previous fourteen — hell, maybe forty.
You don’t have to build a house from mud or raise chickens to be more of a creator and less of a cash cow for corporations. Here’s some very simple methods I’ve distilled that anyone can apply to practice clean living and contentment.
Order What’s on the Menu
Here on the farm, most of my food choices are made for me by what’s currently ready for harvest. Oh, the plantains are still green? Ok, I’ll make chips. Now they’re ripe, ok, fried maduros. Juan didn’t catch any fish today? Fine, I’ll soak some lentils. The little stores where I shop have a limited selection of goods and a maximum of two or three brands from which to choose. But there’s always enough. It’s a haven of simplicity.
Living in full-on “civilization,” you don’t have these advantages. A common scenario: You sit down in a café and look at the lunch menu. Fried fish and baked chicken are the specials. Served with fries and a salad. Immediately, your consumption conditioned brain jumps into gear. Maybe I can get the fish, but baked? And substitute sweet potato fries for the fries? Or ask if I can skip the fries but get a double portion of salad? Yeah I should get back on that keto diet…
Hey! Maybe you can eat what’s on the freaking menu? Didya ever think of that?
Seriously, friends. Don’t make things so hard on yourselves. All that mental exertion over how many substitutions you can make can be better utilized on choices that matter. If Copernicus spent that much energy on sweet potato fries we’d still be here thinking the sun revolved around the earth.
Because it’s not just one lunch. You have to make literally thousands of choices every day from the minute you wake up. The drink menu at Starbucks can permutate out to over 15,000 choices. Some social psychologists have even given this burden a name: option fatigue. And if you are too fatigued to absorb and digest your food properly, what you eat hardly matters. So give your brain a break. Order what’s on the menu, eat what’s on your plate, and move on to bigger things.
Work Offline
Ok, you order your food (from the menu) and pull out your laptop to do some work. Really, you’re supposed to be working from home, but “needed” to get out of the house. So you login in to the WIFI and after sharing your baked chicken as an Instagram story get into a heavy FB debate on the virtues of the latest greatest Netflix series…
Yep. Let’s just stop right there.
At the risk of sounding like your dad, right now I’m going to sound like your dad. To access a desktop computer and WIFI, once or twice a week I walk for an hour to a bus stop where a jolting bus picks me up and transports me via a bumpy gravel road to a small town where I sit in a 1999-era “internet café” in a cramped cubicle and get to work. There is no golden milk latte, no vegan cookies, not even coffee. There’s mosquitos and stinky teenagers watching god-knows-what on YouTube. And yowzah, do I get stuff done. For example, I wrote nearly all of the blog you are reading right now without internet or a computer at home.
Not having these conveniences has taught me how to focus. Now, you don’t have to go all hard-core draconian about your work space — believe me, sometimes I would love a good coffee while I’m working. But being in a less-than-luxurious environment with limited time really can put a fire under your ass.
See, here’s the key. You know all those social media windows. The Facebook-Instagram-Twitter abyss? Don’t even go there. Keep ‘em closed. Notice how this makes you feel. A little jittery? A little jangly? That’s called withdrawal my friends. It goes away faster when you don’t give in to it.
Even better, if you really want to power through something you’ve been meaning to get done, put your Apps in “Work Offline” and put your phone and computer on this magical setting called airplane mode. Did you even know that Google Docs and Sheets are available offline? It’s a godsend to productivity. Use it.
I advised a friend who was having trouble focusing to use Airplane Mode and work offline. Not only did he tell me he started creating more content and easily meeting deadlines, but every time he saw the little airplane icon slide into the top display of his phone, his heartbeat slowed. He found himself breathing more easily at just the thought of the lack of pressure to respond to some random notification.
No one will die if you don’t reply to a comment. But you might live a little more.
In the Sutras, Patanjali also suggests that freedom is felt through the absence of suffering. Not a presence, but an absence. A space. Think on that.
Do the Thing You Want to Do.
In general, everything is specific. If there’s something you really want to accomplish, focus on that thing. For example (and I’ll tell you a secret), my whole life I could never do a pull-up. For someone who routinely cranked out fifty pushups and held five minute handstands, this might seem odd. But true. It was a thing I never figured out. I did all the things to "get stronger for pull-ups" — when I had access to a gym: heavy lat pull downs, assisted pull ups. I lifted weights and did yoga poses and all-around fitness things. Still, nada.
A few weeks ago Juan hung a bar from a bamboo rafter in our kitchen. Once again, I tried to do a pull-up. Nada.
Without access to options, I tried something new. Every day I attempted a wide grip overhand pull up. I didn’t do anything else to improve my pull up attempt except try the pull up. Little by little I started to pull myself up to the bar.
Earlier this week, my chin cleared for the first time. The next day, I did two. Yesterday, three.
Lesson: If you want to do something, do the damn thing. Not other things. Cleanliness of action — that’s saucha. And it works.
Put Utility Before Vanity
Speaking of exercise goals, if you want to feel more contentment about yours, try putting them in line with living your life in a balanced, enjoyable way. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be reasonably fit and healthy. But when you won’t let yourself eat a banana or take a day off from the gym or yoga just so you can get more triceps definition or work on your side crow or whatever, well, ask yourself “What’s it for?”
Instead of spending every day “working out” with weights or yoga or calisthenics, devote at least some of that time to community-based activities. Run a 5k for a cause, get some folks together to do a river clean up, plant a garden on the rooftop of your apartment building.
There’s a million ways to be active and healthy that don’t require you to be in an air conditioned box with someone blowing a whistle in your face and ordering you to spin faster on a bicycle that goes nowhere. You’re an adult. Make a choice to be healthy and useful.
Opine Less. Create More.
The other night I was re-reading Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and this bit struck me as particularly apropriate for our times.
Steinbeck is on the road and pauses for a night by a farm. He invites the farmer into his camper for a cup of coffee and in a conversation about politics, the farmer asks,
What good’s an opinion if you don’t know? My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty’s beard. I don’t even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that made a rock or a table. I don’t even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We’ve got nothing to go on — got no way to think about things.
In a world where conflicting opinions rain down like a hailstorm all day, every day, where is the time to know anything? Not facts, but feelings and sensations and the knowledge that seeps into your bones from years of practice, repetition, and examination — wisdom, it’s called. We all have the capacity for it.
You be with you.
The average “engagement” with an Instagram post is less than half a second. A movie frame is even shorter. No wonder our brains are so damn tired.
Turn it off. Watch the little airplane icon slide into place and breathe. Do a thing. It doesn’t have to be a pull up. Learn to play the violin, speak Arabic, do algebraic equations. Make art. Absorb yourself in it. Stop fighting with strangers on the Internet. Stop wasting yourself.
Stop quoting memes or poets or other people. Yes, maybe Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese really speaks to you, but Mary Oliver can only speak for Mary Oliver. Only you have the words to speak for you.
Yes, you have the words. You do. They are there, simmering and deep. Unearth them. Get off the bus, at least for an hour every day. Learn a thing, really know it. Learn yourself.
The whole point of the yoga, is revealed in the very first group of Sutras:
__________________
Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of thought
so that
the spirit stands in its true identity
as observer to the world.
__________________
In other words, so that you can shine.
You don’t have to take yourself out of the world to observe it, and yourself, and they truly are. But you do need to slow down, consume less, stop getting caught up in the storm. You need time to think, ponder, reflect, create. You need to make a choice that matters.
And drink more water.
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At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building, year-round soil cover with plants and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation
Thank you.
Kristen Krash is the director and co-founder of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative agroforestry farm, education center, nature reserve in Ecuador’s Chocó Andino Cloudforest. Prior to moving, Kristen was known for her guerrilla gardens — productive green spaces she created in any available space. Now an urban transplant in the South American rain forest, she has adapted her urban gardening and sustainability skills to large-scale reforestation of degraded land. She takes a practical and accessible approach to helping others achieve more balance and self-sufficiency in their lives.
Kristen’s articles and interviews have been featured on popular sustainability platforms like Abundant Edge and The Mud Home, and in the Rainforest Regeneration Curriculum at the Ecological Restoration Camps.
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