More for Less

I've been thinking how I’d like to have less. I'd like to get by on less I mean. I'd like to be stronger in resisting the urges to have more. I'd like to work towards a goal of attaining the same state of contentment or for want of a better word, 'happiness', with less rather than focus my life around developing my ability to acquire more. Those who know me might find this, at the very least amusing, bordering on hypocritical. I’m no Ghandi. While I don't devote my life to the acumination of material gain, I certainly do enjoy, in perhaps a specifically male way, collecting items; books, music, clothes, pictures.

Despite this I don't think it invalidates my point that for me now, looking forward, rather than focus my thirties on how much more I can get, I’m beginning to think I'd like to focus on trimming down. How can I reuse or better still do without. It seems that things are getting made so that folks can have more things. The process of production has a drain on recourses. And what’s more if I can train myself to be the same amount of 'happy' with less stuff then why wouldn't I? Like getting by on one less six pack of beer a week or one less cigarette, if you could, why wouldn't you. It leaves you freer in a sense, freer to fill up the vessel that is your head or your life or your day with something else entirely.

One of the great changes that I hope will follow on from this sudden collapse of the church of capitalism will be that needs will no longer be so confused with wants. We kind of already know that pursuing wants rather than needs is very bad for our collective mental health. It creates an inner emptiness, a constant hunger for more. A cycle of "work hard to consume more/feel emptier after the want-satisfying consumption does not meet needs/work even harder to afford ever more extravagant and decadent consumption". If we cut down on having we can begin to focus on being. Goals and motivations will be evaluated in terms of whether they bring intrinsic satisfaction, rather than the external rewards we are so used to chasing. I expect that, apart from spending more time with family and friends, there will be a rediscovering of favourite hobbies - from sports to stamp-collectingto trainspotting, it really doesn't matter what. I guess this focus has come in part from my never ending uncertainty on how to spend my days, where to direct my personal labours. And this has been contextualised by the economic meltdown and what I see to be an opportunity for reflection and a readdressing of our mutual labours.

Looking back at the way things have been: a huge unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialised. That is nobody's idea of how the financial system is supposed to work. It is just as much an abomination to the free marketeer as it is to the social democrat or outright leftist.

I took this from the guardian:

"Not even Gibbon could supply a story as fatefully bizarre as the ultimate consummation of Reagan-Bush conservatism, its last act: the most massive shift of financial power from the private to the public sector since the New Deal. Rather like the Pope deciding that all along he really wanted a bar mitzvah. "

I want to know why we can't start to readdress this inequity now. Why I've not seen any suggestion boxes put up by the Governments that have spent so much public money on these decrepit banks and Insurance corporations. "We've plugged the gap with your money, any ideas how we should run things from now on? Suggestions on a postcard" etc. I for one would like to question who gets what from now on.

Up until recently, this seemed straightforward. Apart from the public sector, where the state sets pay rates, we essentially left value for the market to decide. And the market not being an instrument of equity, justice or fairness, but a mechanism for wealth creation and distribution, rewarded bankers and hedge fund managers far more highly than almost anyone else in our society - despite the fact that the actual value they added to society was, it turned out, at best limited. At worst, it's now clear, their net value was negative.

Partly because the layman could never fully understand it, and partly because it became so dominant in the global economy, the financial sector, over the past two decades, has turned into a living metaphor for a growing chasm between value and worth, between pay and reward, between what we should get and what we do receive. Which would have been rather academic up until a few months ago. But now the public own such a huge share in the banks that we as citizens not only have a right but an imperative to question who should be paid what - and why.

I suppose I want to start looking honestly at what is valuable. And to whom. To begin to honestly weigh up the costs of coveting red sports cars and marble bathrooms, personally, socially. Do we now have an opportunity to establish the worth of other valuable assets we have in our life. Time, care, others. It would be goodto move beyond considering only those things that add to econimic groth as valuable.

I’m being deliberately naive here in my calling for a brighter future I know. I understand the cosiness between government and business; that perfect feedback loop: money to power, power to money; tax breaks for the corporations; donations to those who might command the heights. And I understand that despite the radical events of the past year these people continue to command power and continue to own vast, unfair swathes of the economy. I still foster a hope that change will slowly come however, I'm still getting the urge to step outside. To try to want less.

“When you get to the right place,with the right people...”

(Easy Rider)


That she'd neither seen nor heard of Easy Rider did not surprise me in the slightest. It was becomming clear we shared relativley little in the reference pool of popular culture, and scant else besides. However her underexposure to Hopper, Fonder and Nickleson's trans American homage to the hog did not put her off the idea of travelling the 1000km trip i'd suggested; through the Vietnameese central highlands on the back of a motorbike which was to be manned by a member of the self named clan of 'Easy Riders'. The Rough Guide references this disparate bunch of Honda highwaymen saying; "they'll probably track you down first, but if you need to find them, wait outside the church in the main square after sundown." This made me think of locating the A Team and already i wanted to travel with them. In the end a formal church wedding wasn’t necessary; as is often the way in Vietnam, the barman had overheard our discussion and made the call, and no doubt the commission, himself. Before we could say ‘heavy metal thunder’ two, slightly smaller than anticipated, though immediately likable motorbike merchants stood before us, laminated photos and tatty road maps in hand. After a brief route planning session and a stern price negotiation which ended with smiles and handshakes on both sides of the table, we saddled up and wound our way through the frantic streets towards the outskirts of Hoi An and the distant, misted, shadow like mountains on the horizon.

That first day, we gained about 1700m in altitude as we rode east towards the Laos boarder, where the Ho Chi Minh trail wound its way through the jungled hill sides. Only 40 years previously this area had been bombed relentlessly by Americans trying to stop the spread of supplies and guns slithering up north. And as we wound round the mountain switchbacks i tried hard to visualise the destruction; flames and smoke, the mud and the sound of choppers and the chaos. But really all i was doing was overlaying the images i'd been fed as a child by Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola onto the lush dense jungle surrrounding me. When we passed sections of forest which had been slashed and burned by the hill villagers to clear space for mountain rice, the scorched and mangled tree stumps and the bare red clay allowed the briefest of windows into the past and fed the somber mood i'd forced upon myself.She didn't understand why i kept going on about the war and i suppose my morbid interest came from nothing more than the fact that, growing up, Vietnam had been more a war than a country to me, an amalgam of horrific images and injustices. So through the whole time I was travelling in Vietnam, the war had to be the back drop to my understanding of the way things were, not so much in the sense that things and people were the way they were because of the war, but dispite it. And the more I read the more I realised that ‘War’ singular misrepresented the experiences of Vietnams inhabitants over the last two centuries. Shackled to imperial rule long before the GIs arrived and still fighting the Cambodians and then the Chinese well into the eighties. I don’t know whether Communism would have taken hold in the way that it did, if the population hadn’t been unified it its desire to oust the French colonialists. An irony lost entirely on the Americans I heard photographing them selves infront of bits of American tanks.

As the days rolled under the wheels of our expertly manouvered motorbikes, i was able to blend the past with the present. Tourist stops all invoked a view to some aspect of the imperial past, but the day to day blah blah........tbc