On Compact Living


23 October 2016


One of the first positions I held after moving to Seattle was a fixed term project management position to scale up (and down) an e-commerce operation to offload digital production equipment and server infrastructure. Swimming in SCSI peripherals and fiber, it was clear validation that the path to authenticity can't be found through owning a lot of things, particularly if those things are being replaced by Amazon's EC2 or subject to Moore's Law. No amount of reminiscing is bringing D8 back. Why'd you hang onto those cassettes for so long?

My transition to minimalism was mostly accidental rather than deliberate, and prompted by monthly student loan payments equal to %55 of my income...typical Millennial situation. I'm a pretty adept eBayer, and paring down possessions introduced a natural dichotomy of the consumer lifestyle that characterizes America. I collated a list of essentials in short order and pocketed two snippets of wisdom along the way:

  1. 1. You are not your job.
  2. 2. The term "need" has been cheapened. A lot.
For myself and point one, the word that most clearly defines the human proclivity toward purpose is station. It articulates concisely that our present condition is all that can really be relied on, dictated by neither circumstance nor expectations for the future. Awareness of the ephemeral nature of work in the present day is important. You have to continue pressing forward and growing, otherwise someone will conjure an alternative version of reality for you. This has been pivotal in my approach to creating the world I want to live in and my understanding of how society is engineered.

Point two is the hedonic treadmill. I recall reading a blog post from Pieter Levels about the 100 Thing Challenge, before he founded all those startups and realizing that there really aren't a lot of requirements to live a healthy, productive life. A lot of what he speaks to echoes the way the world is moving (a few huge corporations, with lots of people doing their own thing as an alternative). One of the takeaways is that most people are insulating themselves with materialism and chasing it as validation of hard work and success. His approach of working remotely, from anywhere, is characteristic of the approach to experiential living and diverges from consumer culture dramatically. It's a useful framework for the future, and one I plan to use to keep it as real as possible.