Tag Archives: capitalism

True Beauty Is In the Small Details

The homespun foodie’s week in review, Oct 12–18

There’s a certain decor style, we all know it. Walk into a medical office, a corporate coffee shop, hell, any modern shop, and you can’t miss this look.

Bland and boring. Walls painted a color I call Millennial beige. It’s not always beige, of course. Regardless of the hue, the color makes one feel bland and beige inside.

On the walls rests a minimal amount of meaningless art. A closeup of coffee beans or a random swirl of colors in different shades of some bland hue. Inoffensive, unimaginative, without life.

What is missing are the details. Those small things that breathe life into our homes and the various spaces we carve out for ourselves. To pick one example of life without beauty, the corporate-owned coffee shop does the bare minimum of decorating, using the most offensively inoffensive design to minimize cost while doing its best not to encourage anyone to linger.

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Forget the Grind, Hustle Culture, and the Great Lock-In

It’s time for an Industrious Revolution

Whether you call it grinding, hustle culture, or the newest moniker to hit the internets, the “great lock-in,” it all boils down to the same thing — trading away your life energy for things you have been to told to want and need for the benefit of billionaires and shareholders who, frankly, don’t give a damn if you live or die.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the general masses have been trained to grind away as many waking moments as possible to “earn a living.”

I have a secret to tell you. That’s right, lean in and I shall whisper it: No one needs to “earn” a living — it was granted to you the moment you emerged from the womb. Living, that is, not all the detritus and stuff that comes with it.

As animals, living isn’t something we are meant to earn, but to take. We take the air we breathe as we need. We should be able to take shelter where we can find it, although certain greedy human animals have done what they can to take more shelter than they need so they can fool the rest of us into thinking we need to earn it.

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Without Effort, There Is No Contentment

The homespun foodie’s week in review, Oct 5–11

Nothing in life should come without effort, with the exceptions of sleep and love.

I know that I harp on the same ol’ themes over and over —

  • There is enough for all of our need, but not all of our greed.
  • The simple things are the best things.
  • Waste not, want not, and be fulfilled.
  • We are not main characters in the tableau of life.
  • Good food, good people, and hope is what makes the world go around.

These themes may be simple, perhaps even a bit old fashioned, but I shall take them any day over the current world themes of greed, consumption, hate, and destruction. Call me a curmudgeon, but those viral videos of destroying things for “ASMR” or unboxing things to engender envious consumption or behaving badly simply to encourage engagement really upsets me. They aren’t just a symptom of the hatefulness of the billionaire class that has destroyed modern culture, they are also direct cause of it.

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Taking the Time to Live a Longer Life

Musings from the bus stop.

The journey begins pleasantly enough. I walk down the lane, leaves crunching underfoot. First I crunch through a collection of maple leaves which are satisfyingly crispy even after yesterday’s drizzle.

Next, my feet wade into a sea of yellow heart-shaped leaves. It is the cottonwoods, whose pleasant fragrance reaches me before I see the first impossibly tall trunk. Looking up, I realize our lane winds through a copse of these giant grandmother cottonwoods. Large and wise they tower above. I have driven this lane a thousand times and never noticed them dancing alongside the pavement, ensconced as I was in an aluminum, plastic, and steel cage.

I am disappointed in myself, but also thrilled to have finally made their discovery.

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Let’s Defund the Billionaires

I’m robbing them of my life energy, and you can, too!

You have heard it said before: if you don’t know what they are selling, then the product is you. Your attention, your custom, your life energy.

Does the Zuck care if you are there for pictures of your nephew or to find out about community happenings? No. The point is to get your eyes on the screen, your fingers scrolling, your brain reeling with things to buy or to believe or to fund.

Angry, sad, dissatisfied? Good, the easier it is to sell you and sell your wallet to the highest bidder.

Does Walmart and Kroger care that you simply want to feed your family a wholesome meal? No, they want your life energy to come to them via impulse buys, in store or in app, and they will tempt you with corn syrup, sugar, and bright colors so that you buy, buy, buy until you die, die, die.

As far as I can tell, we only get this one life. I want it to be my own, to live and to share with those that love me back. Not to sell, unknowing and unwilling, to a billionaire class that can never have enough until they learn what it is like to have too little.

Greed is nothing more than addiction under a different name, and none are greedier than a would-be oligarch that is rarely told no.

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Bankrupting Billionaires In the Kitchen

The homespun foodies week in review, Sept 29 — Oct 4

If greed is written into our animal nature, then sharing is also there in equal measure. Greed tends to rear its horrid head only when there is a bounty. Those with little, both history and my own experience has proven, tend to share the most.

In a world ravaged by greed of a filthy billionaire class, how can we, the meek and meager, prevail?

We defund the billionaires.

To do this, we must opt out of their systems and step out of their bank accounts. The less we spend, the less power they have. Remember, the joy is not in the billions they already possess, but in the challenge of extracting more from the turnips we have allowed ourselves to become. We can’t continue to bankroll them, even if it makes our own lives a bit less comfortable.

Especially because it makes our own lives less comfortable. To relearn the joy of living with useful work to be done and cheerful company to be had could very well be the elixir for contentment that a discontent modern populace is seeking behind every screen and delivery service purchase.

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Our Food Choices Can Define Our Resilience

A recipe for community and self reliance

By 6 am my feet are always on the ground. Mornings are my siren song, and I begin my day with the birds — sometimes earlier in the winter months. When I was younger, this was a burden. Now, in my middle years, it is a delight.

On this late September morning summer has finally come to a crashing halt. The sound of rain against the window announces the arrival of fall more surely than the yellowing bigleaf maples.

The bronze orbs of ripening Asian pears catch my attention from my neighbors yard. We share 12 acres with our neighbor. In his yard is a small fruit orchard featuring pears, plums, and two apple trees that need a bit more TLC to produce well. An orchard he doesn’t harvest or care for, so he has granted us permission to treat it as our own.

I thank him with apple cakes and plum preserves.

Taking the day in hand, I glance at my phone. There is a message alert from the Buy Nothing app. My request to pick apples has been answered by someone with an apple tree in their yard but no need for the fruit. Their house is on the same street as one of my gardening clients, so stopping to pick a bucket or two won’t detract much time from my day.

In fact, it takes far less time than driving to the grocery store and buying apples. Even less time than earning the money that would otherwise be needed to purchase apples.

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Why I Am Done With Human Domestication

Are you a tame, wild, or domesticated animal?

Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

The half acre of land that makes up my front yard is a mixture of lawn grasses, invasive plants, and native flora. Each morning, a menagerie of native mule and white-tailed deer, robins, and douglas squirrels commune and compete with introduced eastern gray squirrels, barred owls, and wild turkeys.

All are wild, although some of the mule deer and douglas squirrels are tamed due to their own choices and human meddling.

I, on the other hand, am domesticated. Uneasily I pace within the cage, both this physical home with window sizes and wall heights prescribed by international building codes, and the psychological home of for-profit work, infinite growth economics, and modern constructs of the good and proper life.

Inside, I am a wild animal, willing to be tamed but chafing at the bit of forced domestication.

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Happiness Will Ruin Your Life

Choose contentment and you choose life.

Photo by Timothy Rose on Unsplash

26 years ago Irvine Welsh’s Choose Life Monologue from his book Trainspotting made it’s movie debut:

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

And, like so many before and after me, that’s exactly what I set about doing.

Although Welsh was writing about the heroin epidemic destroying Edinburgh, these words perfectly sum up the American dream that was piped into my house via Friday Night Laugh Packs and Saturday Morning Cartoons throughout my 1980s childhood. It was the same dream, now upsized, that was sold to my parents in the decades following the wars that DIDN’T end all wars.

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