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I know it’s long but you can’t get enough about a third of the way into it. Before I saw this I’d never heard of the Viridian Movement, not sure I’ll follow-up on it anyway. This letter though is so on the nose…well written, not to preachy, very attainable. A lot of these ideas are established philosophies of my BFF in VA, but I still reacted with awe and appreciation at seeing them again. Let me know what you think. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Have/Are you employed these techniques? Did you actually read the whole thing? Seriously, I’m curious…
“…….Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you
waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing,
those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime.
Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them
from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your
children, your friends, your society, yourself.
It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that
you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the
world. The rest is dross.
Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly
insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North
Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less.
Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.
The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal,
boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones.
They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects.
It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it
is “what is going on.”
It takes a while to get this through your head, because it’s the opposite of the
legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the
best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too
much money on a bed — (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact
I do not). You’re spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might
be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to
that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious
notice. See it. Replace it.
Sell — even give away– anything you never use. Fancy ball gowns, tuxedos,
beautiful shoes wrapped in bubblepak that you never wear, useless Christmas
gifts from well-meaning relatives, junk that you inherited. Sell that stuff.
Take the money, get a real bed. Get radically improved everyday things.
The same goes for a working chair. Notice it. Take action. Bad chairs can
seriously injure you from repetitive stresses. Get a decent ergonomic chair.
Someone may accuse you of “indulging yourself” because you possess a chair that
functions properly. This guy is a reactionary. He is useless to futurity.
Listen carefully to whatever else he says, and do the opposite. You will
benefit greatly.
Expensive clothing is generally designed to make you look like an aristocrat who
can afford couture. Unless you are a celebrity on professional display, forget
this consumer theatricality. You should buy relatively-expensive clothing that
is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.
Anything placed next to your skin for long periods is of high priority. Shoes
are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear.
You really need to work on selecting these — yes, on “shopping for shoes.”
You should spend more time on shoes than you do on cars, unless you’re in a car
during pretty much every waking moment. In which case, God help you.
I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of
these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a
beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your
multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.
That’s because a multitool IS a set of keys. It’s a set of possible creative
interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a
multitool. They are empowering.
A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your
previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming
more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice
loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you
have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you
have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will
take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design
education.
As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and
colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than
someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should
aspire to this better condition.
Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear
unless you are Stewart Brand. Furthermore, unless you are a professional
emergency worker, you can abstain from post-apocalyptic “bug-out bags” and
omnicompetent heaps of survivalist rations. Do not stock the fort with
tiresome, life-consuming, freeze-dried everything, unless you can clearly sense
the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The
clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have
left your area. If that’s the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and
prepare to knuckle down.
Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious
design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or
several friends to help you.
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful
function.
4. Everything else.
“Everything else” will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not
touched, or seen, or thought about in a year — this very likely belongs in
“everything else.”
You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying
makers’ marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon
if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital
pictures somewhere safe — along with all your other increasingly valuable,
life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Then remove them from your time and space. “Everything else” should not be in
your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your
opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.
It may belong *to* you, but it does not belong *with* you. You weren’t born
with it. You won’t be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time
vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid
role.
Beautiful things are important. If they’re truly beautiful, they should be so
beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you
should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should
enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.
They’re not really *that* beautiful? Then they’re not really beautiful. Take a
picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.
Emotionally important things. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we
can’t bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke
a panicky sense of potential loss — they don’t help us to establish who we are,
or to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.
Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with
your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this
clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing
yourself better?
Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down.
Then — yes — away with it.
You are not “losing things” by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining
time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will
certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where
they matter — in the everyday.
Not in Oz or in some museum vitrine. In the every day. For sustainability, it
is every day that matters. Not green Manhattan Projects, green moon shots,
green New Years’ resolutions, or wild scifi speculations. Those are for
dabblers and amateurs. The sustainable is about the every day.
Now for category three, tools and appliances. They’re not beautiful and you
are not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical
standards.
Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is
attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays.
Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact.
Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke
anguished spasms of denial.
You will be told that you should “make do” with broken or semi-broken tools,
devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by
poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.
This material culture of today is not sustainable. Most of the things you own
are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad. If we
stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt
notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater. This will not do.
You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings
created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from
today’s. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means
you should encourage the best industrial design.
Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get
the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect
the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.” There is
nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times
because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking
black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.
Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest:
the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking,
partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in
life is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting
semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the
worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to
wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really
need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.
Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory.
They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into
some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to
other practitioners. That’s what makes them true “experiments” instead of
private fetishes.
If you’re buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know *what you are trying to
prove by that*. You also need to *tell other people useful things about it.*
If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You
may be wasting some space and time, but you’ll be saving space and time for
others less adventurous. Good.
If you’re becoming a techie magpie pack-rat who never leaves your couch — that’s
not good. Forget the shiny gadget. You need to look in the shiny mirror.
So. This approach seems to be working for me. More or less. I’m not urging you
to do any of this right away. Do not jump up from the screen right now and go
reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because
it’s not sustainable.
Instead, I am urging you to think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your
mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly
find your comfortable habits disrupted.
That could be a new job, a transfer to a new city, a marriage, the birth or
departure of a child. It could be a death in the family: we are mortal, they
happen. Moments like these are part of the human condition. Suddenly you will
find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. *That* is
the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize
that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and
sustainable constitution.
But — you may well ask — what if I backslide into the ancient regime? Well,
there is a form of hygiene workable here as well. Every time you move some new
object into your time and space — buy it, receive it as a gift, inherit it,
whatever — remove some equivalent object.
That discipline is not as hard as it sounds. As the design of your immediate
surroundings improves, it’ll become obvious to you that more and more of these
time-sucking barnacles are just not up to your standards. They’re ugly, or
they’re broken, or they’re obsolete, or they are visible emblems of nasty,
uncivilized material processes.
Their blissful absence from your life makes new time and space for something
better for you — and for the changed world you want to live to see.
So: that summarizes it. Forgive the Pope-Emperor this last comprehensive
sermon; it is what I learned by doing all this, and you won’t be troubled
henceforth.
*************************************************
…….
Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com”
