Author Topic: Simple living movements  (Read 1243 times)

Zea_mays

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Simple living movements
« on: July 20, 2021, 09:31:41 am »
For centuries, counterculture movements have eschewed traditional society's drive to work pointless jobs to continuously accumulate material possessions. Today, basic material possessions can be acquired with the smallest amount of work in history, leading many young people to question what the point is climbing the career ladder and working nonstop when their needs can be fulfilled quite easily. Today, despite advances in technology and economic productivity which should have made life easier and more prosperous, elite business owners have become so greedy that many people today are actually working longer hours, for less pay, for less economic security, and with far greater stress than previous generations.

The futility of all this has led many young people to ask: why bother?


I found this article about Chinese millennials who have started the "lying flat" simple living movement, and I think this describes attitudes I have seen among young people in the US and in the West as well. The (Western-admiring) Chinese communist party views this counterculture movement as a threat to their geopolitical ambitions. Although, quite frankly, I think cultural exports could be China's most important geopolitical "weapon". In the same way that the 1960s Counterculture helped to erode the USSR, non-Western attitudes coming from something like a Chinese counterculture would be a breath of fresh air that could erode the West's hegemony.


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Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”

“I have been chilling,” Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April, describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong.”

He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.

A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work hard, get married and have children. The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents.

They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.

Mr. Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as an affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying flat” — tangping, as it’s known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counternarrative has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country’s future.

“After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine,” Mr. Luo said in an interview. “And so I resigned.”

To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people. But that didn’t bother Leon Ding.

Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and thinks of the act as “silent resistance.” He dropped out of a university in his final year in March because he didn’t like the computer science major his parents had chosen for him.
[...]
While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s hypercompetitive work environment.

Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese society, called tangping culture a turning point for China. “Young people feel a kind of pressure that they cannot explain and they feel that promises were broken,” he said. “People realize that material betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life.”

The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China. Censors have deleted a tangping group with more than 9,000 members on Douban, a popular internet forum. The authorities also barred posts on another tangping forum with more than 200,000 members.

In May, China’s internet regulator ordered online platforms to “strictly restrict” new posts on tangping, according to a directive obtained by The New York Times. A second directive required e-commerce platforms to stop selling clothes, phone cases and other merchandise branded with “tangping.”

The state news media has called tangping “shameful,” and a newspaper warned against “lying flat before getting rich.” Yu Minhong, a prominent billionaire, urged young people not to lie down, because “otherwise who can we rely on for the future of our country?”
[...]
Mr. Luo decided to write about tangping after he saw people heatedly discussing China’s latest census results in April and calls for the country to address a looming demographic crisis by having more babies.

He described his original “lying flat” blog post as “an inner monologue from a man living at the bottom of the society.”

“Those people who say lying down is shameful are shameless,” he said. “I have the right to choose a slow lifestyle. I didn’t do anything destructive to society. Do we have to work 12 hours a day in a sweatshop, and is that justice?”

Mr. Luo was born in rural Jiande County, in eastern Zhejiang Province. In 2007, he dropped out of a vocational high school and started working in factories. One job involved working 12-hour shifts at a tire factory. By the end of the day, he had blisters all over his feet, he said.

In 2014, he found a job as a product inspector in a factory but didn’t like it. He quit after two years and took on the occasional acting gig to make ends meet. (In 2018, he played a corpse in a Chinese movie by, of course, lying flat.)

Today, he lives with his family and spends his days reading philosophy and news and working out. He said it was an ideal lifestyle, allowing him to live minimally and “think and express freely.” He encourages his followers, who call him “the Master of Lying Down,” to do the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html

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guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2021, 01:11:07 pm »
Record Number Of Workers Quitting Jobs
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As businesses reopen and the economy takes off, employees have options for employment. Some have put off leaving their job because of the pandemic, are burned out from the last year, or have money saved by working from home and want to try something new.

Zea_mays

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #2 on: July 23, 2021, 11:09:51 am »
Another article about the lying flat movement:

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Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to China’s mountain southwest to “lie flat.”

Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting grueling careers for a “low-desire life.” That is clashing with the party’s message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.
[...]
“Lying flat” is a “resistance movement” to a “cycle of horror” from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the country’s most prominent business magazine.

“In today’s society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized,” Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious act than to simply ‘lie flat?’”
[...]
Still, the ruling party is trying to discourage the trend. Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries. China’s population is getting older and the pool of working-age people has shrunk by about 5% from its 2011 peak.

“Struggle itself is a kind of happiness,” the newspaper Southern Daily, published by the party, said in a commentary. “Choosing to ‘lie flat’ in the face of pressure is not only unjust but also shameful.”

The trend echoes similar ones in Japan and other countries where young people have embraced anti-materialist lifestyles in response to bleak job prospects and bruising competition for shrinking economic rewards.

Official data show China’s economic output per person doubled over the past decade, but many complain the gains went mostly to a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals say their incomes are failing to keep up with soaring housing, child care and other costs.

In a sign of the issue’s political sensitivity, four professors who were quoted by the Chinese press talking about “lying flat” declined to discuss it with a foreign reporter.
[...]
“We generally believe slavery has died away. In fact, it has only adapted to the new economic era,” a woman who writes under the name Xia Bingbao, or Summer Hailstones, said on the Douban social media service.

Some elite graduates in their 20s who should have the best job prospects say they are worn out from the “exam hell” of high school and university. They see no point in making more sacrifices.
[...]
Thousands vented frustration online after the Communist Party’s announcement in May that official birth limits would be eased to allow all couples to have three children instead of two. The party has enforced birth restrictions since 1980 to restrain population growth but worries China, with economic output per person still below the global average, needs more young workers.

Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with complaints that the move did nothing to help parents cope with child care costs, long work hours, cramped housing, job discrimination against mothers and a need to look after elderly parents.
https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-world-news-beijing-china-business-d2b9f71d73219b32d78709b0afb443ca

Zea_mays

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #3 on: July 26, 2021, 11:32:58 am »
Although I'm not sure if the ongoing US labor movement in itself should be considered a simple living movement, hopefully it can lead people to realizing they can get by on less than they originally believed and have more options than simply slaving away. That type of stress seems to be what led to the lying flat movement, and certainly what causes so many people in the US and elsewhere to dream of just running away to live a life as a subsistence farmer or something.

Hopefully all these people who are quitting band together or find other alternatives, and don't simply slink back to their exploitative jobs when they can't pay rent again.

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‘People are just walking out in the middle of shifts’: What it’s like to work in a restaurant right now
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/business/restaurant-workers-experience/index.html

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Something remarkable is happening in fast food establishments, retail stores, and restaurants across America. You may have seen photos of it go viral. You may have even experienced it in real life if you've dined at a Chili's or Applebee's and the hostess apologizes for extra-long wait times.

“WE ALL QUIT, SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE,” disgruntled employees posted in giant letters on a sign outside a Burger King in Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month.

"Almost the entire crew and managers have walked out until further notice," Chipotle workers wrote in Philadelphia on a sign posted on the glass doors of their restaurant.

“Closed indefinitely because Dollar General doesn’t pay a living wage or treat their employees with respect," retail workers scribbled in Sharpie outside a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine, after the entire store quit en masse.
[...]
Employment benefits have given workers a little more time to find jobs and higher expectations in their job search. "Workers have seen during the pandemic that when lawmakers choose to step in and act and protect people [via stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, healthcare], work doesn't have to suck as much.
[...]
Part of the mass resignations can be attributed to the fact that the pandemic has raised expectations for safety and benefits in the workplace. Jobs that don't offer health insurance and paid sick days have never been desirable, but now some workers are saying they're done putting up with them.
[...]
"It got to the point where I was having chest pains, my chest was throbbing and my manager would say 'you're fine' and wouldn't let me leave, so I just quit," she continued. "I would never work at McDonalds ever again."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgy7a/we-all-quit-how-americas-workers-are-taking-back-their-power

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"Instead of no one wants to work anymore," former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said, "Try no one wants to be exploited anymore."
https://www.businessinsider.com/origin-of-nobody-wants-to-work-anymore-2021-7

guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #4 on: July 29, 2021, 05:48:31 pm »
The chlorine shortage that is effecting the U.S. currently is partly due to the fact that many employees quit. A few of these chlorine production companies may actually go under because of it....

guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #5 on: August 10, 2021, 05:45:25 pm »
The "American Dream" as described by the narrator of the following video sounds more like the goals and values of anthropocentric Western civilization, does it not?:

Why I gave up on the AMERICAN DREAM - and you should too
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After years of chasing the American Dream I've finally given up on it. And I've never been happier...


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I just realized something was off.... — Timothy Ward

What, kind of like the fact that the civilization you live in is built on a foundation of false history and bad ideas?

See also: https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/leftists-against-progressivism/?message=7975
                https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/
                https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/american-empire-collapse-it's-about-to-get-much-worse()-chris-hedges-joins/

                https://authenticamericandream.blogspot.com/p/reading-list-for-american-nationalists.html

guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #6 on: August 10, 2021, 06:31:22 pm »
What's Really Behind the Labor Shortage in America?
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Why are there sudden;y so many vacant jobs? Where have all the workers gone? Let's talk about it!

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D K9
2 weeks ago
People are waking up to the fact that they’re worth more than 8 dollars an hour while the fatcats are sitting on billions.
Quote
Andrea Wisner
2 weeks ago
A lot of people had time to listen to Youtubers like Timothy Ward and realize that they were being taken advantage of. A lot of them are living in minivans and other vehicles and don't have to worry about the crazy rents that nobody can afford.

guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #7 on: August 21, 2021, 03:41:14 pm »
What It Takes to Live a Simple Life


Quote
Folks must realize that simple does NOT mean easy. This is a very physical life, growing food, raising chickens, cutting wood for the wood stove to keep warm. Thinking simple means easy is a romantic idea not based in reality. There is beauty in homesteading, but it is not for the faint of heart. When you get older, or injured or have health issues creep up on you, simple becomes not so simple.  We are in our 60's, my husband a disabled Air Force veteran and have lived on our mountain property for almost 19 years, but it is a daily struggle to grow our gardens and do daily tending of the land and the flocks. I would not want to be anywhere else. I have lost my tolerance for people and artificial noise. The country has gone very soft and often the dream is much more difficult than folks imagine. ~Cynthia

guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #8 on: August 22, 2021, 06:34:07 pm »
What Happens When All of Your Co-Workers Quit?
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As a record number of Americans leave their jobs, those who can’t are working themselves sick.
https://www.thecut.com/2021/08/workers-left-behind-by-the-great-resignation.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Zea_mays

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #9 on: September 02, 2021, 12:49:08 pm »
I think it is also important to be aware of simple living movements that we ideologically oppose. For example, many overworked people have been "romanticizing" hunter-gatherers since they can supposedly survive on much fewer labor hours than Westerners and are apparently much happier.

Quote
The "original affluent society" is the proposition that argues that the lives of hunter-gatherers can be seen as embedding a sufficient degree of material comfort and security to be considered affluent. The theory was first put forward in a paper presented by Marshall Sahlins at a famous symposium in 1966 entitled 'Man the Hunter'. Sahlins observes that affluence is the satisfaction of wants, "which may be 'easily satisfied' either by producing much or desiring little."[1] Given a culture characterized by limited wants, Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers were able to live 'affluently' through the relatively easy satisfaction of their material needs.
[...]
Sahlins' argument partly relies on studies undertaken by McCarthy and McArthur in Arnhem Land, and by Richard Borshay Lee among the !Kung.[5][6] These studies show that hunter-gatherers need only work about fifteen to twenty hours a week in order to survive and may devote the rest of their time to leisure.[4] Lee did not include food preparation time in his study, arguing that "work" should be defined as the time spent gathering enough food for sustenance. When total time spent on food acquisition, processing, and cooking was added together, the estimate per week was 44.5 hours for men and 40.1 hours for women, but Lee added that this is still less than the total hours spent on work and housework in many modern Western households.
[...]
Sahlins concludes that the hunter-gatherer only works three to five hours per adult worker each day in food production.[7][8] Using data gathered from various foraging societies and quantitative surveys done among the Arnhem Landers of Australia and quantitative materials cataloged by Richard Lee on the Dobe Bushmen of the Kalahari, Sahlins argues that hunter-gatherer tribes are able to meet their needs through working roughly 15-20 hours per week or less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-play

These attitudes have been commercialized over the past decade by a variety of primitive survivalist TV shows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_vs._Wild
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_Survival
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Woman,_Wild
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_and_Afraid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_with_Ed_Stafford

Of course, primitive survivalism is just a fantasy that is far too extreme for 99.99% of people to actually try themselves, so there are also plenty of TV shows, Youtube channels, blogs, etc. about "homesteading". In a nutshell, homesteading involves self-sufficiency, minimizing luxuries, living rurally and "off the grid" since that is cheaper than living in a densely-populated area, etc. Although homesteading can theoretically consist of a noble life of subsistence agriculture, most of the portrayals in the media and in blogs involve ranching (e.g. raising chickens and cows) and hunting (for food and fur/clothing). Things such as selling eggs or fur are also recommended as a way to make a small amount of income (since true 100% one-person or one-family self-sufficiency isn't really possible unless you want to live like an actual caveman).

Here are some of the popular homesteading TV shows. You can find hundreds of blogs and Youtube channels as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Bush_People
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%3A_The_Last_Frontier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Alaskans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Men_(TV_series)
https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/homestead-rescue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukon_Men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Below_Zero

I think there is room for entryism into the homesteading movement to make it more ethical. There are some vegan homesteading blogs and forums, but they aren't nearly as prevalent as ranching/hunting homesteaders.

https://old.reddit.com/r/veganhomesteading/


Considering that pre-industrial subsistence farmers also toiled for far fewer hours (and far fewer total workdays) than post-industrial laborers, it shouldn't be too difficult to replace the idolization of hunter-gatherers with romanticism surrounding subsistence farmers:

Quote
One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.

These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

Therefore, we must take a longer view and look back not just one hundred years, but three or four, even six or seven hundred. Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks.
[...]
The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year [...] A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-more

A communist take on how the wealthy elite believed the self-sufficiency of the peasantry made them too "lazy", and how the emerging industrialists saw a necessity for the peasantry to be forced into wage slavery so they would work longer hours in much worse conditions:
https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/

I am not well-read on Marxism, but I believe one of the important concepts is that laborers in the post-industrial era are "alienated" from the products their labor produces. This is even more prevalent today in "paper-pushing" jobs where people file pointless paperwork all day to make a billionaire richer. What's the purpose in that? Where's the value in that? It is very easy to get burned out from doing that and want to escape to something more meaningful.

Subsistence agricultural labor may be difficult:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/aryan-labour/

However, it is not alienating and soul-sucking, because the purpose of the labor is apparent. It also means you only need to do enough work to procure the necessary amount of resources to live (i.e. simple living!). This is in contrast to the Western drudgery of having to work literally every single week ,without any purpose, just to live paycheck to paycheck.

---

Some forums of interest:

This one seems to have a lot of communist/anarchist people who think robots should do all the work while they lazily sit at home all day and watch TV or something. But it's one of the more active forums revolving around discontent for Western labor conditions.
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/

A more general forum for young people disillusioned with the Western narrative of "go to college so you can get a good job and buy consumer products".
https://old.reddit.com/r/lostgeneration/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/
https://old.reddit.com/r/simpleliving/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Degrowth/

Although accumulating enough wealth to retire early and live off of the accumulated wealth doesn't fundamentally challenge the system, it's at least an option I suppose. Although, I imagine the types of people who make enough money to do such a thing are considered "skilled professionals", and if enough of them remove themselves from the workforce, it may end up having adverse effects for business elites?
https://old.reddit.com/r/leanfire/

90sRetroFan

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #10 on: September 02, 2021, 10:24:28 pm »
"Western narrative of "go to college so you can get a good job and buy consumer products"."

I would not call that Western, but rather consumerist. What I would call the true Western narrative is: "Go to college so you can do machine research to get our descendants expanding into outer space." What is truly Western is always concerned with Yahwism rather than mere consumption.

Consumerism is a way to channel internal non-Yahwists to externally support Yahwism, as in: "Go to college so you can get a good job to support other people's machine research to get our descendants expanding into outer space, and you yourself can buy consumer products as an immediate bonus."

The reason this distinction is vital is because our enemies also oppose consumerism, but from the right, meaning they want to society to abandon consumerism (which they accurately label as non-Western) and get back to the true Western attitude. In our eyes, however, the path our enemies promote would be even worse than society merely remaining consumerist (though this too is bad enough!).

"people file pointless paperwork all day to make a billionaire richer. What's the purpose in that?"

If that billionaire happens to be:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/enemies/elon-musk/

then it has plenty of purpose according to Yahweh:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/if-western-civilization-does-not-die-soon/

guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #11 on: September 07, 2021, 04:34:01 pm »
How people with strong herder blood do simple living:

Went homeless. Done Guerrilla Grazing by choice ever since
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Aaron Fletcher has grazed his sheep and lived off the land as a traveling shepherd for 12 years. He calls it guerrilla grazing (a step above guerrilla gardening, he says) and he lets his sheep graze - with permission- public parks and side lots. Homeless by choice, he offers his services to small farms in exchange for food or a place to stay (though half his calories come from his sheeps’ milk).

With a tiny metal cart home pulled by his sheep, he has a bed, a refrigerator/evaporative cooler, a shower (he uses a pesticide sprayer to pump up the water pressure), power (solar panel), sun oven, a mailbox stove for heat, bicycle tire wheels and a corrugated plastic roof.

Fletcher makes cheese and butter from his sheep milk and forages for seeds, fruits, vegetables and herbs. He’s created a map for foragers in his region. He makes some money with his scythe business - cutting noxious weeds for locals -, but he insists he’s not interested in making money and just hopes to serve as an example for other homeless interested in guerrilla grazing.


Why does he need sheep, that's the part I don't understand? Seems completely unnecessary?
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Fletcher makes cheese and butter from his sheep milk and forages for seeds, fruits, vegetables and herbs.

Oat milk tastes way better than any milk derived from an animal and it seems many agree. He could just do away with the sheep and buy oat milk on occasion, probably lasts a lot longer than sheep milk too I would imagine.

guest55

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #12 on: September 21, 2021, 08:31:29 pm »
Inside America's LARGEST HIPPIE COMMUNE
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The Rainbow Family of Living Light is a worldwide countercultural movement of hippies, living by the Native American prophesy that one day, when the Earth is dying, a family of different colors, creeds, and backgrounds will come together in the name of restoring peace and harmony between each other and between humanity and the Earth. To learn more about the movement, we visited their temporary commune in the forest where they gathered this year in Wisconsin to pray for peace, and work together to create a temporary city in the forest.


I remember Hitler saying something about how only idiots live in the forest....

Top comment to the above video:
Quote
I lived (short term) with a Rainbow Family in Oregon years ago and it was an awful experience. **** was abundant (consent in general, was just not taught or upheld - not just with sex, but other things as well).  A few people stole another person's dog, killed it and ate it (and this was not an isolated event - I heard about this A LOT, regarding other people's pets, mostly dogs).  There were some good qualities, sure - but the bad MAJORLY outweighed the good. A lot of them are also REALLY bad at littering, not digging deep enough holes to **** in, etc.  Just an awful mess, all around.  They don't really care for the earth. They just trash it. Most of them are pretentious, white kids running away from their lives.

Zea_mays

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #13 on: October 06, 2021, 01:17:45 pm »
The global labor movement has a name and its own Wikipedia article now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation

Time will tell if they embrace simple living and find a new way to labor, or if they sell out and go back to the grind...

This is why China needs to promote its counterculture movements like the Lying Flat movement, instead of Westernizing by outlawing non-masculine men or whatever the hell they're doing... They could be gaining massive ground promoting both non-Western cultural elements and an autocratic socialist government/economic system to all the hundreds of millions of Westerners who have no hope in the Western system...



Zea_mays

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #14 on: October 06, 2021, 02:12:03 pm »
What young people in nations with Western economic systems have to look forward to after having their youth wasted in the Western education system:

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Is life really just working a 40 hour work week to savor a precious weekend over and over again until you die?

I just turned 18, and from my understanding, being an adult means: working a meaningless and grueling job 5 days a week to have enough money to pay for livable accommodations, while having little to no time for relationships, hobbies, or really anything that makes life worth living.
And the weekend is just two days of stress trying to get as much done as possible because you don't have time during the week.

Is it like this for everyone? Is there a way to NOT have to do this? What's the point?

EDIT: I should add that I'm NOT someone that would rather party every day and engage in grossly hedonistic alternatives. I don't want a massive house/s. I don't want a brand-new sports car/s. I don't want 10 wives. I just want to live with someone I love and spend as much time with them as possible while furthering my knowledge and pursuing art. That's all.
https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/pnle9x/is_life_really_just_working_a_40_hour_work_week/

The solution: the Lying Flat Movement!

Or, homesteading as a subsistence farmer, living in an intentional community (which would probably make a living by subsistence farming), live cheaply in a low-cost-of-living area and get by on part time work (which seems to be the core of Lying Flat), or find some really rare job that is useful to society and respects their employees.

Or turn on, tune in, drop out and live in a van like a hippie. (I imagine living in a van would actually save more fuel than being forced to commute back and forth to a conventional job!)
https://old.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/

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Like every great religion, we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present—turn on, tune in, drop out.[3]

"Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity".[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on%2C_tune_in%2C_drop_out#History_of_the_phrase


Unfortunately, the person who posted this thread was exposed to hunter-gatherer "romanticism" and not any of the other stuff!

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Honestly? I'd rather be a hunter/gatherer or live off the land off grid and be with the ones I love than work constantly just to be a part of modern society and NOT have time with the ones I love.
https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/pnle9x/is_life_really_just_working_a_40_hour_work_week/hcqhrli/

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Even ancient Rome was able to exist on far fewer hours than laborers today are forced to waste:

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Jérôme Carcopino states in his book Daily life in Ancient Rome (p. 184) that

    If one bears in mind that the "hour" at the winter solstice equalled forty-five minutes according to our reckoning and seventy-five minutes at the summer solstice, these data bring the Roman working day down to about seven hours in summer and less than six in winter. Summer and winter alike, Roman workmen enjoyed freedom during the whole or the greater part of the afternoon, and very probably our forty-hour week with its different arrangement would have weighed heavily on them rather than pleased them.

However, Prof. Donald Wasson in his article @http://www.ancient.eu/article/637/ reports that

    For the affluent the day was divided between business and leisure. Of course, business was only conducted in the morning. Most Romans worked a six hour day, beginning at dawn and ending at noon, although, occasionally some shops might reopen in the early evening. The city’s forum would be empty because the afternoon was devoted to leisure - attending the games (gladiatorial competitions, chariot races, or wrestling), the theater or the baths - all of which were also enjoyed by the poor (as many in government felt the need for the poor to be entertained). Even during times of crises, the citizens of Rome were kept happy with bread and games.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-did-the-average-Roman-laborer-not-slave-work-in-a-week/answer/Marco-Buccini

Surely they'd rather live like that than a hunter-gatherer.