David MacClement's opinions and advice; & Financial Independence & Serial Media

How One Should Live.

Use the least possible resources, partly for the sake of the Earth, & partly to withdraw power from Trans-National Corporations by spending little (they depend on making money).
Build a circle of friends and acquaintances with whom one shares at least some common opinions. Most people cannot (or will not) act in ways that are so different from those around them that they are seen as odd enough to be alien, so they need some positive feedback.
Work only just hard enough to feel satisfied, at the kinds of work you really enjoy more than half the time. This may or may not involve being paid. A major reason for living on little is to give oneself this freedom. {on this page, "$" means: NZ$:}
As the years go by, build up enough savings that one can live on the interest, at ~$2,000 p.a.* for total costs. This gives you the "zero option" regarding working for pay. (At a 5% net interest rate (7.5% actual, before 33% tax), this requires savings of $40,000 to be invested.) { * p.a. = per annum, p.w. = per week}
This $2,000 allows about $650 p.a. ($12.50 p.w.) for food; this is possible, see: https://davd.tripod.com/dsmenu.html
and the remaining $1,350 split between the cost of sharing a paid-for house/apartment with at least two others, and bus & clothing costs. This last can be zero for several years if necessary, for a person who has a stock of usable clothing (however un-stylish it is). Obviously: no car!
Spend quite a bit of time thinking. Some of this time could profitably be spent reading WorldWatch Institute publications, walking in the woods or other places where there are few or no other people, or just "lazing around" (dozing, working-with-no-great-effect in the garden, doing a bit of art or music, or sitting in the sun). These could be the times when you develop who-you-are, and they are likely to include occasions when you are most human (rather than some other primate).
Circulate your opinions in ways that suit you. Write letters to the Editor, or articles if (s)he would accept that the general reader could be interested (and your writing is clear and to the point). Join a dozen groups, where you can join/initiate conversations and make your views known on suitable occasions. Some of these groups could be supportive, but in others you will meet opposition, so you'd best prepare answers to expectable questions/criticisms.
A major (TV-spread) problem is the assumption that getting and spending as much money as possible, even to the detriment of one's relationships and health, is what modern living in Western countries is all about. A part answer (in addition to: "but does it really make you happy?") is that human history and prehistory spans about 100,000 years, and our experiences in this time have largely shaped who we are. Most of these millennia were spent somewhat as I've described above, in hunter-gatherer societies, with only rare emergencies, so living, loving and lazing, with a small amount of (pleasurable, but sometimes risky) "work" each 7 days is normal for humans.

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David's daily life.

item, end-July 2000

My criteria for almost all of what I do, originate from my understanding/belief that since the mid-20th-century there have been increasingly too many people on the whole earth - there's no longer any "frontier" for the excess to expand into - and something over 3 billion people are now causing so much detriment to the living things on Earth that they should vanish/die off. I include myself in this excess. This belief is based on my understanding that both the number and the range of resource use (=spent income) of people in the decade centered on 1950 were the maximum that could be sustained in perpetuity. I realise that, working together for the good of all might have allowed a major increase in these factors, but I see no evidence that the whole human race is even capable of doing this,
so The Ecologist's "Blueprint for Survival" and Meadows et al.'s "Limits to Growth", of 1972, were being too optimistic in portraying a possible livable world for everyone sometime in the future from then.

- From here (late 1990's), it's obvious that unless the top ~25% of income earners on earth reduce their consumption to a sixth of what they use up now, (that's an over 80% reduction in their "living standard"), there will be an increasingly divided world, with The Rich doing "whatever's necessary" to maintain their way of life, paying little attention to the (decreasing) middle-class, and ignoring where possible, killing where not, The Poor, who will be an increasing majority as the decades pass. The Poor may, as The Rich's attempts at genocide fail, become the overwhelming majority at some stage, and cause catastrophe after disaster all around the world. I will be dead by then.

- In the mean time, my life is focussed on my being a ghost seen and recognised but having as close to zero effect on the people around me and the rest of the world as I can. A "living suicide"*.

- A friend has pointed out to me (in Jan.'94, when I told them my "ghost" views), that I could choose to do good and valuable things, i.e. aim at having a positive net result for my having lived, but I remember my (I thought) enlightened views 25 years ago, and I know in hindsight that what I thought were "good and valuable" things to do then weren't, so my choices now would be equally likely to be wrong, and it's better to aim at zero which can't be wrong, at least to the same extent.

{* I'm not so depressed now (1998) as I was in the last 5 years, so while the above still describes
what I don't do, I'm not so sure about its value. However, see: }
https://davd.tripod.com/hard-scrabble.html

The practical results:

My wishes are not even slightly important, so they only produce a result when no-one else is around to notice. An example is my use of our computer, to produce these Webpages and to search for other sites with similar ideas (& send e-mail).
All four of us sharing this house as flat-mates make lengthy use of the computers here, so I get up at 4:30 to 5:15 a.m. to do what I want (in 1997: preparing MS Word papers for uploading to Keith Rankin's pages on my site), and have no regrets when Bera wakes at 7 a.m. (on weekends) to do some of her personal historical study, and the others take over later.
I take my meals in the laundry, where I can listen to the radio without interfering with anyone else's choice of what to listen-to or watch, including (which is what started this, 9 years ago) talking to each other, expressing opinions that I wouldn't agree with. My expressed disagreement used to either stop the discussion cold or produce an argument so acrimonious that those younger than me avoided having meals at the same table or time. Since I used to be the one who made the meals, I found that too hard to take and went on strike for the summer, and when not requested to continue at the beginning of the following semester, I stopped altogether. Our daughter (with rare help) then made meals for herself and the others, on and off during several years. Now everyone gets whatever they individually want to eat, usually bread, peanut butter and fruit, though sometimes they cook a meal.
For at least 6 years I haven't mowed the "lawns", since no-one was using them except to walk across to throw the food rubbish onto a rough compost heap at the far side. As for the front, people keep a track clear by walking across, then up the road to the bus. I am quite willing to leave Nature to "do her thing", even when it's very obviously untidy! (see Bill Duesing's: "Say Good-bye to Lawns" [Aug.1 '97], and a May 2001 motor-mower comparison with car pollution.)
For over a year, I provided mains-independent light in two rooms in the house, by daily charging two 12 V car batteries with a 64 W solar panel on a deck-chair on the back "lawn" (turning it at midday and in early evening), then bringing the batteries in, putting them on the floor just under each light switch, and connecting them up. This meant I had to clear enough space on the "lawn" near the deck-chair. I don't do that now, ever since I became fed-up with my 17-year-old daughter's willfulness, and left to live on my own, in a barn on a corner of a farm, from mid-Nov.'95 to mid-July (winter) '96. I had got my quick, fierce anger to tone down after that period of most of a year, so was much less risk to those around me. My daughter was also willing to put a lot of effort into trying to reach an accomodation, which we did.
In 1989 I was asked to retire [from Physics teaching] because of my too-quick anger and other over-stress symptoms. Since then, I've been walking ~7 km to the nearest supermarket and back again each Saturday for groceries for the 5 of us (as we were then), which included milk from another dealer since Bera and I have been boycotting* "Anchor" (NZ Dairy Group) products because of the way they reduced then eliminated re-usable glass bottles for milk. We still walk there each Saturday, but since Bera now comes with me and I'm over 60, we carry the back-packs of groceries (total: 30 - 37 kg) home in the bus. We're convinced that walking a minimum of 3 hours a week is one of the main reasons we're so healthy.
{* Just today, Mon. 10 August.'98, we've begun a new arrangement with Anchor Milk: they've begun street-delivery to us of Demeter Organic milk; this is what we've wanted since we first found proper Organic (BioGro or Demeter) milk was commercially available in N.Z. years ago.}
As seen in the North Shore Times Advertiser's front page: https://davd.tripod.com/macfamil.html (which includes my 1992 picture), I walk barefoot almost all the time. Partly this is to keep the soles of my feet tough enough to have them as renewable soles, avoiding any more than ~$8 every 2 years for footwear (i.e. thongs/jandals), and partly to keep my mind on the job of making it clear that I reject the current money-focussed economy.
I use minimum power for lighting (11 W compact fluorescents), and in all winters for the last 5 years I've done without in-house heating (as well as cooking), so as to use a minimum of energy and to produce as little CO₂ as possible. This actually does work, because:
1. I simply wear enough layers of (mostly wool) clothing that I'm tolerably warm, and go back to bed if, while sitting still for hours with a blanket around me and my hot water bottle, I'm still cold; and:
2. we live only 37 degrees south of the Equator, in a maritime climate (never too cold, or too hot).
As indicated on my:
https://davd.tripod.com/dsmenu.html page, I do heat water for cocoa (and India tea) and occasionally a hot water bottle, using natural gas (LPG in a cylinder) when possible. This, and my fraction of the energy used by the supermarket to bake my bread, are the only energy I use. From 1992 to 1997, for all weeks except the 6 either side of mid-winter day, I heated my shower water (~3 times a fortnight) in a no-cost black plastic rubbish-bag on a level insulating base on the back "lawn". Naturally, I shower after 2 p.m. on a sunny day.
A literary conspiracy. I'm a fan of Science Fiction (not Fantasy), and I'm glad my rates payments support the local public library (in our case, including a mobile), but I'm concerned that the vast majority of this kind of fiction shows the travails and triumphs of a small group, so that each individual is valuable to the group. Because I was a reader as I grew up, my view of what the world was like was largely formed by that reading. However, this "hidden agenda" of fiction, usually showing an individual's indispensability, is seriously misleading. For the first time ever, there are far more people than the things (eg. jobs) that need doing - most people could be replaced by someone else, or even permanently disappear.
Why is it apparently necessary to put a rosy gloss on the real world, through not only TV, but fiction?
I wrote this next bit on 17 June, 1997.
My wife left for her job this morning at her usual time, about 6:20 a.m., and as she was going out the front door to catch the first bus of the day, she said to me: "I love you!", and put the body language into it that emphasised its truth. I naturally responded: "I love you too!" We had drifted apart, starting about fifteen years ago while I was still working hard as a teacher to support our growing family, and under nearly overwhelming stress.
The contrast I think is stark: I worked too hard and I was on my own - now I do nothing and am at ease, and I have her very welcome company (she has a PhD in BioPhysics) and interest in me: she looks me straight in the eye, now, when a decade ago and more recently, she wouldn't.
It's obvious to me that: "working hard", "improving productivity", "pulling your weight", and other Protestant Work Ethic (& more recent neo-liberal economics) pressures on the individual must be resisted, before they cause a breakdown.
Further, the _real_ option of cutting back the amount you earn from your work, perhaps to zero, _must_ be available to every worker. This is evidence of the _need_ for a Citizen's Income/ Universal Basic Income.

Humankind is a social species, and is implicitly understood as being so by, I would guess, 95 percent of us. (The exceptions are the extreme individualist; the sort of people who go to bed with a copy of Ayn Rand under their pillows.)

The social good represents the "grand commons" of our species, meaning everything that is shared (eg resources, cultures, environments, institutions, infrastructures, science, ideas, ideals). We grow up with the innate belief that everyone must contribute in some way to the maintenance of the commons, suspecting - consciously or subconsciously - that if some are seen to not contribute (free-riding) then others may be tempted to free-ride also. Societies die when too many people become free-riders.

In Western and Confucian cultures - eg under the "Protestant Work Ethic" - the term "contribution" has come to be understood to mean "paid work". In reality, of course, there are other forms of contribution. In addition, much paid work does not contribute to any social ends, and may indeed be socially damaging while serving strictly individual ends.

The first is socially responsible market production. Here, we must recognise that the contribution is the "net social product" arising from the work, and may be unrelated to the efforts, time sacrifices or wages of the paid workers. We should never regard market incomes as measures of contribution. Nor should we regard "income tax" as a measure of an individual's contribution to society. An individual who appropriates an excessive share of market income will be regarded as having paid more income tax than persons less able to claim large shares, but may have made a smaller net contribution.

The second form of social contribution is non-market production. This includes a whole range of unpaid activities that take place at global, national, local and household levels. Raising children is a particularly important example of a non-market contribution; an example that occurs on all four levels simultaneously. Each parent, through reproduction, is creating the future (paid and unpaid) workforce of the world.

The third form of contribution is "conservation", or "treading lightly". The purpose of social contribution is to maintain the integrity of the commons. One way to maintain that integrity is to adopt a lifestyle that, while not involving any form of measurable production, at the same time involves no destruction. Leaving the planet as we find it is a form of contribution.

Two cricket metaphors are apt here: "A run saved is a run gained", and "Dropped catches lose matches". Contribution through conservation [good fielding] is as important as contribution through production [batting]. And the socially negative by-products of indiscriminate market activity [dropped catches] tend to far exceed any negative impact arising from those conservers who add little to the commons that sustain us.

A welfare system that facilitates a balance of the three different forms of contribution is more valuable to human society than a system that forces everyone to contribute through just one of the three forms. Indeed, mass labour market participation may contribute even less, net, than mass idleness.

Variety is the spice of life. Variety of contribution is the means of safeguarding society.

On the other hand, if you are talking financial independence as envisioned by most people (i.e., to have enough money coming in to do anything I would ever want to do, with no change in my lifestyle and no attempt to reduce my expenses/ecological footprint), I would strongly agree that we're mixing oil and water in discussing it in parallel with cohousing.

But what I guess you're really driving at, Tom, is that the desire for financial "independence" seems somehow at odds with the desire for the "interdependence" of community. But I don't see FI as reflecting disconnectedness...I see it more as a desire to "pull one's weight." Most of us do that already by holding down a job...I don't really see how insuring that you have income from other than paid employment is really any different than insuring that you hold down a job. They are both ways in which we responsibly cover our expenses so that others don't have to...and so that we can be a resource to those in need.

I could be FI in the sense it seems to be usually meant--have enough money in investments to generate cash to live on and meet all my needs, myself, through paying for them with money--and I can still live in co-housing to reduce my expenses for housing, tools, perhaps even food as well as benefiting non-monetarily from the mutual support of others in the co-housing community.

I am uncertain what you mean by "the yearning for utter financial independence." I, personally, share the view that others (Jim Anderson?) have expressed here recently, that FI needn't meant "utter independence" in the sense of going it alone.
FI can mean that I have managed to arrange my life so that I can meet my needs. Period.
I don't need more money than I have or am earning. I might be sharing a lot of expenses with others; I might be living very lightly and need extremely little, like David MacClement; I might be taking part in barter and local currency systems, plus gardening, getting off the utility grid and in other ways meeting some or many of my needs *without* money. I also might be getting paid weekly or monthly for work I do, and live on that, or partly on that, not necessarily entirely on investment income. (Didn't Jef Murray point out that Joe Dominguez meant *this* by FI, a life for which one had enough money, rather than strictly a sock-it-away approach?)

I know you may not have been talking about me, Tom, but I just want to make it clear (if I haven't!) that I do *not* yearn for "utter financial independence." I yearn for a low-cost life that is also comfortable and connected. I think, as I've said here before, that whenever we talk about "financial independence" as meaning that we can meet all our needs with our own money, we are still embracing the values of consumer culture--we are changing the degree of those values, but not their kind. We are reducing our ecological footprint and opening ourselves to many of the benefits of a simplified life, but we are stopping short of challenging the fundamental values of consumerism and our destructive economy.

When I begin to find non-monetary ways to meet my needs, such as communal living arrangements, bartering and allowing myself to think that things can be fundamentally different from the way they are, I am changing the entire course of my economic and social interactions. *Then* I am creating a new culture and a new society, and demonstrating to others that it *is* possible, we are not "stuck" with capitalism or with hierarchical social structures or with a system that defines "value" as "worth a given amount of money in the marketplace." That is what I want to be doing.

At the end of June,'98, I wrote* to the Dirty Sole Society list, with

Subject: Re: pedestrians rights (on N.Z. roads) :-

A few days ago [in their MESSAGE dirty-soles.v001.n313.2] I said:
"I use my jandals/thongs where there is sharp gravel for nearly a kilometer",
but I didn't mention when and why I have to walk on the gravel at the side of the road.

This chore I carry out on Saturdays (getting the weekly shopping) involves walking on the side of the road, since there is no footpath/ sidewalk. Our rural area is being built-up, but in spite of the great increase in traffic there is still only the 2-lane road, with virtually no shoulder before the ditch.
Ten years ago I'd walk (barefoot) along there, and only on rare occasions have to move off the road, e.g. for a truck. Smaller vehicles simply went around me, part of the car being in the opposite lane.

I still insist on my right to the road, subject to the same Rode Code that all users obey, basically that one doesn't materially impede the free flow of traffic.
So I'm constantly looking behind when I see a vehicle coming in my lane, and am ready to temporarily move onto that sharp gravel if vehicles in opposite directions will be passing each other near me.
(My other routine is to walk on the outside of the sharper curves.)

My problem is that too many of the new-comers to Greenhithe act as if the road was made for them, and that pedestrians have to get out of their way. I have begun to record the registration-plate numbers of those who come within half a meter (a foot-and-a-half) of my left elbow. (We drive on the left, and I face the traffic). I'm afraid the Police are just too busy to be interested, though.
These are attempts at intimidation, in my view, but at 62 (and having had a good life), I'm quite willing to risk serious damage or death, so I'm not giving way.

[* This is a moderated list, and the above was rejected for publication.
Here are the moderator's views: ]

How One Should Live.

David's daily life.

Two Different Views of Financial Independence.

Subject: Re: Financial dependence

Subject: Re: Financial dependence

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