+50 happiness points

"all that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. every minute i save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what i just ran upstairs for. on the other hand, attending to the task in front of me--even a quotidian chore--might make it into part of a good day, rather than just a rock in the road someplace"

-barbara kingsolver, animal vegetable miracle

baking bread tonight. thinking about what i do with my time. where my mind's at. what i want from life. you know, typical saturday night.

lately i'm pretty convinced i'd like to spend my life working on a farm: a local, small scale, community based organic farm. and then, if i could manage it, have it be an open house for visitors of all sorts...much like a trail hostel, and it would be awesome if it happened to actually BE on the trail. i want to be self supported, little to no infrastructure. it's a bit of a stretch for me, not coming from a farming background, having been raised in a family that never grew a single edible thing, with no actual experience (beyond hiking) with life outside the grid...in other words it's a romantic idea and i don't actually know what i'd be getting myself into, outside of a conceptual understanding, and some limited reading on the subject. but i've had ideas like that before (namely hiking the AT) and they panned out well. i'm not shy of physical labor. and conceptually, it makes me tingle!

the thing is, the hang up is, our society has spent a lot of energy making it so i could remove myself from the necessary elements of staying alive. i don't have to grow my own food, or even know anything about how to cook, in order to eat enough to live my life. i don't have to think about where i get water, or how much of it i use, since it comes out of the tap with minimal effort. there was a lot of work put into making my life be so uncomplicated. i'm supposed to think it's a privilege that i get to spend my life being a secretary, doing a job that literally has no relevance in the grand scheme, and still get all my needs taken care of. so, why don't i? why am i becoming so obsessed with the idea of returning to a less 'developed' state. why is growing my own food so appealing? why do i read about people who live in houses whose walls are made of hay bales and think that's totally awesome and not that it's totally insane? there's a long history behind me of generations of people toiling and building a society so that i wouldn't HAVE to do that... why am i trying to shun it?

it has a lot to do with happiness. that and the meaning of life. simple, right? i mean happiness, in that way that it IS the meaning of life. you know, because i don't believe in god or an afterlife, no, not even a little bit, not at all. so personal happiness in the moment, for me, that IS the meaning of life. and i'm pretty convinced that the frills and infrastructure of modern society don't ultimately increase this kind of happiness. not the big picture kind of happiness. and i'm willing to venture that they might increase the rebound bipolar effect of euphoria... but more importantly, they complicate things. attachments to physical objects make me feel constrained, and i think if you average out all the highs and lows they provide, in the best case you'll be left with some neutral middle. from my perspective, in the best possible scenario, they land you no better than if they didn't exist at all.

of course, there are obvious hypocrisies in what i'm saying. at the surface level there is infrastructure i'm not planning to live without. healthcare, for one...or at least reliable birthcontrol, is a very important element of modern living that make my 'take no more than your share' philosophy achievable. and i don't mean to suggest that i intend to return completely to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, shun society completely...but if that is not the case, telephones, roads...i have to draw a line somewhere.

which i suppose is where it's important to remember that ultimately it doesn't matter. what i do isn't actually changing the world, and my personal actions are really just for me. i can be as hypocritical as i want, as outside of society as i'm comfortable with being. and for the big picture, whole world contribution, probably there is an equilibrium at which we can settle where we mainly spend our collective time doing what is necessary for living and actually living, and ultimately not much more. that certainly won't happen in my lifetime. certainly it won't happen because of my actions. but maybe in my lifetime i can model some of it. move towards it, and demonstrate its importance...its feasibility in the 'modern,' 'industrial' world. and, really, i think it would make me happy to try. i think it would boost my average contentment in life like, 50 points, at least!