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by Ben Hewitt

  While it is true that I cannot protect my family from every single health crisis, it is true that by making informed decisions about how we eat and otherwise care for ourselves, we can absolve ourselves of much of the risk associated with the contemporary American lifestyle. We place tremendous importance on the quality of the food we consume, and on ensuring that our lives remain as stress free and full of beauty as possible. These factors, as much as anything else, provide our “health insurance.”

  Of course, some portion of my life must by necessity remain tethered to the unconscious economy. This is indisputable, and there is no calculation that can show me what portion of my life this should be. Instead, I rely on intuition and a simple question that never fails to provide guidance when I find myself at a crossroads: What am I agreeing to? And, when faced with a choice—to invest in a mutual fund or in nut trees, to buy a new car or keep patching the rust holes on the old one, to borrow a tool from a neighbor or buy one for myself—what does my decision tell me about what I am agreeing to? Am I agreeing to the world I want to inhabit, or am I capitulating to the prevailing story of the commodity economy? Of course, there are times it must be the latter, but as I have found both in my life and in observing Erik’s, the more I agree to inhabit a conscious economy, the more opportunities I have to reject the commodified status quo.

  Still, despite the emotional and intellectual gyrations associated with attempting to define the monetary aspect of my life, this is only part of the story. To be sure, it is a part that deserves serious consideration, if for no other reason than my responsibility to provide for my family. But to allow financial considerations to dominate is both tragic and ironic because the greatest benefits bestowed by the conscious economy have little to do with money.

  Indeed, what I have observed in both Erik’s life and my own is the extent to which money’s relevance wanes as we begin to understand what a poor representation of wealth it truly is. Or maybe it only wanes in relation to the other components of holistic wealth, as they come to command increasingly large portions of our total affluence pie. In other words, it’s hard to care so much about money when you care so much about other people, or when you truly understand that how you spend your hours is how you spend your life. It’s hard to care so much about money when you inhabit each moment so thoroughly that you have little emotional or intellectual space left over to fret about tomorrow, next week, next year, and so on. It’s hard to care so much about money when you recognize that caring so much about money is driving a wedge between yourself and the things that are really deserving of your care: personal relationships, the natural world, your freedom and spirit. It’s hard to care so much about money when you have found alternative ways to secure at least some of the basic essentials of human survival. When, to put it simply, you aren’t scared.

  It is a largely unacknowledged truth that the contemporary American life is lived under a guillotine of fear. We fear disease, poverty, terrorism, loneliness, and death. We spend a lifetime seeking security because we are told the world is an insecure and dangerous place; that peril lurks around each corner. We spend so much of our time believing these fears and trying to abate them that we don’t even stop to consider whether our anxieties might be misplaced. We don’t even wonder if perhaps the things we fear are, at least in part, the tragic outgrowth of our misguided attempts to create an artifice of security. We have disease because we have allowed our food to be commoditized and thus subject to the profit-borne whims of corporatism; we have poverty because we have believed the lie that money buys security and because we have created a system that unjustly allows money to beget money; we have terrorism largely because we have meddled and assumed the righteous stance of American exceptionalism; we have loneliness because we no longer need one another; we have death because it is inevitable, and we know this, yet because we have come to see ourselves as separate from nature and its laws, we believe that death is something to be vanquished. It has become a foe. And until we have conquered our foes, we fear them.

  It is fascinating to me to consider the evolution of this story. I’d originally wanted merely to better understand money, and I wound up better understanding the ways in which I relate to the world around me. It is no exaggeration to say I wound up better understanding myself. Because once you peel back the illusory nature of the wealth and security our contemporary monetary policy and economic expectations provide, you are forced to confront the truth: We are all connected, and we are all meant to be connected, both to one another, and to the natural world that underpins our existence. To live amidst the false abundance of a system that exchanges our true wealth for accumulated tokens of prosperity might, for a time, provide a sense of comfort and satisfaction. Of well-being. But that sense of well-being is no more durable than the inherent worth of the bills and digits used to represent it.

  It is not that we need to abandon money; it is that we need to return it to its rightful role as merely one of numerous means of exchange, and never a means to an end. We need to understand that money by itself is nothing. It is a creation, a story, a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and yet it wields the power to cause irreparable damage. This may sound counterintuitive, but it is precisely money’s nothingness that lends it such power, for it is this quality that allows it to be infinite in a finite world. We must use money in full consciousness of this power. We must accept that we have granted it this capacity, and that anything we have granted can just as easily be rescinded.

  This includes the power it wields over us, with its unique capacity to hold us captive, in mind and body. The most remarkable change in my life since I began to break from money’s spell is a profound sense of freedom and choice as I sink deeper into the understanding that my life need not be defined by money and the pursuit of wealth. Much like Erik, I have come to realize the extent to which it is my privilege to experience this freedom and choice, and try not to take it for granted. I am grateful for it, and I notice how the more grateful I feel, the more money’s spell wanes. I notice how the less I fret over money, the less I need to fret over money because I find myself more connected to the things that truly matter, for which money will always be a poor substitute. In other words, I do not even want what I once wanted. I do not want what the marketplace tells me I should want.

  This is going to sound painfully obvious, but here it is, anyway: This is your life. This is your one life, and the incredibly, amazingly beautiful thing about it is that you get to choose how to spend it. It is true that those of us with children carry the added responsibility of knowing our choices regarding how we spend our lives are by default choices regarding how they spend their lives. But in all sincerity, I ask this simple question: Are your children better off having you work the long days necessary to provide them the “opportunities” we’ve been conditioned to provide, or are they better off simply having you? Because you will not get another chance to be with your children, or for that matter, any of your loved ones.

  What is it that compels us to consistently choose the path we’ve been taught to choose? Fear, as we’ve discussed. And, I’ve come to believe, a misplaced assumption that we inhabit a world beset by scarcity and that we must gird ourselves against this scarcity. For most of my life, I believed in scarcity, but now I see that scarcity, like money itself, is merely a story we are told, and I view the world as being amazingly, almost impossibly abundant. In many ways this is the most affecting aspect of my shifting consciousness, and I view it as a tremendous gift: to see plenty where I once saw paucity and to understand how truly generous and gracious nature is. My view of people has been similarly altered, although of course many cling to the worldview proffered by the unconscious economy, and they often feel as if they cannot afford to be as generous and gracious as their spirits whisper is possible.

  But how can I blame them? After all, they live the tragic irony that the myth of scarcity drives the reality of scarcity for those who cannot afford to participate in an economy that has monetized and
commoditized almost every basic human need. There is plenty for all, but fed by fear, marketing, and flawed assumptions, those who are able to do so consume and accumulate vastly more than they need, ensuring that we inhabit a world of massive inequality, where scarcity is manufactured by arrangements that are hardly questioned. Indeed, we have been indoctrinated to the myth of scarcity in no small part because a world of abundance is a world in which monopolistic corporate entities make no sense. It is a world in which hierarchal socioeconomic stratification makes no sense. It is a world in which fear makes no sense.

  There is no question that abandoning the quest for accumulated monetary wealth carries with it a degree of risk. But life is riddled with risk, which the accumulation of monetary wealth seems to mitigate only because so many experiences and aspects of human survival have become commodified: Birth. Death. Food. Water. Even the very air we breathe has fallen victim to the unconscious economy, as it is increasingly sullied by fallout from industry.43 The monetary arrangements we have established enable us to exchange our money for our freedom, at least to a certain extent, but it is a specific type of freedom. It is, as Lewis Hyde describes, “a catalog of possible lives,” with each possibility affixed with a price tag. In other words, it is a conditional freedom and freedom, like love, cannot be both conditional and pure.

  I have learned—I am still learning—to accept the risk that comes of embracing an alternate freedom because increasingly it feels to me as if the freedom offered by the unconscious economy is both tenuous and insincere. Increasingly, it feels to me as if maintaining the illusion of abundance contained within Hyde’s catalog of possible lives is keeping me from realizing the true wealth of interconnectedness, and that the greater risk lies in never knowing the richness and simple joy of this interconnectedness.

  It is true that neither Erik nor myself have managed to decouple ourselves from the illusory abundance of the unconscious economy, and I do not expect that we ever will. But I have also learned that this is not an all-or-nothing endeavor, and that the catalog of possible lives can be extended to include those experiences and relationships that fall outside the unconscious economy. It is as if there are two parallel economies, one conscious and one not, and it feels as if the most important thing I can do for myself and others is try my damndest to build a bridge between the two.

  I recall something Erik once told me, one of the few things I’ve heard him say that I actually disagree with. It was during the afternoon we plastered the interior walls of his cabin, after the night he’d spent roaming by foot, fretting that simply by living in accordance with his values, he wasn’t affecting change. Or enough change, at least. “My lifestyle is just a lifestyle choice. It’s not a strategy that’s going to affect things on a systemic level.”

  If Erik lived in a vacuum, that might be so. But of course he does not live in a vacuum; he inhabits a community that is itself part of a larger community that is part of something even larger. And so on. Erik might dismiss the choices he has made and continues to make as “lifestyle choices,” but to me, they are much more than that. I think of them as pebbles dropped into a pool, and I see how they ripple through the lives of those around him, informing and even enabling their choices. I think of how my life has been affected by those ripples: I have become more generous, less fearful, and increasingly content. Where I once saw scarcity, I now see plenty. I feel more connected to those around me and to the natural order, both as embodied by the physical structure of the land on which I live, and the too-often unacknowledged truth that my humanness does not grant me permission to stand apart from it. I am separate from nothing.

  We are repeatedly told that the path to prosperity and contentment is the one paved by the commodity economy, the one that separates and compartmentalizes us. We have been told this so often, for so long, that sometimes we forget to take our eyes off the path, to look up and around. To look forward. To look inward. To feel that separation and acknowledge the toll it takes.

  This is what I humbly suggest. For at least a moment, forget everything you know and have been told about money and wealth and abundance and how they should inform your life. Forget, even, everything you have read in the preceding pages, and simply grant yourself the gift of allowing your mind and heart to expand beyond the range of what you’ve been told is desirable. Or even possible. And at the same time you are forgetting all of this, remember this simple truth: The manner in which you pass your time is the manner in which you pass your life.

  How, then, do you want to live?

  And so I came to spend a small fraction of my life hunched over a pair of overturned plastic buckets just outside the front door of Erik’s cabin, running a handsaw through a slab of salvaged two-by-ten, and wishing he’d held on to our chop saw for a while longer. It was early May and the day was serene, warm, and breezeless, the clouds puffs of cotton in the sky. The exact date was May 9, which I know because I’d written it in my notebook but also because it was Erik’s 28th birthday. As such, there was to be a gathering at the cabin that evening, and it was decided that a set of front steps was needed to replace the precarious slab-of-plywood-perched-atop-a-couple-of-stumps-and-a-moldy-haybale arrangement that had served him for the past year or so.

  Erik was still living at Heidi’s, although he no longer referred to it as such, instead calling it “our place.” At some point over the past couple of months, he had cut his hair short and trimmed his beard to a fashionably neat goatee. It was amazing what the grooming did for him; it wasn’t as if he’d been a slob before, but now he looked downright dapper. In another set of clothes, he could have fit in at any brokerage or law firm. But of course he wore his usual assemblage of thrift-store attire, with his usual baseball cap perched atop his newly shorn head. The cap sat high and slightly off-center, and, worn thusly, reminded me of the prow of a great seafaring vessel.

  I was pleased to see that Erik hadn’t given up on the cabin. Over the preceding months, he’d finished plastering the walls and even cleaned most of the excess plaster from the beams and floor. And he’d applied whitewash over the plaster, which had brightened the place significantly. There was still plenty to be done, of course: finish floors, trim, some sort of paneling for upstairs walls and ceiling. Cardboard had been considered (“It’d be fun to draw on,” he told me)—and then dismissed. Whatever he decided on, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be typical. Or expensive.

  What would he do with the cabin, now that it needn’t provide his day-in, day-out shelter? He didn’t know, exactly, but thought it might make a nice art studio, or perhaps a place to stay for visiting friends. I thought of the bucket toilet, but even as I did I realized that Erik did not consort with the sort of people who would think twice about bathrooming out-of-doors, or reading by candlelight. In any event, Erik’s enthusiasm for the structure seemed undiminished, and his pride in his progress was evident. “It’s really coming along,” he’d told me a few days before, his voice bright with the simple satisfaction of it all.

  The decision to construct steps had been arrived at only after some consideration and a brief debate regarding priorities. “What do you think?” asked Erik when I arrived. “Should we make a platform for the bathtub”—he motioned to an old cast-iron tub straddling the line between forest and cabin clearing—“so we can light a fire under it and do some hot-tubbing, or should we build some steps?” Even as he mentioned the steps, his gaze lingered on the tub, and I knew in which direction he was leaning. Clearly, I would need to be the voice of reason: He’d invited 30 people, some of whom had never been to his cabin. Furthermore, much of the party would take place under the cloak of night, and of course, he had no lights. The plywood-stump-hay contraption was profoundly sketchy even in the full reveal of day. A wood-fired bathtub-turned-hot-tub would be a pleasing novelty and was, for lack of a better term, very “Erik.” But steps? Given the circumstances, they were essential.

  To my great surprise, Erik acquiesced to my pragmatism and in short order we had begu
n construction on a set of rudimentary stairs, utilizing haphazard pieces of lumber he’d stashed along the cabin’s northern wall. We tugged them out one by one, as the whole pile teetered precariously. Once cut to the proper length with the handsaw, we fastened the boards together with the least-bent of the used screws he’d been collecting in an old yogurt container. Despite the well-worn nature of his materials, and the 19th-century cutting technology, it took us less than an hour to complete the project, making ingress and egress to his cabin a relatively simple (and safe) affair.

  We stood back to admire our handiwork. It was a fine piece of work. Well, maybe not exactly “fine,” because in truth the middle step seemed to tilt a bit from left to right. Or maybe it was the bottom step that tilted from right to left; whatever the case, the relationship between the two seemed a bit out of whack. And to be honest, I harbored some minor concerns regarding the holding power of the repurposed screws we’d used. Might they have been compromised by their previous task? There was no way to know for certain, but it seemed possible. Still, vigorous stomping on my part did not expose any acute structural defects, and the project was deemed a success.

  In fact, things had gone so smashingly that we found ourselves with a spare hour or two before Erik was due back at Heidi’s, where he was to be led on a long and convoluted treasure hunt that would culminate with his birthday gift.44 It was not quite enough time to tackle the wood-fired bathtub contraption, but it was plenty enough to motor up a long, winding hill to the north, where almost a year before we’d found hatfuls and shirtfuls of morel mushrooms with Erik’s friend Breakfast.

  Erik offered to drive, so we hopped into the little Honda he and Heidi had recently procured. It was a replacement for her truck, which still sat in the driveway, having been diagnosed with a blown head gasket. The car was exactly what I would have expected Erik to own, if he were to own any car at all; it was small and thrifty, and bore a coat of blue paint, weathered by nearly 15 years of exposure to the elements. The interior was in great disarray, with scraps of paper and other detritus scattered about. I counted $1.68 in spare change sprinkled across the floor like confetti, and that was without looking under the seats.