I remembered the promise Mikey and I had made in a hot tub along the Rio Grande. I was here to dream aloud. The concepts of acculturated life — money and fame — were too heavy to take flight in the Land of Enchantment.
The Cost of Living
The merchant in Love’s bazaar is none other than the customer himself. Where then is the profit in trying to buy and sell?
— Javad Nurbakhsh
While I battled the fame and money goblins, Mikey was earning money blogging for media outlets like Popular Science and Hack a Day. He did online Linux consulting and sold filtered WVO when there was extra. Freelance work led him to design custom equipment for various New Mexico algae companies. But things got really exciting when he began designing his own electronic devices to make living our postconsumer life easier.
It was our domestic life that made it even more obvious to us than it had been when we’d first written on our whiteboard in New York Having a job is expensive. Though building a home out of waste and making our own fuel and power had freed us from a couple of commerce’s main entanglements, we still had fixed costs that could not be paid with a Bundt cake: a mortgage, a gas bill, and taxes, to name a few.
Growing and wildcrafting food and medicine showed us how precious our domestic life is to us. We became fermenters and began producing wine, mead, kimchi, cheese, bread, yogurt, tempeh, and kombucha at home. With all of these labors taking place in our own abode, taking up all our time, having a job was a direct threat to the quality of our life. Too much time freelancing or — worse — a full-time gig could end our diet of homegrown organic food produced by our garden and the raw cheeses that we made from fresh milk each week. It could put us back at the pump buying petroleum fuel. If we tried to build even one building project with a licensed crew doing the labor, we’d have gone broke the first year we were in New Mexico. We were wealthy because we did not have jobs.
Over time, our home economy became nuanced and took on a particular rhythm. As much as possible, we reduced our reliance on what required money and increased our participation in the local nonmonetary economy. Mikey was the first to detect and plug into the local domestic economy in T or C. He started baking and giving away bread. As he did, our friendships flourished and people started giving him things in return. As we learned to make more things we gave better gifts: homemade wine, salve, teas, and plant medicines.
When we started a cottage industry, I told Mikey that it felt to me as though we had started a production facility to make gifts that we also put online in the form of a store, just in case someone who didn’t live near us wanted to have them. As I learned at Black Rock City and confirmed at Swap-O-Rama-Rama, handmade objects are imbued with meaning; they have real value. They contain stories, heart, intention, and responsibility. And as gifts, their value goes up exponentially. The things we made were gifts first. We distributed them to friends in our community. The little extra we made we put online. They were commodities second.
As in many small towns, the local domestic economy in T or C functions outside of the national monetary system and runs on favors, labor, advice (good, bad, and otherwise), and objects gifted and bartered: camel poo, pies, fabric, baskets, blocks, building materials, and furniture (to name a few). Between friends and locals, an exchange of money is the low road. Though there is an exception to this point of etiquette: Almost everyone does one thing for money. We know what each other’s one thing is, and for it we happily pay each other in American dollars. This is how we support one another and how we recognize the tie we all have to the national economy, which, for now, still exists.
Sensing and participating in an unspoken law of reciprocity, we volunteer on local projects, such as building a solar hot-air heater for an elderly man in the neighborhood. We sit on boards for proposed food buying groups and co-ops. For a while we moderated a renewable energy group. Occasionally we produce events such as the Better Living Through Experimentation talk, musical events, clothing swaps, and a weeklong homesteading skill-sharing workshop for homesteaders around the country. Mikey taught a class on the subject of power and batteries to a group of eight students, none of whom was over 12 years old.
We arrived in the desert with some savings to lean on, and lean we did. Truth or Consequences’s low cost of living helped us bide the time needed to tease out questions like Is there a way to live that does not need money? Can we discover it before running out of money? Before two years were up, we were no longer people who required six-figure incomes to live, but people who led a happier and more abundant life on a combined income of under $30,000 a year, a year of rent in Manhattan.
The only thing that Mikey and I gave up during our quest for a decommodified life was broad-coverage medical insurance. Once in New Mexico, we reduced our medical insurance plan to one that covers only catastrophic events that cost more than a few thousand dollars. We pay approximately a hundred dollars a month per person for this level of insurance. There were many reasons that we made this choice. We wanted to know that a large medical event could not break us. But otherwise, we were also hesitant to rely on insurance companies, especially when we learned that many of them have been convicted of criminal behavior.
Instead of investing money in an insurance company, we decided to invest our time in health and to pay ourselves. Our health insurance plan consists of our organic garden, local wild-game meats, wildcrafted medicines we make from local plants, pollution-free high desert air far away from industry, life in rhythm with nature, stress-free living without deadlines and traffic, inspiration, a sense of purposefulness, and physical exercise from work and play. Our lifestyle is our insurance plan.
Before we left New York, we relieved ourselves of debt and promised each other that we would never acquire new debt. But we did acquire new debt in New Mexico. We could not find a way to buy property and a home without a mortgage. We also couldn’t get a mortgage. Banks don’t loan money to unemployed people in their thirties who admit the goal of never having a job again. In retrospect, this was a hidden blessing. To get around the technicality, we found a property being sold by a person willing to hold the mortgage at a low interest rate. It was debt nonetheless, and we added it to our cost-of-living chart.
In the same week we were inspired by both Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and the film The End of Suburbia, and we took the cash we had left in our savings account and bought a 2-kilowatt PV solar system and a bank of batteries. On April 23, 2008, we went off-grid. We hedged our bet that in the future everything dependent on petroleum — food, fuel, and power — would go up in price and become harder to obtain.
When the stock market finally crashed and the banks were bailed out, I read reports that parks in Los Angeles were turning into tent cities that housed those who’d lost their homes. Meanwhile, the stores in Truth or Consequences remained open and continued doing what they knew well: selling inexpensive used junk. As foreclosure rates jumped around the country, I noticed that in southern New Mexico less than 1 percent of the homes had been foreclosed on. New Mexico had been poor for a long time; people lived off the waste stream and resided in old mobile homes and trailers that they already owned. Life went on as usual.
Wendy and Mikey’s Yearly Cost of Living*
Shelter
Mortgage, home insurance, and property taxes $9,100
Natural gas (for home) $275
Electric $120 (basic connection; we keep a grid tie in case we need it, such as during a rare cloudy week or to equalize our battery bank)
Water/sewer/trash (combined in Truth or Consequences) $1,200
Technology & Communications
Internet provider $600
Two cell phones with data plans $1,320
Transportation
Insurance: four vehicles $600
Vehicle registration $200
Fuel $300 (10,000 miles per year)
Food/Health
Health insurance (catastrophic only) $2,400
Food and domestic good
s $4,500
Total Cost of Living
Just over $20,000 annual fixed expenses
*2011 figures
Take Time
Time is short. That’s the first thing. . . . Time is a servant if you are its master. Time is your god if you are its dog. We are the creators of time, the victims of time, and the killers of time. Time is timeless. That’s the second thing. You are the clock.
— Willem Dafoe as an angel in the film Faraway, So Close!
In New Mexico, we became money-poor and time-wealthy. I’d take time over money any day. (Who wouldn’t, really?) People who have money often use it to buy time.
Time away from unnatural schedules like the standard 9 to 5 allows your body to regain its natural rhythm. Waking, sleeping, working, resting, playing, eating, and contemplating have their own time, and that time is different for each of us. Some say that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle used time in fits and starts, that people in those cultures worked hard for short periods, rested, and played. Personal rhythms connect people to large natural rhythms such as circadian and seasonal cycles. Connecting to these rhythms produces the feeling of being connected to life. Because these systems are natural, rejoining them brings about a feeling of well-being.
Imagine having time to see what happens when you have time.
The soul is slow. Having time makes this evident.
Earmark the time passing now by noticing what is dawning.
Have you had the time to discover what you love to do?
It takes time . . .
to get to know people. You cannot love what you do not know.
to make things that represent no monetary gain but that improve life: gifts, toys, and things for pleasure alone.
to grow healthy food, cook, prepare, and savor it.
to fix what breaks.
to learn new skills.
to get past representation and arrive at presence.
with time . . .
you can wake up in the middle of the night to witness astral events like meteor showers and eclipses.
you can get to know yourself.
you can custom-fit your clothing.
you can customize your world and make everything the right size, shape, color, and style for you.
you can call in product warranties and guarantees. Starting a conversation with the words “I’m unemployed” tells customer service reps that you have time to see your complaint through.
you can transform free raw materials and waste into valuable goods.
you can listen instead of hear and can see instead of look.
you may discover what having time leads to.
The incomprehensible is solely the result of incomprehension, which seeks what it has and therefore can never make further discoveries.
— Novalis
Getting Better All the Time
When we assert our claim that this existence is blessed it gives us a relaxed assurance and holds back the floodgates of despair.
— Gayan Macher
Life in the waste stream is like life in an arranged marriage. When things go well, one is immediately lifted from a set point of moderate expectation. I consider the sleek aluminum-framed couch from the 1950s that I found teetering in an easy-to-reach spot in the landfill and liken the treasure to the joy experienced with each sign of a good trait discovered in a not-yet-familiar spouse. A kind act, a generous deed, a dimple previously unnoticed adds a sweet charm and improves a matrimonial partner’s likability. Good junk is a constant upgrade from something unknown or mediocre to something better.
In my twenties, when my professional life was at its start and a future career in marketing was ahead of me, I used a calculator to estimate my life’s earnings, based on the standard wages for my occupation. I crunched the numbers over decades, the span of my work life, and ended the calculation at retirement. I fattened the math with the occasional bonus and considered the value of the extras that working people trade for their time and creativity, things like medical benefits and fresh titles that indicate more responsibility and more time spent. I compared the high and low salaries earned in my field. I sank, realizing that the numbers revealed a future of few surprises, a life that thrived on continuity. With planned joy neatly slotted for weekends, I knew that this was not the life I was meant to live. It is a different vision of forward movement than things always getting better.
Between building projects, I cushion outdoor couch frames with newish foam pads that I upholster with sturdy shade cloth. Solid iron springs in steampunk shapes and parts from long-gone farm machines are regularly celebrated treasures that stand here and there in our yard like postapocalyptic art. To me they are part of a collage of reuse that signals a coming renaissance. After the waste is used up and industry slowed, I imagine we will all become makers of things. Waste buys us time to learn.
Rusty saw blades make pretty wind chimes when strung side by side with baling wire along dried yucca stalks. Stackable plastic bread trays from the back of an out-of-business grocery make an excellent drying rack for herbs, fruits, and veggies.
Cordless power tools constantly turn up in the trash, their only flaw a dead battery that finds inspiration to live a little longer after being zapped with a welder. Nearly free thrift-shop furniture — sanded, stained, and re-knobbed — warms our home. The goods that surround me shine with achievement. Refurbishing is as relaxing to me as I imagine knitting must be for the crafters who stitch together colorful strands of yarn while riding the New York subways.
As new and better junk is found, old, less great junk is dumped back where it came from — except, having been used a while longer, it prevented something else from being manufactured and new materials from being mined. Fewer people drove, printed things on paper, and wrote it all down. Fewer of us missed the color of the sky that day. The dog got an extra walk. Things are always getting better.
Some of the pitfalls of consumerism can still be found in the waste stream. Namely, the tendency to hoard. Mikey and I occasionally bump into waste-stream hoarders who fill homes, empty lots, extra buildings, and storage containers with stuff. They boast stories of projects they are going to build one day when there are future resources such as energy and inspiration. Far away from cities and shopping malls, the belief in lack persists and drives people to acquire more than they need.
A belief in an unseen law of reciprocity prevents us from doing the same. I imagine the invisible employee of the universe’s department of pledge-keeping standing over me, telling me that if I take more than I need or acquire out of fear, the abundance may stop. Even if abundance is the actual condition of the world, we still must come out to meet it. With this in mind, I regularly review the neatly arranged junk piles that we keep divided in categories: wood, R-panel, flat metal scraps, metal and PVC pipe, fabric, and natural fiber. I thin the piles and pass on to others what has not been put to use.
My favorite activity for reducing waste is droplifting, an activity that Mikey and I engage in annually, dressed as Christmas elves. Droplifting in the guise of a holiday elf requires six things: an elf costume, social bravery, the ability to size people up, some junk, a belief in abundance, and joy. After rummaging through all the drawers and cabinets in our house, we stuff an odd lot of goods no longer useful to us into a fire-engine-red fleece Santa sack lined with white faux fur. With our red jumpers trimmed in the same fur, our snowflake buttons, and pointy hoods, we are elves.
“I bet you would like a present,” I whispered to a shy country girl who stood at hip height next to her daddy on the main drag in town. It was a week before Christmas and Broadway was closed for the night, the yellow lines dividing the road dotted with metal fire drums similar to the ones I’d made at the Brooklyn metal shop. Noticing the dad’s tall ten-gallon hat, I imagined him in a dual-suspension pickup truck and handed him a free-car-wash coupon. I winked at him while handing his daughter a colorful set of stickers. Her eyes widened as she considered if I might be a real elf from the
North Pole. I told her that she could be sure that I was, because only a real elf can play the nose flute. That’s where my $1 plastic nose flute comes in handy.
I gave a cold woman a fuzzy scarf I’d picked up at a San Francisco Swap-O-Rama-Rama and handed a set of earmuffs to a shivering cop. It mattered very little to us that we happened to have been raised Jewish and were acting as elves in a town where our tribe was too thin to form a minyan. “Abundance,” I said to Mikey, pointing to the illuminated faces of two kids chomping down on the marshmallows that Mikey had pulled from his sack, handed out, and then helped roast on the open fire.
The best part about droplifting is that items headed for the landfill are transformed into gifts that, I suspect, are less likely to get kicked to the curb, because they’ve been given by an elf. They are no longer things, and they are more than gifts: they are magical gifts.
The film No Impact Man chronicles a New York family’s attempt to live without any impact on the earth. I like No Impact Family. They had a pledge, too — we had that in common. I imagined the movies No Impact Man and The Decommodified Girl playing on a double bill on movie night in Bartertown, the fictitious city in Mad Max. I wondered if the universe had also assigned No Impact Family a mythic creature from the department of pledge-keeping.
This family held steady to their goal in spite of real difficulties. Bravely they gave up life’s comforts: air conditioning, electricity, public transportation, and refrigeration, to name a few. At times with strained smiles, they searched out the bright side of the situation.
The Good Life Lab Page 9