Dark suspicions about how my own way of life is possible

(Apologies if this is in the wrong forum...and if I've already mentioned this before...)

For years now a troubling thought has been tugging at the hem of my shirt. The thought that nags at me is that my ability to live as I do and have the values and ideas I hold is only possible because society is as messed up as it is.

For example, everyone around me seems to like buying lots of stuff and throwing away most of it. I make a killing on trash day just picking stuff up from the side of the road. But if everyone was like me there'd be no dumpsters full of free materials to scavenge, because everyone else would be less wasteful to start with.

It's the fact that the Joe Sixpacks keep buying new cars every 3 years that allows me to buy a nice used car and drive it for 15 years. Without them there'd be no used cars with under 200,000 miles on them.

Or to point to an even blunter example, my dream of using my retirement investments (my 401K, my Roth IRA, etc.) to one day buy a bunch of wooded acreage and build a small home out of natural/recycled materials, ultimately relies on America's rampant consumerism & wastefulness, and on corporate insistence on never-ending increases in profitability.

You see what I mean?

Without getting political (seriously!) this thought even extends to ideology, where I find perhaps the most glaring example. Here's how I'd explain it:

I have a "tend my own garden" mentality toward the world's problems. Instead of having strong opinions about how the world ought to be run, I simply focus on trying to run my own interactions with other humans in the way I think would be good for the world if everyone else ran their interactions similarly. So I am kind/courteous to strangers, I tend to ignore other people's group identities and try to avoid having any of my own, etc. But, I am aware it would be impossible for me to do any of this in, say, prison, or in a country with far less social trust and stability than the US. And the US only has all that social trust and stability because lots of its citizens have strong enough ideological convictions and group identities to inspire them to go run for office and uphold its institutions of checks and balances, or even more drastically, to go risk their lives defending the country from internal and external threats!

Hopefully this summary doesn't lose too much detail: The majority's globalist mentality provides the safe haven in which my atypical localist mentality can exist.

Do others have this thought? Does it feel like a conundrum to anyone else? Has anyone had the thought, felt the conundrum, and resolved it?

My thought on the  topic is that everything you say is true. BUT, if everyone lived the way we did, it would be easier to fit in, and these questions would never arise.  But maybe we would then ask ourselves if we live this way only because everyone else does.  

Hey Ned,  yes I've had those thoughts.  And I'm doing that thing with the small acreage homestead and recycled as much as possible for the house construction.  I've considered calling the "homestead" the Side of the Road Farm because nearly everything was found on the side of the road in a free pile.  I also peruse the free pile on trash day and can't stand when good stuff goes into the landfill.  Makes me crazy.  

Without knowing what age group you belong to, consider that the Boomers are aging.  The largest population spike in recent history is downsizing.  There's going to be a glut of used products going to waste because folks are tired and need to move on to the next stage.  They may not know how or want to deal with Craigslist or whatever.  Perhaps this is a decade to run a recycled stuff business?  It's a great way to raise money for local projects.

Also, I suggest you do the home building asap.  It gets harder as you get older.  Land isn't getting any cheaper.  If you want to Moose me about that and the pros and cons of recyclable building materials, I'm always happy to spill what I know.  

Is the thought dark that one person's excess is another's treasure?  All life has it's niche.  Everything that exists gets consumed, broken down into smaller components and changed into something else.  Except plastic.  Although, once all living things contain a certain percentage of plastic, we may evolve into other kinds of life form that allow us to survive what comes next.  We humans are so myopic.

That is a provocative thought Ned.
I often think of my fellow citizens as the elephant to my dung beetle.
They indirectly affect what resources are available to me, and their "waste" is my bread and butter.
You don't have to be a scavenger like us for this to be true.
When Joe sixpack spends money to go see millionaires play ball, he is supporting an entire industry and that includes everyone from the vendors to to the security guards to the janitors,along with the millionaires.


We have to ask ourselves, what would we be doing if we didn't live off our interactions with others?
For example I don't think homesteading was ever an activity independent of society.
Much like trapping, hunting, fishing and mining, it is an extractive process that depends on the tools that take a complex high tech society to build.
This is even more true today.
Solar panels, batteries, generators, power tools, vehicles, fencing, screws, welders, etc are tools for self reliance but not independence.
Even the first rocket mass heaters relied on materials that were cheap or free because of the mainstream society that surround s us.

Even being a frugal scavenger is enabled by relatively expensive tools.
People who have no cars have almost no access to the flood of used appliances available for cheap or even free.
They might turn to rent to own places because they don't have the credit to buy from big box stores and they are hemorrhaging money and time  going to the laundry mat.
These places charge them through the nose.
Because I have car ,50 bucks and some time means I can bring home a washer or dryer that will probably last me a decade.
Being poor helps keep you poor.
The mindset is only part of it.
When you have very little to start with, it's easy  to buy soothing distractions than invest in self reliance.

I think the best we can do is teach as many people as we can to be better dung beetles.
One of my favorite things to do as a scavenger is to scrounge something on the behalf of some one else.
Even better is when I can teach them how to aquire it for themselves.
The poop is going to happen,there is no stopping it.
The more we learn to value it, the more we thrive.

I just live my life as I see fit, doing as much as I can for myself, and as my skill set and experience has grown, what I can accomplish has increased.

I do not boast about it, nor am I showy, and now that I can buy whatever I want the truth is I don’t care about buying it. I wish my wife had a more minimalist mindset but that’s okay she has endearing qualities so I just let that go. I can only control certain things in my grasp and anything else is just a waste of my time.

I know my thoughts are not mine alone, nor my lifestyle, but I know it won’t be popular or mainstream either.

People can do whatever they want that floats their boat, just don’t sink mine in getting there.

I feel we all do the best that we can.

Since the folks here on the forum are permies we tend to be more frugal.

Way back in 2001, we decided to downsize and live as cheaply as possible.

That is still our way of life.

We have no trash service so I don't buy stuff with a lot of packaging that has to be thrown away.

I think about every purchase and buy what I can get as cheap as possible.

When our daughter decided to get a new car she wanted me to have her old one.  I gave my old car to her so we would not have that car siting unused.

I believe in purchasing stuff locally to help out the town.  Of course the local folks never have what I am looking for so I buy online at eBay.

Ned: as a scavenger type, who makes most of her life off things other people get rid of, I am very aware that my lifestyle is only possible in a certain type of society.

My house design (linked in my signature) is based on the structural stuff being almost all new stuff (I have to meet codes) but everything I can after that is second (or third, or fourth) hand one way or another.  

For the things I want in my life there's just too many great options out there that no one wants! I can't justify to myself anything BUT used. I'm glad I live in a world where people enable my lifestyle like this. I think my reality is FAR more interesting than theirs.
:D

John F Dean wrote:My thought on the  topic is that everything you say is true. BUT, if everyone lived the way we did, it would be easier to fit in, and these questions would never arise.  But maybe we would then ask ourselves if we live this way only because everyone else does.  

Right. Thank goodness the way we live comes with the added bonus of being unusual!

Alice Wegner wrote:Is the thought dark that one person's excess is another's treasure?  All life has it's niche.

I thought about adding to my post some discussion of this idea, popularized in the phrase "Takes all kinds". There's a notion that not only is it okay for there to be many different kinds of people, but that diversity (along all sorts of parameters) is a requirement for society to function. On one hand I can't help but recognize the profound wisdom of this notion, but on the other hand it can be used to equivocate and excuse behaviors or behavioral patterns that are harmful. That's the root of the conundrum I referred to: yes, I benefit from living in a wasteful society, but it's bad for societies to be wasteful.

William Bronson wrote:When Joe sixpack spends money to go see millionaires play ball, he is supporting an entire industry and that includes everyone from the vendors to to the security guards to the janitors,along with the millionaires.

This is the key idea at the center of so-called "trickle down economics"; despite its political connotations it was a concept that always made intuitive sense to me, thanks to the same logic you are outlining. It is why I never quite grasped why people reacted negatively to the phrase, but may explain why its synonym "Reaganomics" also became popular. (To be clear: I have no strong opinions, positive or negative, on Ronald Reagan, or on various styles of economic policy! I am talking only about the logic of this one economic idea.)

William Bronson wrote:
We have to ask ourselves, what would we be doing if we didn't live off our interactions with others?
For example I don't think homesteading was ever an activity independent of society.
Much like trapping, hunting, fishing and mining, it is an extractive process that depends on the tools that take a complex high tech society to build.

Well put; I agree. Everything is connected. And, all activity is extractive in a way...it contributes to and possibly helps speed the heat death of the universe, so to speak. Some activities more than others.