Please don’t flash your Rolex watch!

Resilient, nourishing repetitions are the backbone of sustainable usage. Unless you can find continuous pleasure in the usage of the objects you invest in, you are inclined to replace them rapidly instead of maintaining and mending them.

Reducing consumption and focusing on usage and investments is, in my perspective, the key to sustainable living and to truly changing the unfortunate environmental impact that our current lifestyles have caused.

But something important, yet immensely intangible, must also change in order for it to become the norm to engage in resilient, repetitive activities and continuous usage of things. That “something” is the cultural consensus on what status and success means!

If being busy — “working hard and playing hard” — climbing the career ladder of success, buying an expensive apartment or house, consuming expensive luxury goods, owning state-of-the-art electronic devices, having luxurious dining experiences on a weekly basis, and indulging in exotic holidays (always to new and more extravagant destinations) is the going definition of successful, praising the resilience of nourishing repetitions may seem like a far-fetched and rather unappealing yang to the lavish yin of late-modern consumerism.

Perhaps resilient living is too radical for the contemporary praise of the aesthetician enjoyment culture. Still, it seems that most of the consumer-ventures we indulge ourselves in are compensations for being too busy and working too hard. The logic behind this appears to be the late-modern work hard, play hard mentality, implying that by working long hours and spending most of your energy and capabilities at work, you are allowed, or even entitled, to spoil yourself by buying something fancy, or going somewhere pleasant and luxurious in your scarce spare time. If you cannot spend the money you earn, then what is it worth?

However, in order to live a sustainable and stable life, extremes should be avoided — balancing one’s life and finding a way to thoroughly enjoy the time and our everyday life, which could be taken up with work otherwise, in order to ensure a constant stream of nourishing pleasure and contentment.

This seems to be a more resilient and durable lifestyle than depending on momentary, compressed outlets of stored needs for pleasure. The need to enjoy in the shape of intense “bouillon cubes” of consumption suggests that our work-life is not as satisfying nor nourishing as it should be. Maybe because there is just too much of it.

Perhaps we should return to the ancient wisdom of Aristotle’s theory on the golden mean.

We need to find a way to balance our lives, as this seems to be the key to reduce our consumption. Perhaps engaging fully in slow, off-grid living is taking it too far, but at the same time continuing down the lane of extreme stress and consumer-ventures is just not reasonable.

Anti-trendy success is not about flashing expensive purchases or having a full calendar of important appointments. Anti-trendy success concerns freedom and purpose; a life that you can sustain and justify.

The challenge, however, with these elements is that freedom and purpose are open and flexible terms, which basically means that it is up to each one of us to “fill” them up. There is no one way to live freely or to lead a purposeful life. There is no paved path that one can follow. There are many. There is no immediate status-providing acknowledgment when one initially takes the first baby steps down whichever path that leads to anti-trendy success and a life worth sustaining.

But what is status proving when leading an anti-trendy life? How do you define yourself when “traditional” status symbols fade away—or when you let go of them? For example, how do you build and define your identity if you own very little, and then, on top of which, leave your familiar surroundings?

We often take for granted that we need to build a base; a home that we can call our own and that we can fill up with all of our things and make increasingly comfortable over the years—and we are meant to live the majority of our lives in familiar surroundings. But, maybe this way of life is not the most resilient way. Maybe building up resilience involves relocating from time to time, since this develops adaptability and strength.

As Israeli historian and professor Yuval Noah Harari shows in his book Sapiens, the agricultural revolution, which homogenized, grounded, and stabilized human life, actually made human beings much more vulnerable and much less resilient in comparison to their nomadic hunter ancestors. Building up a stock of wheat and other crops as well as sleeping behind a closed door that prevents intruders would seem to improve safety and comfort. However, the benefit of the prehistoric nomadic lifestyle was that it was dynamic and vigorous. If resources were scarce in a region, the nomads would pack up and leave, and travel until they found a new place to make camp and hunt and gather food.

This still happens today with nomadic people such as Berbers, Bedouins, Maasai, Khoisan, Penan, and the Moken. Of course, the nomadic life consists of a lot of hard work, uncertainty, and wearisome travels, but nevertheless, research shows that the prehistoric nomad hunters were healthier and lived for much longer than their subsequent farmers.

In his book Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, British environmental activist, author, and columnist George Monbiot tells anecdotes about his time with Maasai morans (or warriors) in Kenya, and about ventures into the wild with his friend Toronkei, a 19-year-old Maasai warrior.

He describes how he at the end of his stay he wanted to stay, but didn’t, and how he still at times wonders and regrets why he didn’t:

So why did I not defect to Toronkei’s community? It is a question that still troubles me. I was, as I had kept discovering, too soft for his life. I could not quite keep up physically. More importantly, I could not cope with the uncertainty: with the dislocation of not knowing whether I would eat today or eat tomorrow, or still possess a living — or a life — in a month’s time.The Maasai accepted the wild fluctuations in their fortunes with equanimity. In one season, their cattle would darken the plains; in the next, drought struck, and they had nothing. To know what comes next has been perhaps the dominant aim of materially complex societies. Yet, having achieved it, or almost achieved it, we have been rewarded with a new collection of unmet needs. We have privileged safety over experience; gained much in doing so, and lost much.

The last sentence stayed with me for a while after I read this passage.

Yes, we have indeed in modern society privileged safety over experience. How can we reach a balance point or the golden mean between somnolent security and revitalising uncertainty?

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