I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since February. I go to the drugstore now if I need something, or think about where I need to go that will have it in brick and mortar. It’s so nice to take trips to the drugstore or go on little errands. My head and heart are aligned on my level of consumption, and I’m comforted by the knowledge that somewhere, in a faraway garbage heap, my little portion of unused, discarded clothes and one-time use goods is a manageable size.
We compost- it’s not much, but it’s something and I get a little tinge of comfort every time I dump chicken bones into the compost bin instead of the garbage. In truth my husband helps to manage our composting process, so for me it’s easy: I just chuck the peach pits and rotten apples into the compost and that’s all there is to that.
I like camping more than I like fancy hotels, and we’ve done well enough now- both me and my husband- that we’ve experienced both without it being particularly financially stressful. But I find in a fancy hotel I feel listless, confused about what I’m supposed to be doing with myself, smiling mechanically at the staff and wondering what “rest” even feels like. In campgrounds I don’t have to wonder because I feel a primal peace wash over me the second I pitch a tent, pure contentment when water is boiling in the morning for coffee for just two of us. A wildlife encounter touches me at my core and some of the most special moments have stuck with me for years afterward, buoying me in times that would have otherwise pitched me to the depths of despair. There is a reverence that nature commands that is inimitable.
So I guess some part of me doesn’t understand the instinct to continue to overdevelop a world we’ve already sent to the precipice, to continue to spiral down social media and distraction, while damning our planet to literally become the 122 degree hot fire pits of hell. Have we forgotten there is C.S. Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sandra Cisneros and Marina Keegan to be read? God not just them- also Maya Angelou and Agatha Christie and Mary Oliver and E. B. White and Alex Dimitrov. And the time spent living in these great works, especially if procured from one’s local library, doesn’t cost you, or the planet, much of anything at all.
Truthfully, I suspect the zombie apocalypse is already upon us but we don’t recognize it because it’s so much drabber and less gorey than we’ve imagined: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have turned countless throngs into easily distractable automatons. The algorithm, so well designed to hold our eyeballs (the longer our eyeballs are captured, the more ads we see, and the more ads we see, the more ad money social media companies make), feeds us content that keeps us engaged at the expense of reality. In fact, often it feeds us the stickiest lies- it optimizes for the content that will make us the most emotional! But it doesn’t need the content it is feeding us to be real if people believe it anyway. And the algorithm is in the enviable position of being able to test thousands of cases, thousands of different tag lines, true or not, from thousands of places. It will reward and hold people to whichever content they will trust the most, whether or not it has any basis in reality, scaling our human vulnerability in such tragic ways.
And so here we are. I’ve backed away slowly, clutching my small and humble routines, understanding that while I may not be able to save the world at least I can bear witness.
The Gentle Truth 