What to stand for and What to refuse

Starting Point of Axis Minimalist:
Reading blogs on minimalism and zero waste--Miss Minimalist, Zen Habits, Zero Waste HomeThe Minimalists and Cat's Meow--has inspired me to create a blog where I can examine (my situated) life in the throes of capitalism and by extension, crapitalism. As a mode of love, knowledge, change.


What to Stand for:
  1. Pro-health, zero-waste food that promotes sustainability of the organic over the inorganic
  2. Empathy for self and the global out-there-like-me who live in a world (the capitalist world-system) designed to make humans (especially women sadly) fixate and obsess over amassing crap (despite self-disdain when the desire for crap, often gorgeous, creeps up)
  3. Empathy for how psychology + advertisement apparatus imprisons individuals (despite contempt for the Joneses and their Alliance of Alienators)
  4. Love, love, love of The Human rather than The Inhuman posing and imposing
  5. Love of Children, their imagination, their emotional well-being
  6. Sleeping more
  7. Acceptance (rather than denial) that adults model existential ontology for children at all times
  8. Micro-moments of resistance (hence heroic happiness) to the allure, mystification and wishful thinking commanded by the crapitalist's discourse
  9. To use one's purchasing power to support the best one can afford that is consumable, perishable, experiential and sustainable
  10. Beauty in Nature. The crapitalist's discourse wishes you to believe nature is boring, unfeeling, dead and that their malls and other outlets are exciting. This is false. Nature is passionate, complex and alive.
What to refuse, even though it can be hard, inconvenient and annoying:
  1. Comparing self with others in any way
  2. Plastic and plastics
  3. Junk Mail!!! How I hate thee!
  4. Logos. I see logos, I see a fool. No logos, brands and other corporate crapitalist signatures, especially on my personhood.
  5. Supposed gifts. Please stop the insanity of goodie bags. What waste we generate for the generations in the name of birthday parties! No, I don't want your pen, mug or other crap that's been sullied by your logo. And gifts from well-meaning but out-of-control shoppers: please keep your crap to yourself! I prefer a genuine hug to a plastic-coated card any day!
  6. Poverty mentality. When people show off their latest buy from Target, I don't think that's a real relationship to frugality. It's a cheap thrill to buy the latest fashion from H&M or wherever, as long as you stay in denial about its actual reality. The reality is that after you take it home, it will start to fade, unravel and lump up immediately. Because the fabric is so cheap, it will require extra attention like ironing--something you don't have time for. After a very short while, less than a year, it will have lost all its luster. It'll be clutter, not true love. Who's gonna wear it after you? It's not made to last. It's destiny is landfill. I speak from experience. One crazy winter, after I had my first baby and was feeling so frumpy, I bought a lot of clothes crap from Target, hoping I could look cute on the cheap. I bought from their Go! International line. I spent two or three hundred dollars over a single year. I have none of those clothes; instead of feeling cute, I felt mass produced, unoriginal and desperate. On the other hand, I have a wool coat I bought twenty years ago at a thrift store for $20 that still looks and fits amazing. It's made in France by "Weil Paris" and was sold through I. Magnin & Co. That was money well spent.
  7. Stuff made outside the United States, unless of exquisite, durable quality
  8. Disposables
  9. People stuffed with stuff. Inhuman people: workaholics, shopaholics, perfectionists, automatons. But know your evaluation of others reflects your psychology and projection.
These are my aspirations. If you came to my home now, as much minimizing as I have achieved, you will find a lot of crap with corporate logos made secretly in unadvertised sweatshops. You may find me eating food that makes me crappy. You may find me lusting after crap as I have not severed the cord to crapitalism. But this is really what I want after all the distractions are swept away. This is my existential dream: to be free of crap and be (mind)full of closeness to the demystified real.

No comments:

Post a Comment