A comfortable life – and then what?

"Luxury carmaker Aston Martin's share price sank more than 20% after it said profits will be lower than expected this year," the BBC reported earlier this week. A serenade of tiny violins. What the world needs now is fewer cars, smaller cars, and cars that don't harm the planet so much. The use of a car to project one's status is increasingly being seen as a waste of one's wealth. Could Aston Martin's financial woes reflect society's rising wisdom? Over the past weeks, the YouTube algorithm has been suggesting to me videos about how to become rich by looking poor. Lots of YouTubers have reached the same conclusion as me – that pissing away money on a new car every few years to impress your neighbours is dumb-ass stupid. 

But it's not just new cars. It's new clothes, new furniture, new tech, new any shit. I've got off the materialist treadmill (if indeed I was ever on it) years ago, realising that the consumer lifestyle hurts your wallet and hurts our planet. Result? I feel financially comfortable – not through busting a gut in the corporate rat-race, but by decades of not wasting money on fripperies and foibles.

Being comfortable is a noble aim; there's no virtue in suffering hunger, cold, ill-health or stress. Do I need luxury? No I do not. Do I need surfeit? I don't, and the planet simply could not cope with even two billion of us striving to live in surfeit or luxury. 

But should we worry that if a billion of us suddenly saw the light and stopped spending mindlessly – wouldn't it hurt the economy? I wrote back in June about the effects of a generation holding back on consumption. What would happen if Aston Martin would go bust? Not a whole lot. Or all luxury-car makers? Ditto. Several thousand skilled workers would (briefly) be out of work. Engineering and craft vacancies are hard to fill these days.

If supply of new cars suddenly dried up worldwide, we'd all become like Cuba. Used cars would gain in value, folk would take care of them more, knowing they are irreplaceable. We could go on for decades. The US embargo of Cuba was imposed in February 1962 by JFK; the youngest American car in that creaking, repressive socialist paradise is over 62 years old. There are an estimated 60,000 of them still in daily use, with some dating back to the late 1930s. Dragging iron ore out of the earth, smelting it and stamping out car bodies out of the resulting steel when it's not necessary, only something driven by individual egos, is not right. [Though I would argue that it's not anybody's business to ban car-making – people just need to reach that conclusion one epiphany at a time.]  

But buying unnecessary products creates jobs and generates taxes. Squaring the circle through a top-down policy of de-growth would be destructive – it would hit education, healthcare, infrastructure, security and defence. But I feel that we in the Western world are seeing a gentle form of de-growth; more and more people waking up to the need to spend less. Tough policy decisions are needed, in particular regarding immigration and accelerating green transformation.

Another birthday, another moment for reflection about the arc of my life. I'll keep on working into the foreseeable future (my father worked until three months' shy of his 70th birthday, giving up work to take up grandfathering duties). No great desire to travel, though Stella-Plage calls me back to revisit sometime.

Health and fitness report: better in every metric than the 66-year-old me – the result of stronger willpower rather than muscle power. However, eight pull-ups to the chin now a standard (last year I managed it only twice).

This time last year:
The Ego, the Soul and the Individual

This time two years:
In which I reach the Age of Maturity

This time three years ago:
Golden Autumn, Golden Years

This time four years ago:
Last embers of summer

This time five years ago:
It's that Day of the Year again!

This time six years ago:

Decline and growth

This time seven years ago:
Health at 60

This time nine years ago:
In search of vectors for migrating consciousness

This time ten years ago:
Slipping from late summer to early autumn

This time 11 years ago:
Turning 56

This time 12 years ago: 
Turning 55 

This time 13 years ago:
Turning 54

This time 14 years ago:
Turning 53

This time 17 years ago:
Turning 50

Spirituality, the Ego and the Environment: Lent 2024, Day 28

Looking back over this blog, the topic of human spirituality is becoming ever-more important to me. This is my 33rd Lent, in the meaning of a conscious effort to change my habits over a continuous 46-day period. My first Lents, back in the early 1990s, were little more than exercises in abstinence – giving up alcohol, meat, confectionary, salt snacks and fast food for the duration. Indeed, it was only in 2011 that I started labelling blog posts about Lent with the tag 'human spirituality'! 

Age, acquired knowledge, wisdom and an increased sense of physical mortality prompts ever-deeper philosophical investigations.

Several threads come together to inform my spirituality and philosophy, including psychology, cosmology, physics and metaphysics, all of which I've touched on. The environment is another thread that I want to discuss today. 

I am concerned by climate change and that concern has led to significant changes in my lifestyle, behaviour and outlook. 

I have come to see materialism (both in the sense of physicalism = belief that there's no more to reality than physical matter, and in the sense of materialism = a way of life focused on consumption) as the path to perdition. For the individual consciousness, for humanity and for our planet. Materialism rids us of hope and replaces it with a vacuous contest to see who can acquire more toys before they die.

Talking to friends and colleagues, I appreciate that most people do understand that the climate is changing, that human activity is foremost in driving that change – and yet they are not showing any willingness to adapt their behaviour accordingly, to help to mitigate the effects. Holiday plans still mean jetting off to exotic destinations! A new car is a must! There's a million and one household gadgets we absolutely need! The acquisition of more and more things, leading to stuffocation. A materialist treadmill from which there is no escape, driven by the ego's desire to be admired. To be socially respected, to be appreciated as top dog in the status hierarchy.

The ego is needed up to a point; it drives you along, but only up to that point when you realise you have achieved material comfort and no longer need to chase the next dollar, thousand or million. But so few people can do that.

Surrounded by the człowiek, który się nie zastanawia, the person that contemplates not, I worry about our fate as a species. 

Surging on in life without pausing to check the map. Where are you going to? What's your aim?  What's your purpose? How does the way you live your life affect other humans, and the animals and plants with which you share your environment? What do you want to achieve and what mark do you ultimately wish to leave on the Earth?

Our unthinking consumption creates a powerful demand, a vacuum that sucks raw materials from out of the earth, and burns fossil fuels to power their processing into the goods that we crave to own. This has been going on for two and half centuries, and over the past half century the greenhouse gas emissions that our consumption creates has escaped our control.

How much of what we buy – including food – do we waste? How much of the money that we earn by working so hard do we spend on what we waste? A life in which we consume less and waste less creates a profoundly virtuous circle; less money worries, less need to work so hard/so long, more time to realise one's potential – and that's what really counts in life.

If we, the two billion people of the rich world, dialled back our consumption, we could quickly reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that are threatening the stability of the ecosystem on which we depend. In the meanwhile, I'm watching the world around me consume its way to climate catastrophe.

We all really need to re-think our lives and consider the future. I really like Canadian artist Sarah Lazarovic's Buyerarchy of Needs. Scale down, good people, now. For your descendants' sakes. 

Lent 2023, Day 28
Can the future affect our past?

Lent 2022: Day 28
Understanding the Infinite and the Eternal

Lent 2021: Day 28
Higher life forms, imagined

Lent 2020: Day 28
The Secret and the Hidden

The price of stuff and the cost of living

For my 15th birthday, I received a bicycle - a Raleigh Sportsman 10. I remember the price - £33. This was 1972, so according to the Bank of England's Inflation Calculator, the value of that money today would be £364.63. An entry-level road bike retailing today in the UK for between £350-£370 is vastly superior to my old Raleigh, with its gas-pipe mild-steel tubing and crappy gears that would quickly go out of alignment, throwing the chain into the spokes. It was so carelessly prepared that riding it home from the shop, the brakes wore a groove into the amber sidewalls of the rear tyre. It was replaced in 1986 by a vastly better bike - a Saracen Kili Flyer, 531 alloy frame, Suntour groupset, Brooks saddle.

Once upon a time, things were more expensive and of poorer quality than what we have now. Globalisation (ie getting poor people from poor countries to make things for poor people in rich countries) and technology (computer-aided design and manufacturing) have made bicycles and pretty much everything else cheaper, better, lighter and more durable. 

Result? We are awash with stuff. We want want want, our wants driven by manipulative advertising that hooks onto our whims and desires. Learning to say 'no' to the blandishments of consumerism isn't easy, but not saying 'no' leads to debt and a lifestyle predicated by paying off loans.

Stuffocation affects us all; even with my highly ascetic lifestyle, the disposal of stuff is still an issue for me. In away, technology has streamlined our stock of possessions. Here is a list of things I no longer need because they are in my smartphone: fixed-line telephone, watch, stopwatch, step-counter, portable radio/Walkman/iPod, pocket torch, compass, snapshot camera, calculator, dictaphone, a whole drawer-full of maps, and a new pocket diary every year. 

But not only things - the digital revolution has dramatically cut the amount of money I spend on media. Other than my subscription to The Economist, I no longer buy newspapers. I don't own a TV, so no TV licence fee. I don't buy or process several rolls of film a month, nor do I buy CDs or DVDs or LPs or music cassettes. I once estimated that back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I'd be spending up to one quarter of my disposable income on media. Today, it's all rolled into my YouTube Premium and Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions and the plethora of free online services available through my laptop and smartphone.

The costs of things in proportion to food and shelter is shifting. Once, humanity did nothing but hunt and gather. Agriculture and civilisation led to increased specialisation; today, only 2% of people in the rich world make a living growing and processing food. And as food and clothing became cheaper, housing has become more expensive. So we're living in smaller premises with more things, and disposing of them becomes an issue. Selling them online is time-consuming; precise description of the state of wear of a given item, answering emails from time-wasters, meeting potential buyers for whom the goods are not quite right, puts many people off. Charity shops are an answer, but Poland still has only a tiny handful.

The real answer is to scale back one's purchases. Buy less. Separate needs from wants. Cutting out junk food, salt snacks, confectionery, biscuits and cakes is not only good for your health - it saves money that over time becomes significant in scale. Impulse buying is unwise. And it tends to end up in landfill sites, having wasted precious natural resources. Below: the Buyerarchy of Needs, by Sarah Lazarovich

I'd attribute my current financial comfort to the fact that I jumped off the treadmill of consumerism a long time ago. Where one lives is vastly more important that what one drives or what one wears. Car ownership and clothes are a massive waste of money. My mother used to say, "Nie ważna miarka, tylko szafarka", roughly meaning that it's not how much you have of anything that counts, but how you use it. The person who earns £80,000 a year (averaged across the span of their career) and spends £75,000 a year ends up after 40 years' work ends up much less wealthy than the person who earns £60,000 and spends only £40,000. Look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves.

This time last year:
Post-Lenten photo catch-up

This time two years ago:
Qualia memories - Edwardian railways

This time seven years ago:

The great taste of Polish India Pale Ales

This time eight years ago:
Lublin - pearl of Poland's East

This time ten years ago:
70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

This time 11 years ago:
Tarkovsky's Stalker: a zone of my own

This time 12 years ago:
Warsaw's big billboards

This time 14 years ago:
Pace of development falters

Justify the Buy - Nikon D5600

I'm always going on about repairing, borrowing, or buying used (see Sarah Lazarovich's Buyerarchy of Needs) and yet I've just bought a new camera which to a great extent duplicates the one I already have. 

Why?

The answer lies in Nikon's consumer-camera strategy. Nikon in its wisdom has decided that the way forward is the mirrorless camera, as opposed to the digital single-lens-reflex (DSLR). In theory, the mirrorless camera should be smaller and lighter than the DSLR, and indeed in the world of pro cameras, with full-frame (FX) format sensors, this is the case. But it isn't the case for Nikons with the smaller DX format sensors.

I am absolutely delighted with my Nikon D3500; it spends many hours a week dangling around my neck as I go for my long daily walks. It is utterly dependable and takes great photos; one charge of the battery is typically good for three to four weeks.

This week I bought a Nikon D5600, the next model up from the base-model brilliance that is the D3500. For an extra 700zł, the D5600 has several features that above all will save me time:

• Self-cleaning sensor. Sadly missing from the D3500 (the older D3300 had one). This means that after a while, changing lenses in the field, dirt builds up on the sensor, leaving spots which are visible mainly in skyscapes. These can be removed in Photoshop, but it takes time. Cleaning the sensor is tricky, requiring 95% spirytus rektyfikowany and a lint-free swab. And a very steady hand. Not something you want to be doing often.
• A viewfinder grid option. I am a stickler for straight horizons and parallel verticals. Again, I can do this in Photoshop, but grid lines in the viewfinder help enormously with composition. The D3500 doesn't have these, the D5600 does. Saving time on rotating the image in Photoshop (by a fraction of a degree, often).
• Tilting rear touch-screen. The tilt feature comes in handy when taking overhead shot, when the angle needs to be as high as possible - you can live-view and compose the image on the screen tilted down towards you. Handy for crowd shots, and offers a more interesting point-of-view in landscape photography.
• A better autofocus system with more points, and using the touch screen and live view it's easier to pick the where on the picture you want the focus to lock. The D3500's 11-point system is fairly rudimentary by comparison; an out-of-focus photo is not something you can do anything with in the digital darkroom. I have lost quite a few photos, or else they are publishable, though sub-optimal.

And that's about that! The D5600 shares the same sensor as the D3500.

So why did I buy a new camera?

The simple answer is that Nikon has ceased production of the D3500 and D5600. They have been discontinued on the Japanese market, you are unlikely to walk into a MediaMarkt, Euro RTV AGD, Saturn or MediaExpert here in Poland and find either. Online, the offers come and go, a stocks are gradually run down. Nikon is now heavily pushing the mirrorless Z50, which has a DX-sized sensor with fewer pixels than the DSLRs it will eventually replace; the Z50 has far less battery life, it is actually heavier than the D3500 - and costs twice as much! So buy them while you can. Click to read more easily.

Below: the box arrives - courtesy of MediaExpert,  delivered by InPost in Zamienie.

Open the box - inside D5600 body, Nikkor 18-55mm AF-P DX VR lens, EN-EL14a battery and charger, and strap. Needed - an SD memory card (avoid those microSD cards with adaptors - they are prone to malfunction, I've found. The full-size SD card words best for me. Also needed a 'clear lens-cap' aka filter, a basic Skylight 1A protects the front element of the lens and you won't have to be popping the lens-cap off before taking a shot. I also have a rotating polarising filter to accentuate blue skies on sunny days, which also serves to cut out/accentuate reflections from water, windows etc.

And that's it - ready to go - good photographic tools, so much better than what you'll achieve with a smartphone (see comparison pic below, D3500 with Nikkor 18-55mm lens and polarising filter, left, Samsung Galaxy S20, right). Click to enlarge.

This time last year:
First frost, 2020

This time three years ago:
Edinburgh, again and again

This time eight years ago:
Ahead of the opening of Warsaw's second Metro line

This time nine years ago:
Keep an eye on Ukraine...
(Portents of troubles to come)

This time 10 years ago:
Płock by day, Płock by night 

This time 11 years ago:
Warning ahead of railway timetable change

This time 14 years ago:
Some thoughts on recycling

Approaching a Circular Economy

A faddy business trend, or a sharper focus for the sustainability agenda? The notion of a circular economy lies in opposition to a linear economy (extract-make-use-dispose). It is a regenerative approach that seeks further use for items we no longer need. This means that industry needs to extract from our planet fewer resources to make new things.

The current clamp-down on single-use plastics is a good, though extreme example, with the UK government pledging to ban plastic straws and cotton-wool ear buds next year. Free-of-charge single-use plastic bags have disappeared from shops across the EU. There is still much more to do.

On Tuesday I chaired a small meeting of representatives of business and ecological groups on this subject, and the more one looks into the subject, the more complex and interconnected it all is.

Three groups of players are in this game; consumers, who want things, businesses, who satisfy those wants, and the regulator, who imposes the rules on the game. And, this being circular, the regulator is doing the bidding of the voter, who is the same person as the consumer.

As voters we want a clean planet, clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean food. Yet as consumers, we want convenience. I was talking to a producer of food packaging who said that something like a packet of sliced cheese may consist of ten or more components; the plastic packet itself, a pull-off seal made from a different type of plastic, held to the packet with a special glue; the paper label on that pull-off seal with the product information printed in different inks - the label being attached with a different form of glue, waterproof foil over the paper, sheets of thin plastic separating the cheese slices. The resulting package is impossible to recycle and is fit only for incineration.

We may find (as consumers) that our lives become more beset by inconvenience as we (as voters) tell our regulators to clamp down on the plastics that are despoiling our oceans and our land. It may be a return to older days. Take the cheese, for example. I've swapped my regular brand of Roquefort cheese, packaged in a plastic tray with a plastic foil seal and further plastic inside for cheese cut from the round, with aluminium foil on the outside, and simply shrink-wrapped in clingfilm. To be honest, this works out cheaper (around 63zł/kg compared to 85zł/kg for the packet cheese). But I can only guess the environmental impact of the foil/clingfilm packaging to be much lower than the plastic packet. How is it for health though? All those phthalates and plasticisers and other chemicals are known to be no good for us, and leach into our food.

Cheese predates plastic by a few millennia, so can't we go back to storing it under porcelain in cool, dark larders? And can't we go back to buying it from the block, cut and weighed for us, and wrapped in paper?

As consumer-voters, we should take a more active interest in how our food - and indeed other products we use - is packaged and sold. Food we can't really buy less of, below a biological threshold, but other things we have more control over.

Cars - I set out my precepts regarding car ownership back in 2012:

1. Don't own a car. Go on two wheels, public transport, hire or ride-share instead.
2. If you really must own a car, buy a small car.
3. If you really must have a larger car (large family), buy an economical large car.
4. Whatever you have, drive as little as you possibly can.
5. Invest the money you have saved by following the above precepts.

The automotive industry must change; consumers will force that change. The regulator will not be far behind; a Extended Producer Responsibility Directive will force car-makers (and other manufacturers) to take final responsibility for their product - taking it away and breaking it down for recycling. This is expected within a few years.

Clothes. For the past few years, other than new suits for the office, most of my casual clothing I buy from the Children's Society charity shop on Pitshanger Lane in Ealing, jackets, shirts, trousers. Shoes I wear for a long time and then get re-soled. I am loyal to one brand, a family business around for 138 years that uses traditional materials and methods.

In the presentation at our meeting on Tuesday there was a brilliant slide (by Sarah Lazarovich), entitled the Buyerarchy of Needs.

Based on Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, this makes the point that before buying something, we should first consider the options. Note for non-North American readers - 'thrift' = 'charity shop'; neither really exist in Poland (other than the Sue Ryder Foundation shop on ul. Bagatela in Warsaw - anyone know of any others?).

We discussed the current trend for decluttering, the antidote to stuffocation. Participants in the debate were concerned that after a solid bout of decluttering, the natural tendency of consumers (bombarded as they are by the blandishments of business) is to once again fill those gaps with new stuff. STOP!

The circular economy is about much more than buying less. It is about making more use of what there is (sharing power tools, rather than each household owning a drill that's used for nine minutes in its lifetime), about recycling as much as possible. Business needs to become less short-term profit focused, trying to get people to spend money they don't really have buying things they don't really need.

So where's economic growth going to come from?

Healthcare.

What's the outcome of that going to be?

Some of us will end up living extremely long. On a cleaner planet.

This time last year:
Ralph Vaughan-Williams - two song cycles

This time nine years ago:
Spring scenes in Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Modernist wheels

This time 11 years ago:
Mammatus clouds over Jeziorki