Quote:
Originally Posted by callmecrazy
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Thanks for the link but it honestly made me want to barf with its idealism. If the student who put that together really belives all that crap he can drop out, get a couple of pet bottles for shoes and join the Africans in the video.
I am failing to find words for this thread at present but I think there is some sort of developed world guilt that we have all become ingrained with. We have, they dont. Therefore we must be bad, or evil, or living wrong, or less moral. I dont buy it.
Sailing simply & cheaply - the beauty of this thread title is that these two concepts really can be at odds with each other most of the time. One cannot always have simple with
cheap.
Is it simpler to relpace a
windlass,
winch,
watermaker or whatever piece of kit on a boat or
overhaul it?
Is it simpler to catch and/or haul
drinking water or press a button and make
water with your spectra?
Is it simpler to punch in a
gps destination on your
gps or take star shots and sight reductions and plot a course?
Is it simpler to prepare a meal from scratch or pop something in the microwave?
Is it simpler to barbeque a hamburger and fry up some fries or pick up a big mac meal?
One may not agree but the button press lifestyle is very simple. It is not necessarily
cheap... (or maybe even healthy)
The biggest advances in technology humans have made have been in the area of
food production and farming. Moving the majority of society off farms, feeding large populations large quantities of high protein
food allowed the population to
work in different endeavors, primarily industrial and lately technology. As the average daily labor output need reduced we filled the free time with leisure activities.
There are still populations that struggle to feed themselves. The reality is that this is not a failure of us to create food. It is a failure of us to evolve from our animal roots in which tribes dominate each other by the withholding or sharing of resources. Sometimes it is the external tribe (call it the west) not sharing. More often it is internal tribes (call them warlords) intercepting food and using it to dominate other internal tribes.
The sad part is that somehow on some level we (the haves) are required to examine ourselves and feel some sort of guilt about "having" too much stuff. I certainly belive we do have too much stuff but I dont suffer guilt over it, nor judge my fellow haves for
buying mcmansions and filling them with plasmas and toys. The reason is simple.
I dont care if you have a "simple" boat or a complex boat. You have a boat. It is probaly not a boat used primarily to go
fish and feed your village. It is a Leisure boat. Sure you live on it, it is your shelter, you worked hard to get it. But the vast majority of the entire worlds population does not have a leisure boat. By this very definition, having a boat and the time to leisurely
live aboard you are perceived as a very, very rich and privileged person.
Dont feel guilty. Enjoy it. But dont explain it away as a simple, "I chose to live simply.". If we didn't win the birth lottery to start with there would be a whole nother set of westerners with their electrronic devices sitting in their comfy
internet wired world postulating about how simply they are living. Really the folks who may or may mot be living simply are, well, simply not on the internet. If you really want to prove something, unplug and disappear, that will show us! Realistically we dont really want to get that simple. It is more fun to keep enough complexity to wear our birkenstocks, drive our hybrids and tell everyone else to unplug and sell out the complexity - yeah, I am a total cynic. I grew up
California. Globe central for the do as I say crowd...
Oh and back to that video and the idea, that the guy with the coke bottle shoes is living more closely to a zen existence because he doesn't have the distractions of modern society - complete rubbish. Hey if there wasn't a pet bottle factory that dude wouldn't have any shoes... Even he rerlies on modern technology...
Lets all get over ourselves and enjoy what we have...
(wow, I just read my drivel - gotta stop
posting under the influence of coffee...)