Assignment:
Could You Live With Less?
Underline the technological products or services that Mills has chosen to live without.
Compared to the lifestyle of the average person on Earth, my days are i lush with comfort and convenience: I have a warm home, enough to eat, my own car. But compared to most of my urban American contempo¬raries, I live a monastically simple life.
Since 1984 I've made my home outside a small city in lower Michigan, 2 where the winters are snowy but not severely cold. My snug 720-square-foot house is solar- and wood-heated. No thermostat, just a cast-iron stove. There's electric lighting, indoor plumbing, a tankless water heater, a secondhand refrigerator and range-but no microwave oven, no dish¬washer, no blow-dryer, no cordless phone. My gas-sipping compact station wagon has 140,000 miles on it and spreading patches of rust. I've never owned a television set.
My home entertainment center consists of a thou'sand books, a stereo system, a picture window and two cats.
Part of the reason I live the way I do is that as a freelance writer, my 3 income is unpredictable and at best fairly unspectacular. Thus it behooves .me to keep in mind the difference between wants and needs. Like all human beings, I have some needs that are absolute: about 2,000 calories a day, a half a gallon of water to drink, a sanitary means of disposing of my bodily wastes, water to bathe in, something muscular to do for part of the day and a warm, dry place to sleep. To stay sane I need contact with people and with nature, meaningful work and the opportunity to love and be loved.
I don't need, nor do I want, to complicate my life with gadgets. I want 4 to keep technology at the periphery rather than at the center of my life, to treat it like meat in Chinese cuisine-as a condiment rather than as a staple food. Technology should abet my life, not dominate or redefine it. A really good tool-like a sharp kitchen knife, a wheelbarrow or a baby carrier, all of which have been with us in some form for thousands of years-makes a useful difference but doesn't displace human intelligence, character or contact the way higher technologies sometimes do. Working people need the tools of their trade, and as a writer, I do have a fax, but I've resisted the pressure to buy a personal computer. A manual typewriter has worked well for me so far. Noticing that the most -computer-savvy people I know are always pining for more megabytes and better software, I've decided not to climb on the purchasing treadmill of planned obsolescence.
Doing with less is easier when I remember that emotional needs often get expressed as material wants, but can never, finally, be satisfied that way. If I feel disconnected from others, a cellular phone won't cure that. If I feel like I'm getting a little dowdy, hours on a tanning bed can't eradicate self-doubt.
Why live in a snowy region when I don't use central heat? I moved here for love several years ago, and while that love was brief, my affection for this place has grown and grown. I like the roots I've put down; living like Goldilocks, moving from chair to chair, seems like not much of a life to me.
Being willfully backward about technology suits my taste-I like living / this way. Wood heat feels good, better than the other kinds. (Central heating would make my home feel like it was just anywhere.) Fetching firewood gets me outdoors and breathing (sometimes gasping) fresh air in the wintertime when it's easy to go stale. It's hard, achy work to split and stack the 8 or 12 cords of stove wood I burn annually. I've been known to seek help to get it done. But the more of it I do myself, the more I can brag to my city friends.
My strongest motivation for living the way I do is my knowledge, deep and abiding, that technology comes at a serious cost to the planet and most of its people. Burning fossil fuels has changed' the Earth's climate. Plastics and pesticides have left endocrine-disrupting chemicals everywhere-in us and in wildlife, affecting reproductive systems. According to Northwest Environment Watch in Seattle,the "clean" computer industry typically generates 139 pounds of waste, 49 of them toxic, in the manufacture of each 55-pound computer.
I refuse to live as if that weren't so. In this, I'm not unique. There are many thousands of Americans living simply, questioning technology, fight¬ing to preserve what remains of nature. We're bucking the tide, acting consciously and succeeding only a little. Yet living this way helps me feel decent within myself-and that, I find, is one luxury worth having.