Less Is More: Time to Stop Consuming Ourselves to Emptiness
“But when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”―Marie Kondo
Essentialism has been on my mind of late. I’m guessing the same may be true for many of you. I’m considering questions like:
Who is essential?
What is essential?
What do I need — I mean really need?
Prior to the Great Pause, we’d been living under More’s Law. (No, not that Moore’s Law, though the one I’m talking about also has to do with getting more for less.)
There’s another law of more for less at work in our modern world, one that rules but is not limited to the tech industry. It’s the principle that says more is better. That no matter how much we have, we always need more.
We deserve more.
We will be happier, more successful, more loved if only we get — and are — more.
We can have more for less.
The more for less thing also and insidiously applies to our role in the global economy. With the Industrial Revolution, human beings suddenly became human doings. As if we were just another input to the system. To be measured for our productivity level and optimized to see how much performance could be extracted from us.
Measured for our contribution to the bottom line.
Measured for uptime as if we were computers capable of sustained performance approaching 100%, urged on by calls to hustle harder, rise and grind.
In the process, we’ve strip-mined away the humanity from human resources. Leaving us as just resources.
Resources to be exploited.
Resources that are both expendable and replaceable.
Resources that are in greater and greater supply on our overcrowded planet.
As we’re driven to produce more, we’re simultaneously being commanded to consume more. After all, we’ve become a consumer society, our global economy largely based on consumption. Consumption that, as George W. Bush famously told us in the wake of 911, is our civic duty. An act of patriotism.
We are continuously barraged with messages — from political leaders, advertisers, and other influencers— telling us we want more, we need more, we need to buy more because our very lives (really the livelihoods of a select few) depend on it.
The more we consume, the emptier we feel, and the greater our hunger for, you guessed it, more. It’s like we’re trying to fill a bottomless pit at the center of our beings.
Consuming ourselves to emptiness.
We’ve become a bulimic society, chasing wave after wave of overconsumption and generating torrential, never-ending outpourings of waste.
We “binge-watch” Netflix.
We’ve become hoarders, renting storage units to house all the things we buy but can’t fit in our homes.
We have umpteen different kinds of toothpaste — of every consumer product — that all seem to share the same attributes in a different order when there used to be two to three, leading to selection stress where we once found sufficiency and satisfaction.
The information superhighway has become a tsunami, a torrential wave of content that grows larger and more imposing with every passing day but never breaks, though it’s starting to break us.
We are literally drowning in information — long past the point of being able to keep up with it much less assimilate or meaningfully connect with the substance of it all.
Tuning in daily, habitually, with constant partial attention, to WADD: Voice of Distraction radio.
Numbing out in the collective din of the tower of babble that is our social ME-diocracy — the NutraSweet of connectivity, the source of endless scrolling, fear-mongering, othering, and fake news.
Experiencing diminishing returns with every like.
Life has become a zero-sum game where to have more, someone else has less. It’s heartbreaking to watch the exponential growth of Jeff Bezos’ company, ego, and net-worth while the workers on whose backs this enrichment comes are treated like slaves, like expendable, replaceable, less-than-human resources.
We were already living a pandemic before COVID — gorging ourselves to sickness like Romans in a global vomitorium — but it took an actual pandemic for us to see it.
To shine a light on our collective excesses.
To put a temporary halt to our frenzied, habitual, self-and-other-and-planet-destructive activity.
To provide a mirror that is revealing so much about our societal disorder and disease.
This discomfort we’re all feeling isn’t just our confinement, it’s the pain of being forced to sit with ourselves and stare at our own reflection. To be with what we see.
Honestly, COVID is not just a pandemic to fear or a disease to eradicate, it’s a wake-up call to ignore at our peril.
An opportunity for reflection.
An opportunity for truth and reconciliation.
An opportunity for rebalancing and world positive change.
The “normal” we wax nostalgic for was anything but and wasn’t working for the great majority of us — especially those of us we now deem essential and whose service and sacrifice we now collectively celebrate with claps, bangs, and howls at dusk.
Far too many of our fellow beings across the globe will not survive this pandemic. And if we fail to learn its lessons—to see the toxic and destructive impact of our excesses — their tragic sacrifices will have been in vain. And other plagues will follow.
So, let’s not make this a Great Pause — a word that implies we’ll resume what came before — but a Great Reset.
A Great Re-imagination
A Great Reincarnation in which all beings find happiness and the cause of happiness and are free of suffering and the causes of suffering.
A Great Recognition that less is more.
I keep finding myself returning to the lifeboat metaphor. As we navigate through this period of epic disruption and societal transformation, what will we choose to put in our lifeboats and what will we leave behind.
I hope that all of us will choose to bring our humanity and with it a commitment to remaking our world with a positive-sum mentality.
I hope we will leave behind toxic polarization, weaponized words, greed-is-good, and most of all, other-ness.
Because in truth, there is no other. No difference between you and me. No planet B.
We’re all in this together.
We are all one.
What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.
Life — all life, yours, mine, ours, and most of all the life of the planet and of all living beings that call it home — life is a precious gift. There’s enough for everyone but only if we recognize, celebrate, and advocate for the rights of all beings as fiercely as we fight for our own.
It’s time to recognize the collective bystander effect of denial we’ve all been operating under and start to proactively work for the greater good.
To love more and hate less.
To be more and do less.
To give more and take less.
I hope to live long enough to see a world where we collectively move up Maslow’s need hierarchy. A world where all beings don’t just survive but thrive.
A world where dreaming isn’t a luxury but a right given to all.
A world led by open minds, lovingly curious hearts, and higher selves.
A world of reciprocal responsibility for each other’s well-being.
One simple action when multiplied can change the world. Perhaps that simple act could be for each and every one of us to take the Hippocratic oath. To do no harm.
To ourselves.
To each other.
To nature.
It’s appropriate that today is May Day — also known as Beltane, an ancient holy day. A celebration of fecundity and rebirth. A celebration of workers.
Sending out love and May Day blessings to all.
If I can be of service to you on your journey, please book a curious conversation to explore what the Vulnerability Doula can do for you.