Less is more...

This is not just another blog post from me. No, this is a political, economic, social, and spiritual manifesto. I hope it will cause you to think and I hope it will cause you to act.

The United States is a big country, not just in terms of geography and population, the US has a big psyche. We love most things big, big cars, big houses, big careers. It is probably not a coincidence that the idea that a perfectly sized woman's breast should fit in a champagne glass came from France and not the USA. Our desire for everything bigger has also grown over time. In the 1950's the average sized home was 983 square feet. In the 2000's that average had grown to 2300 square feet. We grew to love massive SUV's, we shifted our shopping trips from small stores to "big box" retailers, restaurant food portions have increased in size and our waistlines have grown with them. We like things big in America.

It isn't that we always embrace the grandiose. No, we want our government smaller and we pay lip service to appreciating small business. Of course our government keeps growing and we make it easy to support small businesses because we classify any business with less than 500 employees as small. This means that 99.9% of the businesses in the US are small businesses, it would be hard to not support them. So why do we like most things big but not all? People on the right see big government as a threat to the bigness they want in their lives and people on the left see big business as a threat to the bigness they want in their lives. It isn't that we hate anything big, we are just afraid that the largess of the things we dislike will reduce our ability to achieve the personal largess we are seeking. These exceptions prove the rule, in America, bigger is better.

So where am I going with all of this? I want you to think about small.

Today I was driving my car around town. I drive a 2011 smart car, currently the smallest car sold in the United States. Smart cars aren't terribly common where I live and so I have a lot of people walk up to me in parking lots to ask questions about my car. Most of the people are simply curious about my car, but at some point almost all of these conversations get around to the person who stopped me saying they could never own a car that small. They think the car has to be a death trap. Even when they see the considerable amount of space inside the car they can't believe it is practical. I have literally had someone tell me while they were sitting comfortably in my car that they could never fit in it. They just can't get past the small. After a round of these questions today I started thinking about why I drive a smart car. I didn't buy the car for the gas mileage, it is a nice bonus, but there are cars on the market that get better gas mileage. I'm not a big environmentalist so the low carbon emissions weren't a factor in my buying this car either. I have just been fascinated by smart cars since they were first released in Europe in 1998, but why?

I'm an old punk. I have had the piercings and tattoos and mosh pit injuries to prove it. I guess at this point in my life I have moved from being an old punk to being more easily recognized as a contrarian. I have exceeded the age limit to call myself a rebel, yet these tendencies, thankfully, die hard. I look at all things popular and accepted with a great deal of skepticism. I appreciate people and ideals that go against the flow, a smart car fits in with my contrarianism perfectly. Plus it is just a lot of fun to drive. The question is, why is a smart car such a perfect rebel, punk, contrarian automobile in our culture when it is so easily accepted in other parts of the world? Simple, it isn't big.

Small is threatening in our culture, we want everything bigger and so anything that glorifies the diminutive is nearly sacrilegious. Our desire for the grand means Starbucks can't sell you a small coffee. Our lust for the large means that we have to have the bigger car, the bigger house, the clothing with the larger price tag, and because of all of this we wind up with greater stress, larger levels of debt, and jumbo sized deficits of free time. We idolize big to such an extent that we start off our adult lives going deep in debt so that we can attend college, quite often not so that we can learn but so that we can get a higher paying job which will allow us to live large later in life. Size, in America at least, does matter.

We have to get away from this need for big. There are many reasons to do this, it can help our environment, it can benefit our local economies, it can lead to greater freedom, but I don't care about any of that. I want to live little because it pisses people off.

I once spent a few months hiking on the Appalachian Trail. I quickly learned to send home anything in my backpack that I didn't use every single day. When you are carrying everything you own on your back as you hike up and down mountains for 8 to 12 hours a day every ounce matters. I got down to the point that I could hike for a week, carrying my clothes, shelter, food, and everything else I really needed in a very small pack with a total weight of around 20 pounds. Other hikers looked at me with jealousy in their eyes. I was living little. I would go into a town to resupply and I could see the envy on the faces of the people around me. They loved the idea of having the freedom that I had but they couldn't drop their super sized lives and embrace the small. Living simply makes people angry because they want to do the same thing but they won't allow themselves to. They are trapped by the titanic proportions of their lives.

So how about you? How big do you live? Look around and see what you could reduce, what you could get rid of, how you could change things to make your life smaller. Live smaller and you will take away the power that other individuals have over your life. Live simpler and you will have more time to live. You don't have to go without anything that you need, you only have to get rid of things that you don't need, things that own you instead of you owning them. Do it for any reason that appeals to you, but if we all did it our nation would be in much better shape, physiclly, economically, socially, spiritually. Plus after the hippies and the punks and the goths and emos and hipsters our youth needs to find a new way to rebel. This is it, this is the way, us older folks need to show them the way, so if for no other reason we should all shrink our lives for our nation's children. They are our future after all. Hopefully our future will be much more reasonably sized than our present.