The Opposite of Materialism Is Freedom

What happens when you own too much stuff? It owns you. You find yourself needing money so your stuff can occupy more space, be maintained and insured, and eventually be packed and moved. All the stuff you have invested your time, money, energy, and the planet’s resources to acquire winds up running your life.

Sometimes it creeps up on you, the way wrinkles and other signs of age do. For example, my friend Jill spent several seasons as a rafting guide in Alaska. The guides camped in tents all summer, walking into town to fetch food because none of them had a car. Jill had left her car back home in Las Vegas. When she tired of her Alaska experience, she went home to load it up and drive to her next adventure working for a casino in Reno. Two decades later, as she packed the contents of her three-thousand-square-foot house into box after box to be loaded into a moving truck, she lamented no longer being twenty years old and able to stash all her possessions into a hatchback and hit the road, the ultimate freedom.

It’s true that most of us don’t want to turn forty and still be living in a tent; there is something to be said for planning for a comfortable future. But comfortable doesn’t need to be extravagant, and extravagance is what our current consumer culture is all about. Spending to impress people (including yourself) is a bad idea. So is frivolously wasting the earth’s resources.

Luckily, there are other ways to live your life, even in modern America. My friend Ann spent her adult years living with an enviable zest. She managed to arrange her work schedule to take off extended periods of time so she could travel the globe, her favorite pastime. This included riding her bicycle to Mexico with her brother, spending eighteen months traveling solo through South America, and taking her elderly mother to Greece. For Ann, travel and experiences were vastly more important than material possessions, of which she had few. A coworker advised her early in her career to set aside 10 percent of her income in savings, which she did faithfully, managing to survive, thrive, and travel frequently on the rest. She is now retired, living comfortably in a $175,000 house for which she paid cash, despite never having netted more than $25,000 per year in her life. If she had spent her money on material goods instead, she would not have been able to pursue her hobby, and she very likely would have had to work more years to secure her future.

You are probably surrounded by people quietly bucking the mainstream, living well on less and being kinder to the planet in the process. If enough of us join them, we can secure a comfortable future for ourselves and many more generations going forward.