Howard, G. (2002). How should I live my life?: Psychology, environmental science, and moral traditions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

 

Chanced upon this book and the title triggered one thought and relates to a few questions that was brought up with regards to my project. Since my project is advocating frugal living, one issue was that if people have the means to live whichever ways they want, extravagantly or not, so why do they have to live frugally? Why should we tell others how to live their lives?

This book encourages us to think about the future, extensively on the context with our emerging environmental problems. He talks about how psychologically humans make decisions and choices, how it affects our earth, and how our attitudes, habits and other factors attributes to the issues that we face now.

Here I will highlight his analysis and important points on the human nature he brought across in the book as he explains why we do what we do, and how we should go about solving it. His explanations aid my project in different aspects and answer to some of the issues I faced.

 

Chapter 1: Why change is needed

To examine the extent to which the philosophy or life and the philosophy of human nature that we currently believe as if they were literally true.

 

What-if anything- can be done?

Human beings will undoubtedly be blamed, since too many humans and their ever-expanding consumptive activities represent the root causes of all ecological problems. Two obvious candidates are human nature and human cultures.

The second engine of ecological destruction – namely, overconsumption or unsustainable lifestyles. (First engine: overpopulation)

Suggest that cultural differences hold the key to effectively reducing the kind of consumption now stressing the earth’s ecosystems. (E.g a child born in the US in 1990 will consume more than sixteen times the energy(which thus produce approx. 16 times the waste) over his or her lifetime as a child born at the same time in India)

Not to imply that Americans are naturally wasteful while Asian indians are by nature conservationists but rather American children are raised within an extremely wasteful system.

The types of cultures moulds different behaviors/practices.

What is free market capitalism?

Capitalism seeks to foster a culture of multiplying appetites. People are instructed to want more out of life, to have more this year than last year, and to want a better life for their children than they themselves have.

Quote: The capitalist system, in order to sell its plethora of manufactured goods, has to enlist the help of the motivation researcher and the Madison Avenue ad agency to get rid of the excessive and ever growing pile of manufactured goods and not really needed in our society. To encourage consumption in the absence of real need and to associate status and self-esteem with wasteful consumption, it has been necessary to encourage mindless impulse buying and self-gratification. By now, we have raised several generations of people on endless and repetitive exhortations that it is all right to yield to impulse, to buy without guilt, and to consume without shame. Installment buying may have been the fatal blow to the self-denial of the Protestant ethic. (Albee 1977, 150)

Madison Avenue’s advertisement propaganda, that people adopt wasteful, consumptive-oriented lifestyles, represents an important ecologically destructive force against which children and adults need to be inoculated. Contrary to the consumerist vision of life, wasteful overconsumption, unbridled greed, and short-term myopia must be understood as destructive vices.

 

How do you like the title of this book?

In one sense it’s a deeply flawed- The author purposely demonstrated one of our contemporary problematic beliefs in the title. The title should have read “How should we live our lives?” Why should we focus upon the group rather than the individual? The author believed that the thorny psychological issues of the twenty first century will be social in nature, not individual.

The ultimate consumerist dream is for the individual to be able to consume without conscience or consequence – but this can only safely occur if most other group members live Spartan, virtuous lives. We have generalized our consumptive profligacy to “generation abuse” through our tendency to live fat and rich for today and lay off the consequences upon our children and their children.

 

Who’ll stand Against the Idols of Our Age?

Moral traditions might play as a counterweight to a cultural milieu that valorizes consumerism, maximization, materialism, and other gentrified forms of gluttony.

(Author replaced “maximization” with “gluttony” as he felt that “gluttony” has too negative a valance and therefore society smuggled the concept into polite conversation under the term “maximization”)

Maximization(sickness)>extremism(disease)>perfectionism

1: Author believes that the ecological crises that we are now beginning to experience will be the leading causes of human pain and suffering in the 21^st century.

2: these crises represent symptoms of maladies that lie at the very heart of our contemporary worldviews and societies.

3: the cures of these maladies lie in human beliefs that are governed by character and virtue (short supply these days).

 

Chapter 3: Stories, Stories Everywhere; But not a truth to think

• the essence of human thoughts can be found in the stories we employ to inform and indoctrinate ourselves to the nature of reality.
• True stories serves as bookmarks to highlight the way that stories can create character and possession of certain virtues in each of us.
• Scientific stories might lack the rich resources of other nonscientific perspectives like philosophy, literature, clinical wisdom, religion, and the like.
• Different types of stories serves different functions.

Here the author explains that stories is a way to shape one’s characters and possession of virtue. A good point to note since i am advocating frugal living. A possible deliverable maybe?

Culture: Some of the stories we live by

• definition of a cross-cultural psychology a strong concern for how large differences between cultures actually find their way into the psychological world and the actions of individuals
• We are raised in a plurality of cultural subgroups, each exerting a multiplicity of influence upon us
• The subjective culture of each of us is strongly influenced by the degree of contact we have with people and institutions that focus upon their own subcultural perspectives.
• We are molded by the subjective culture of our reference subgroup

Shows that how we are influenced by the culture we live by. With advance technology nowadays, we get to learn about different cultures all at the same time and this mixture of cultural knowledge shapes our thinking in today’s society although we live in different countries. (not sure if i understood this part correctly)

• initially, a child is greatly influenced by the cultural milieu of his or her family. With maturation the influence of the family generally declines, relative to the potency of other subcultural groups such as the neighbourhood, the schools, and society in general.
• Many of the classic struggles between parents and their children in adolescence and early adulthood come about as children espouse the values and beliefs of their subjective culture subgroup that conflict with the beliefs and values of their parents’ subjective culture.

We here see how culture and our environment shapes our thinking. The development of values and beliefs as a child is one point to take note of. Hence, one of my target audiences focuses on people that are starting a family. The influence they brought upon their child affects their character.

 

Chapter 5: The tragedy of maximization

The tragedy of certain self-fulfilling prophecies

• to the extend that people believe it is in their nature of maximize individual “goods”, they will orient their lives toward the attainment of self-interested goals. Then, as each of us reflects upon the experience of our lives, we find that the maximization of our own self-interest represents the most compelling explanation of our own nature and experience as humans. That we might have become a different type of person, had we entertained different beliefs about human nature and the good life, rarely tempers our sad conclusion about human motivation.
• Free market capitalism represents a self-interested, maximizing belief system. Because both individual and corporations are instructed to maximize their profits, the current credo has become “let no human want go unsatisfied”. This strategy is doom to failure in the long run because it is based on ever-increasing material throughput.
• While we can and should find ways to use these resources more efficiently, we live in a world of important physical and biological limits. Yet, we’ve adopted worldviews that rest upon dreams of geometric growth.
• The reality is that western, free market capitalism system, that encourages the current geometric rates of increase population, production, consumption and waste generation, represents a terrifying, pyramid scheme.
• Eventually we will overwhelm our ecosystems, unless we change our beliefs and lifestyles.

 

Reexamining Ancient wisdom

• many religions promote moderations, and thus tend to encourage earth friendly lifestyles.
• For example: “Buddhist economics” rethinks our most basic economic assumptions and offers alternative foundation based upon a Buddhist belief system and the notion of the “goods” in life. Material goods are to satisfy human needs and are never collected for the sake of becoming wealthy.
• For example: Jesus teaches a spiritual enlightenment that focuses our attention on a world that lies beyond our material world. Undue attachment to the things of this world represents a danger to the life of the spirit. Material possessions are not intrinsically bad but rather, sin might result from being overly attached to material possessions, or by losing sight of spiritual goods, due to a myopic fixation on maximizing one’s material possessions.

Hope for the future

• first step in this process is to replace some of our consumption-oriented, maximizing beliefs with perspectives that prize nonmaterialist values

 

Extremism in the service of a good cause

Moderation is a virtue that is currently in short supply.

Acceptable or balanced extremism

• the only remotely defensible rationale may be to claim that extremism is acceptable when grounded in a balanced (non extreme) awareness. A balanced, pluralistic awareness is open, broad, thoughtful, and constantly questioning.
• Extremism vs moderation: it is easy to condemn all extreme actions as ‘unjustifiable and productive” and to encourage moderation as a vehicle of change. However, “moderate actions” are by definition, anchored to and defined by the context of cultural norms within which they take place. If those cultural norms are part of the problem, then moderate actions may never promote real change
• The real problem is lack of awareness.

The funny thing is to encourage frugality I thought moderation in consumption is they key. I might have to think more about it now

 

Reengineering wasteful systems

• lives of excessive individual consumption, materialism, and the focus on individual welfare are anathema to virtually all religious belief systems.

 

HABITS AT FIRST ARE SILKEN THREADS

Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit, and you reap a character. Sow your character, and you reap a destiny.

• human should focus upon doing the little things correctly- acts produce habits that build the character that determines one’s destiny. A satisfying destiny in life often represents the natural outgrowth of thousands of well-chosen acts.
• A sound education ought to closely examine the fragile threads of students habits (such as savings, spending, etc) that overtime will mold students’ characters and create their destinies.

 

Cheap is beautiful: Is your money working as hard as you are?

• Rule #1: Spending cuts are far more effective than increased earnings in escaping a household financial crisis. In real sense, we diminish our lives whenever we overwork.
• Why don’t we recognize the enormous power of spending less, consuming less, and of generally appreciating the beauty of frugality?
• To reconsider what items in your lives are luxuries rather than necessities. And show how we might obtain these necessities and luxuries in ways that greatly reduce the amount we spend for them.
• A psychological strain due to financial difficulties.

 

Necessities or luxuries?

• something is not a necessity simply because you’ve always owned one(eg. Car), or because everyone you know owns one (eg wristwatch). If your life would significantly diminished by not spending money on an item or service, then it can reasonably be considered a necessity for you. Luxuries are fair game for spending cuts, but unless your financial circumstances are truly desperate, one should not consider forgoing a necessity.
• It is not trying to suck out all the pleasure out of life by making people forgo the luxuries that bring joy to life but rather trying to show ways that enable you to afford even more pleasurable luxuries in your life.

 

GREEN TAXES

Shortsightedness – Thy name is human!

• the more one studies psychology, the more one realizes that human almost always sacrifice important long-term considerations to trivial short-term rewards or punishments.
• Credit-card lifestyle: the-live-for-today and don’t-sweat-tomorrow mentality
• Think like an investor, not like a consumer.

 

IMAGINE!

• overtime, people have institutionalized wasteful and destructive lifestyles by creating systems( eg. business, political, educational) that virtually demand that individuals stress their ecosystems.

 

In praise of the common good

• religious tend to focus attention upon the group rather than on individuals
• jews: the chosen people
• Christians: people of god
• Buddhist: all is the tao, and the tao is all.
• Religious traditions tend to be suspicious of too much wealth and try to promote various forms of asceticism – voluntary simplicity, self-denial etc
• Hence tend to be in conflict with the materialism, consumerism, and individualism that now permeate contemporary first world societies.

 

From benevolent invisible hands to common tragedies

• In a world characterized by severe limits, growth, maximization, development, and greed are often destructive impulses that serve to undermine the common good.
• More and more, wise individuals are those who recognize when “enough is enough”
• In first language of self-reliant individualism, one need not even worry about the res of the world.
• But because we live in a world of strict limits, the common good will more often be served by stasis and decline in human numbers and their “wants and needs”

 

Buddhist economics

• Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in multiplication of wants but the purification of human character.
• It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them.
• The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence.
• Buddhist economics is the study of how to attain given ends with minimum means.
• As physical resources are limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use.
• It is a question of finding the right path of development, the middle way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, of finding “Right livelihood.”

 

GHANDI SEVEN SINS

Extremism and balance in life

• ghandi sees that few people are able to separate their career and work choices from monetary considerations, even after their basic needs have been more than met. Instead of making work important means to enlightenment, the lust of maximum profits and wealth leads people to make choices that lead to serious exploitation of others.
• The voluntary simplicity movement teaches us to see value in simple pleasures and simple means to beneficial ends. Downsizing our lives opens our attention to pleasures of the interior life (eg spirituality, family, community sharing, fine arts) as we gradually free ourselves from the grip of external shackles such as materialism, the headlong pursuits of wealth, consumerism, political power, fame and the like.

 

It takes uncommonly dedicated person to live a life of voluntary simplicity when she or he is trapped within grossly wasteful economic and business systems. It is clear that American systems that now nurture our unsustainable lifestyles much change before individuals’ proenvironmental wishes can be transformed into sustainable, earth-friendly lifestyles. But how does one influence change in societal structures?