Peace and prosperity

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about peace. Not the vague ill defined peace that the Barbie clones talk about at pageants, but the peace and more importantly the quiet that many down shifters crave and that so often inspires the move away from the rat race.

I travelled to work today on the bus, not in itself a world shaking event or of any great importance, but today I was shown just how important peace and quiet has become to me. This morning I was surrounded on all sides by people with personal music players - each one, turned up too loud and each one thumping away some indescribable beat and hiss that intruded on my journey. Halfway through, someone at the back of the bus decided that the experience was just not anti social enough, so lit a cigarette and started playing some thrashing tinny music through the loudspeaker on his mobile phone. Needless to say, by the time I arrived at my office I was tense, stressed to the point of having indegestion and feeling severely misanthropic. I would like to say that this was an isolated incident, but I can't. This was a fairly typical journey on the bus for me - out of control kids showing the world that they are tough and that they don't care about anything or anyone, and a bus full of people too tired, too frightened or just too complacent to challenge them.

So we seem now to live in a world obsessed with self, with appearance and with consumption. According to The Overspent American "Twenty-seven percent of all households making more than $100,000 a year say they cannot afford to buy everything they really need. Nearly 20 percent say they "spend nearly all their income on the basic necessities of life." In the $50,000-100,000 range, 39 percent and one-third feel this way, respectively. Overall, half the population of the richest country in the world say they cannot afford everything they really need. And it's not just the poorer half!" Conspicuous consumption seems to be everywhere I look at the moment - perhaps I'm more sensitive to it as we prepare to downshift, but perhaps its because more and more people are buying into the new consumerism of buy now and pay eventually - just so long as they can have it now and its the newest thing.

Now I cannot deny that I will have a wish list of things that will make my new life easier - perhaps I will want that compact tractor, that slightly more up market polytunnel, that goat with the go faster stripes, I think even the most hardened downshifted of us has a desire for a bit new kit to make our lives a little bit easier, I know that I can rarely look through Small Farm Canada or Mother Earth News without drooling over the home saw mills and wind turbines, but I suspect that our wish lists will be based on real rather than imagined needs (yeah, alright, I really don't need the high speed goat) and certainly not to keep up with the neighbours. Ok ok, I know that I'm basically preaching to the converted, after all we are a self selecting minority, we chose our eccentric lives and lets face it, none of us give a stuff what the world outside think, but as the world outside gets greedier we can risk becoming a little smug and a little over critical, and I think it is important that we too want and need things, we are human after all.