Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.
Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands, although finding takers has been harder than they thought. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.
“It’s amazing the amount of things a family can acquire,” said Mrs. Harris, 28, attributing their good life to “the ridiculous amount of money” her husband earned as a computer network engineer in this early Wi-Fi mecca.
The Harrises now hope to end up as organic homesteaders in Vermont.
“We’re not attached to any outcome,” said Mrs. Harris, a would-be doctor before dropping out of college, who grew up poverty-stricken in a family that traces its lineage back through the Delanos and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Mayflower settler, Isaac Allerton.
While the Harrises’ approach is extreme, the idea that material possessions — although not evil in themselves — have a capacity to ensnare us and hijack our lives is a very Christian one indeed.
I myself have realized how much I have unthinkingly bought over the years, and how my consumer activities should be subordinated to a love for God just like all my other activities, when I had occasion to clean out my garage earlier this year. It is not a matter of Communistically feeling guilty for having disposable income, or denying oneself all finer pleasures, but rather for me seeing how much “cheap garbage” I had purchased. Had I thought in a more godly fashion about my purchases beforehand, I could have gotten something nice, durable and intrinsically valuable instead of paperbook books, trinkets, video games, etc.
Oh that the pendulum would just once stop at a sensible mid point…
You have to read these quotes:
“They are exchanging e-mail with a woman who has a remote cabin available in central Vermont. There is no electricity, Mr. Harris said, just propane power and a wood stove.
“We want to be in clean country with like-minded people with access to clean food,†Mrs. Harris said.
Mr. Harris does have a concern, though. He now telecommutes from his job as a Web systems administrator and is hoping to stay employed through the move. “The question is, Do I have Internet access in the woods?†he said. ”
I’m all for cutting back on consumption. I’m all for not letting your possessions own you. We have far less house than we could have bought (at least according to the bank). We deliberately drive used cars. We save and invest. We garden.
But . . .
These folks have no idea what it is actually like to try to live on what you grow in Vermont (I grew up there — it is a short growing season). The fact that they’re thinking about moving to a cabin with no electricity and simultaneously wondering about internet access demonstrates that they are a pair of silly romantics.
One might consider that by reading a brief media article about another person, you do not, in fact, know much about them. The fun thing about media is their ability to present things out of context.
I appreciate your idea of us as silly romantics, however, anyone who actually knows us would likely find that idea quite hysterically funny.
Don’t believe every judgment that your mind offers up.