Degrowth Handbook - Part III

Meaning, life, and the meaning of life

The pace of modern life makes it difficult for us to look around and take a stock-take every now and then. It’s strange that we, particularly in the West, don’t discuss a great deal about what our long-term objectives are for society, not just in one year but in one thousand years. What is the end goal that we’re working towards, and more importantly, are we on course to meet these goals?

We also rarely discuss what our collective sense of meaning is, more specifically what this sense of meaning might imply for the way we organize our society. If I asked you what you think our collective values might be, you’d maybe say things like love, kindness, fairness, prosperity, democracy, freedom, these kinds of things. Some very poignant events in recent history have laid bare the possibility that the way we organize our society is struggling to provide these basic values.

The promises of prosperity from leaders and the world’s billionaires may inspire hope in some, but it’s hard for us to really feel their optimism in a truly tangible way. Whilst billionaire promises of progress, hyperintelligence, and robots tucking us into bed are mildly exciting, the only ones seeming to benefit from our march to Musk’s interplanetary utopia are the billionaire class themselves. Our march towards global fuel poverty and ecological collapse on the other hand doesn’t seem particularly prosperous or fair considering fossil fuel company profits this year.

It seems that our values have become detached from the means we employ to realize them. Our values are not embodied in our political, economic, and social spheres.

What degrowth calls for is a rain-check. Undoubtedly, we’ve done some remarkable things since a few genes were shuffled around 300,000 years ago, and the maxims and mechanisms we’ve invented to embody liberatory values are to be treasured. Yet now, degrowth calls for a further shuffling, of our political, economic, and social fabric, one that is truly suited to the 21st-century, wherein we need to decide which parts of society are helping us embody these values and which are hindering us.

What does a society look like that provides the optimum level of human well-being for everyone, an abundance of hours for leisure and self-directed time, and an absence of lifelong drudgery? What does a society look like where we genuinely work to live rather than live to work?

Degrowth suggests that modern society does not and cannot fulfill the promise of prosperity, love, freedom, democracy, and fairness it purports. We produce too many things for everyone to live the materially-affluent and prosperous lifestyles of the West. Too few people have their hands on the levers of the things that affect our lives for us to have real democracy. Our cultivation of the competitive spirit hampers our ability to love. Excessive time at work deprives us of real freedom. Nepotism in government and the economy at large scupper any chances of real fairness. What we should be asking is who is the future that the technology-driven billionaire class proposes for? I will go over this question in part iv of this handbook on the case against economic growth. Semantics aside, why does degrowth offer the most fertile political economy for human flourishing? Well, I believe that degrowth offers the best answer to the questions of what we value in society and how we can best embody those values.

Let’s quickly dive into one example, the idea of abundance. Abundance, I would argue, is the condition of having enough or plentifulness. Abundance in the context of Western society has come to mean the possibility of accumulating a limitless amount of stuff. Abundance is bathroom tile heating, Spanish tomatoes in December, and a slightly bigger telly. Yet this story of abundance really doesn’t add up, because this abundance never seems to be enough, we never seem to “arrive” at abundance, because there’s always someone with more. Some call this the ‘hedonic treadmill’, chasing positional goods that will allow us to feel as if we’ve “succeeded”, relative to the performance of others. Degrowth offers us an alternative view- why not think of abundance in terms of wellbeing, joy, and fruitful time spent with others? Additionally, what can be said to be a plentiful amount of possessions? Is there such a thing as abundance within limits? Degrowthers would say - yes.

In short, this looks like a life where we have fewer possessions, produce food seasonally and locally, travel less, work less and spend more time dedicated to caring for one another, cultivating social relations, pursuing meaningful yet ‘unprofitable’ work, and leisure. This is all possible as the less time we spend working to make the money to provide for our excessive understandings of abundance, the more time we have to pursue our vision of '“the good life”. Isn’t this vision of frugal abundance so much easier to grasp than the dream sold to us by influencers and adverts? That’s the whole point, that’s what we mean by “a good life for all within planetary boundaries”. Degrowth invites us to step off the hedonic treadmill, without this need for growth, people are free to appreciate what they already have.

What we’re talking about here is a system that seeks to embed the pursual of joy, well-being, and the meaning of life not only in the free, self-determined time available after the day’s work is done, but also in the day’s work itself. Degrowth insists that humans should be free to exercise their vision of the good life and search for meaning without coercion. The reason we must degrow is that for everyone to enjoy this possibility, we need to exercise low-impact lifestyles, because it’s rather difficult to search for meaning when someone’s luxurious lifestyle is stopping you from breathing clean air. The transition to this vision is a topic for another day, but I’ll leave you with this short story by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, who sums up today’s messages better than I ever could.

There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.

As he sat, he saw a fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite a few big fish.

The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”

The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”

“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.

“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.

The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”

The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.

“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?”

The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”

The fisherman asks, “And after that?”

The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”

The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

Cover illustration - Floating (24”x36”, Oil on Canvas, 2018, part of the Utopia Series) by Danielle Klebes. Courtesy of http://www.danielleklebes.com/