How could the average consumer - I should say class citizen media - switch to a lifestyle of radical simplicity? For simplicity radical I mean, basically, a very low standard of living but biophysically enough, a way of life that I will describe later in more detail. In this essay I want to suggest that the radical simplicity would not be as bad as it sounds and we were prepared balai for it and if we had anticipated his arrival with intelligence, both as individuals and to the community level.
In fact, I am suggesting that the radical simplicity is exactly what they need the consumer cultures to wake up from their slumber, that the radical simplicity would be in our immediate interests. However, in this essay I will defend only the more modest thesis according to which the radical simplicity "would not be so bad." Prove this fact should already balai be quite challenging.
Of course, if a standard of living dramatically lower suddenly were required balai because of the circumstances and without advance preparation nor, I recognize that most people would find such a drastic balai change terrifying and painful - an existential disaster. Such a reaction would be quite natural and understandable. But I will argue that if such a dramatic change would be stoically anticipated and we should prepare balai for it, it would not be so bad. If this argument is correct, it would seem that the middle class would benefit greatly from anticipating and preparing for the radical simplicity, even if they never get there, and could not get over our lives or those of our children. Then might, due to an unlimited number of reasons, ecological, economic, political and social and this possibility whatever its likelihood, it is ultimately the reason why I face the subject of radical simplicity.
And 'my hypothesis that the lifestyle of consumers balai have a time limit and that this time limit is running out quickly. If the global financial system does not collapse under the weight of its own debt, perhaps induced by the increase in oil prices, then at some point in our ecosystems collapse shaky, taking away with them the industrial civilization. In both cases, consumerism and the growth paradigm that supports it have no future, a diagnosis that will not try to defend here, but rather to consider as fact (Alexander, 2012a-f). When the time of consumerism is over, we will all live more simply, to varying degrees, whether we like it or not.
No one can be sure about when exactly the time it will end or how sound the closing bell, but it's the next year, the next decade or the next century, the inevitable death of consumerism is a subject that deserves our consideration today, because the time will expire at the end and probably sooner balai than you like to think of many. It should go without saying, of course, that would be far better balai to embrace the simplicity of designing it that she hugs us by a disaster.
Will already be clear that I am writing this essay from the perspective of an 'insider', a member of the so-called middle class, something I admit with a certain uneasiness. Despite devotes a great deal of my energy in supporting post-consumerist lifestyles (as far as you can do within the constraints of a consumer society), I am very aware of being a member of the middle balai class, balai which benefits from many of the comforts essential balai this lifestyle brings. For example, balai I have a computer, of course, and solar energy to power it, there is a fridge in the room next door with a little 'food inside and a productive balai vegetable garden in the house, so I'm not hungry and I have enough clothes and a roof over their my head, so I'm warm. Not only this, I have the leisure, health, education and safety balai to study the problems of the world, quini, without saying anything else on my standard of living, I have already said enough to place me firmly into the middle class. While I barely earning a living as a part-time academic, in the global context I know I'm fabulously wealthy.
I assume, since the reader is his time in front of a computer, with all the wealth and privilege that this will normally mean that I'm balai also writing for the middle class, in its broadest sense. There may be some readers who do not really fall into this admittedly vague socio-economic category, but only a few, probably none. We, will assume, on the same boat or, as he once put Henry David Thoreau (1982: 314): 'I balai should not then publish my guilt without blushing if not s
