Downsizing and “Offgridding”
For most of my adult life I have lived in apartments: small, cozy spaces that were always entirely sufficient. Yes, the missus and I upgraded from a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom version midway through our time living in New York City, but that was in recognition of our need for a small home office, a place to more conveniently store our mountain bikes, and a place to stow visitors who seem to want to visit you often when you live in Manhattan.
In 2001 due to various changes in life circumstance, we moved to Albuquerque where both of us have family and an area that we had long enjoyed. New Mexico is a fantastic place to live, and between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, just about everything – aside from Ethiopian food – is available. But we did move into a real house since as telecommuters we needed lots of office space and we still needed a guest room.
In 2004 we upsized again, buying a 160-year-old adobe house that we converted in to a B&B which we ran for a year and a half before discovering that at this stage in our lives, that lifestyle was not for us. Closing the B&B we’ve been left with a house significantly larger than we need and one that we will be selling sometime over the coming year or two.
Throughout the past several years I have been plagued by a sense that the craze towards “largeness” – in cars, homes, lots, waists – was something unsustainable. I never understood having rooms that were never used, or cars that can hold a small horde but are almost exclusively driven for the purpose of moving one or two people around. Surely the desire for “bigger and better” was in a sense a “keep up with the Jones” exercise, but one I never felt any affinity for. Show me a small car with great gas mileage and a cozy cottage built with simplicity and efficiency in mind and I will be envious. Your huge, drafty, impersonal ballroom-studded manse leaves me cold.
And I also became convinced that we’d been in a housing bubble and living, as a nation, beyond our means. Whether you want to measure it though the low to negative savings rate or the current account and trade deficits, it all seems so very unsustainable. At some point the pendulum will swing back, and it’s always better to be ahead of the pack in adopting the next thing. In this case, a smaller home, a more sustainable way of living.
This could mean moving back into a more urban environment and returning to apartment living and public transportation, but that has its drawbacks for us. One is that urban is usually antonymous with peaceful and laidback. We’d done the rat race – in New York no less – and don’t really feel the way a 20-something feels about living that way. Peace and quiet and natural beauty is more attractive to us as we approach middle age than are action, excitement and buzz. Another is that we love our animals – dogs and chickens now but who knows later – and would not want to impose urbanity on them.
There is also a harder-to-define concept driving some of my thinking about all this. In general, as Americans, we seem to have lost much of the community that we once enjoyed. We don’t have common space where we share gossip: that’s been outsourced to television and magazines where we share the lives of so-called celebrities but have no idea what the neighbors are doing.
For most of human history people who lived close to each other shared their lives and livelihoods and just about everything. They relied on each other for entertainment, news, assistance, and, well, everything. We try to recreate that natural order when we have dinner parties and when we join churches or other community activities, but it is more forced than natural, more of an obligation that simply a facet of living. If I am to live in a community, shoulder to shoulder with others, I would prefer to know them, there seems to be little sense living in close proximity to strangers.
I didn’t mean for this page to become some form of manifesto. I may have to edit it at some point, but for now, this will have to do.
(“That’ll do pig, that’ll do”)
