Student Life
Culture
While being bombarded with information and media, it’s important to reconnect with yourself through the act of creating.
21 March 2019
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Student Life
Making The Decision To Live A Minimalist Lifestyle
A look into what "minimalism" really means and how realistic it is to live with less.
26 February 2019
100
I have an arguably unhealthy obsession with organizing and cleaning and planning. However, I also have an unhealthy obsession with buying new things and wanting new things, as many of us do. It took me a long time, watching some "Tidying Up" on Netflix and forcing myself to regularly eliminate clutter to realize that the things in my life are giving me an incredible amount of anxiety. I'm very sentimental and struggle to get rid of things, which means I own a lot of objects that have meaning to me but aren't really useful in my everyday life.
To try to learn about what I could do to force myself to get rid of stuff and lessen my anxiety by lessening my belongings I started by watching the documentary "Minimalism". I started to see the appeal of living with as little as possible and eliminating excess thoughts and worries. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus self-identify as "the minimalists" and are spreading a message of living more meaningful lives. The documentary follows multiple people who have given up "consumer culture" in a variety of ways. Some gave up excess clothing or objects, some gave up cars and moved into tiny houses, while one got rid of a home altogether and decided to travel the world.
Courtney Carver started Project333 as a way to declutter wardrobes, arguably the most common dumping ground for excess belongings. She decided that she would try to dress with only 33 items for three months. Those 33 items included clothes, shoes, jewelry, and accessories. After the short three month experiment, Carver realized that she only needed that small wardrobe to dress. Project 333 has become a phenomenon with women all over the country attempting to dress with only 33 items. The idea is that you only keep your favorite wardrobe items, so you lessen dissatisfaction with your clothes and lessen decision making every time you have to get dressed.
Carver's project is just one example of decluttering one area of your life, but it's an interesting process to think about. We don't need all of the things we own, we just think we do. Carver's process points out that once you get rid of those things, you actually don't miss them. With everyone trying to become as happy as possible and as successful as possible, it's easy to lose sight of what it actually means to be happy and successful. Perhaps success lies in being the most satisfied with our own lives rather than matching everyone else's view of success. The stories presented by the minimalist movement prove that living with fewer things can mean living with more meaning.
Beyond the personal benefits of consuming less, it is well-known that lowering consumption positively impacts our environment. Consumer culture has created many of the massively daunting environmental problems we see today. With practices like fast fashion, cheap labor and cheap production of goods, it is easy to see how our process of creating and using materials does nothing but hurt ourselves and the world around us.
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Lifestyle
Black Friday Shopping...On Thursday
Is consumer culture overshadowing Thanksgiving?
26 November 2018
36
Black Friday is an amazing, wonderful invention of a holiday. Even more amazing, some might argue, than Thanksgiving itself. It is a day characterized by savings, spending, and materialistic capitalism.
In all seriousness, Black Friday is a great day to get a deal on items that you might normally not consider purchasing. As it marks the beginning of the holiday season, it is the ideal time to purchase gifts for loved ones, and maybe to treat yourself to something special.
However, in recent years, this annual day-after-Thanksgiving tradition of waiting for store doors to open Friday morning and frantically scrambling to find the best deals has changed. Black-Friday has gradually been encroaching upon Thanksgiving Day territory, with stores opening on Thanksgiving to maximize Black Friday sale hours.
As great as this might seem (more hours = more savings, right?), it points to a bigger problem created by the capitalistic ideals of American society. With this seemingly minimal expansion of Black Friday, we see a shift in the focus and energy of the holiday weekend.
Thanksgiving, a holiday intended to celebrate and acknowledge our gratitude towards the people and blessings in our life, has become, like many major holidays, a commercialized event. The focus has shifted from gratitude to things like football, food, and Black Friday. While none of these are inherently bad, the prioritization of material and physical things over concepts such as thankfulness and appreciation is indicative of a cultural shift towards superficiality.
Stores being open and promoting Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving stands in direct contrast to the point of the holiday. What is supposed to be a celebration of our gratitude is interrupted by a fixation on getting more. We disrupt the mindset of thankfulness with a culture of consumerism.
In the past few years especially, I have seen this change in my own family's celebration. Thanksgiving seems to be more rushed, people seem to be less present or mindful of their blessings, and the conversation is often littered with a discussion of who will be going to what store at which time to buy what presents.
And I'm guilty of it too - I have left family Thanksgiving events early to get to the mall with my friends, and have spent good portions of dinner on my phone searching for store opening times or making plans about where to meet.
I see this and compare it to earlier memories of Thanksgiving, where my family would go around the table and talk about what they were grateful for during the past year, and what we wanted for each other in the coming year. While we maintain conversations in this spirit, they are more superficial, more hurried, and more for the sake of tradition than anything else.
I love Black Friday as much as the next person. I love sales, shopping, and picking out presents. This Thanksgiving, however, let's bear in mind what we are gathering to celebrate and make gratitude the priority. Leave Thursday to Thanksgiving, and save the Black Friday shopping for Friday
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Student Life
Morality is not one-size-fits-all
How morality can be objective but not universal
21 November 2018
163
Pixabay
It's an idea that we've come to terms with hypothetically, in stories, but not in actuality. Nobody would contest such commonplaces as the classic, "With great power comes great responsibility," or "Do what you can with what you have." Yet this same notion requires some concrete extension.
Take, for example, the trendiness of sustainable consumer choices. It's wonderful to see a culture so joyously and artfully take up an extremely important call. We have recognized that though one individual's choices contribute very little, the collective effect is vital. On top of this utilitarian idea, the question of personal ethics has arisen. Essentially, though one individual's decision to buy a sustainably sourced item does not, on its own, make a difference, it does matter to that individual's degree of morality that they are not consuming products which were produced unethically.
But.
This conception of individual morality requires a bit more nuance. Yes, the wrongness of allowing products to be made through means involving the poor treatment of human beings or the environment is an objective truth. And we should make every deliberate effort within our abilities to purchase items from ethical sources. But the tragic and undeniable truth is that ethically sourced products are often more expensive. If an individual lacks the funds or material access to purchase in this manner, I suggest that whatever force of objective morality exists would be sympathetic. Items such as clothing and food are survival needs, and so people who struggle to attain such items at all should certainly be held to a different moral standard.
What this means, of course, is that those "on top" have an even bigger responsibility. Certainly, they have an absolute moral obligation to support the most ethical of companies and resources. At the same time, they face an additional duty to use their positions to challenge economic structures that require many consumers to purchase from unsustainable sources.
Wherever you stand, perhaps a more effective and even more moral move than adjusting our own consumer choices is larger scale advocacy to ensure that all resources are ethically attained, manufactured, and sold or distributed.
Furthermore, I must note that those with higher positions absolutely do have a greater moral obligation to, for example, pay taxes that contribute to programs for those in lower positions. They have a greater duty, too, to use their platforms to speak in respectful, empowering, and impactful manners. This idea can be supported from both a utility standpoint and from an individual moral one.
Certainly, as the Christian text suggests, "To whom much is given, much is expected."
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