What do minimalism, slow living, tech resistance, and homesteading – all growing trends in America – have in common? They all spring from a longing for a simpler way of life.

Sometimes that longing takes on a nostalgic or idealistic form. Yet it’s a legitimate desire, symptomatic of our sense that something has gone wrong, that our techno-industrial world, for all its advantages, has proven to be a Faustian bargain.

The octopoidal global economy, mass-produced pop culture, and cornucopia of comforts around us all rest on a scaffolding of tremendously complex systems few of us really understand. There’s nothing wrong with complex systems in themselves, but trouble arises when systems begin replacing people and relationships. The result is alienation, isolation, and cultural degradation.

I suspect that those interested in minimalism or homesteading yearn for a way of life less dependent on vast impersonal systems, whether the industrial food system or the consumerist economy designed to pad the pocketbooks of distant, behemothic corporations. Our humanity is stifled when we find ourselves as mere nodes in a network, cogs in a machine, consumers whose job is to keep the corporate money-grab chugging along.

The modern consumer has almost infinite choices before him, but he is forbidden to cease to be a consumer because that would disrupt the system. Such a mechanistic conception of humanity and the purpose of human life isn’t worthy of human dignity nor conducive to human flourishing. I think many today sense this.

People do not want to be part of a system; they want to be part of communities. They don’t want to be numbers on a balance sheet; they want to be individuals who both know and are known. They don’t want to live fractured lives; they want wholeness, integration.

That’s the appeal of something like homesteading: one becomes involved in an integrated process more like a dance than a system, the natural cycle of seasons and lifespans, yielding an understanding of the way we all depend on the soil for our existence. The farmer or the small-scale craftsman comprehends and manages the entire process of production, from seedling to dinner plate, from raw wood to finished table.

In a localized economy, a man sells his goods to his friends and neighbors if he doesn’t use them himself. That sense of completeness appeals to human rationality and ingenuity; it permits us to take pride in our work and to grasp a sense of right order – both the order we create and the larger order of which we’re a part. It’s a far cry from the factory worker or cubicle slave who never sees the whole, never knows the person who will benefit from his work, who repeats one small task in isolation, making a career out of fragments.

Something in us cries out for an economic system that’s about more than mere efficiency, systemization, and consumption. In the past, economic activity was not just economic but also social, relational, and cultural. For example, if you needed a new farming implement, you’d have to visit the blacksmith’s shop, talk to the gentleman, have him take measurements, etc. In a week or two your handmade tool would be ready. You and the blacksmith would engage in a personal relationship, collaborate in the cultural act of making something useful and beautiful out of raw materials produced nearby.

Contrast that with today, in which an isolated farmer in a climate-controlled tractor clicks “Buy Now” on his iPad. The tool is delivered to his house through an immensely convoluted process of production and distribution without him speaking to a living soul. Efficient? Yes. But at what cost? Can anyone deny that something is lost in this second scenario? Maybe something even more important than brute efficiency?

I have no objection to systems in themselves. But when systems begin replacing relationships and connection – whether relationships with one another, nature, or God – our humanity suffers. When systems promote artificiality, rootlessness, and materialism, I do object.

People who speak of “simpler living” are speaking, in part, about a desire to live more like a human being and less like a machine – a human being rooted in a real place and in real relationships.

We are relational beings made for relationships. One need look no further than the longest study on human happiness, which I wrote about recently, which found that the most significant predictor of health and happiness is the quality of one’s relationships. “People who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected,” the study’s directors wrote.

The trouble with a mechanical and bureaucratized economy, government, or culture is that they risk obscuring and interfering with a fundamental need of the human heart: to be connected. To be integrated. To be whole.

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. 

Image credit: Picryl