Chasing Utopia, Family Imagines No Possessions

NY Times ^ | 5/17/08 | RALPH BLUMENTHAL and RACHEL MOSTELLER

[Dawnsblood]

Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

“It’s amazing the amount of things a family can acquire,” said Mrs. Harris, 28, attributing their good life to “the ridiculous amount of money” her husband earned as a computer network engineer in this early Wi-Fi mecca.

The Harrises now hope to end up as organic homesteaders in Vermont.

“We’re not attached to any outcome,” said Mrs. Harris, a would-be doctor before dropping out of college, who grew up poverty-stricken in a family that traces its lineage back through the Delanos and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Mayflower settler, Isaac Allerton.

[MikeHu]

It’s because we are a rich and prosperous nation that many can now develop the next economic manifestation — of common wealth as opposed to the notion of personal wealth, because the common wealth is by far the greater.

Largely, that is knowing where and how to access information of what one needs, when one actually needs it — and not simply maintaining vast storehouses of goods or information, regardless.

Things get more complex until they require a greater simplicity and effectiveness; that’s always been the pattern of evolution and progress. But that simplicity is on a higher level and not the lower level of the past.

[JRochelle]

Don’t feel sorry for the kids. My grandfather was a wanderer, in search of utopia. He ended up in South America, my mother followed him down there and I had a perfect childhood. Perfect.

We had very little ‘stuff.’ But we had friends and family and lots of love and I wouldn’t have traded that for all the stuff in the world.

[Hot Tabasco]

Mrs. Harris grew up in Wisconsin with her mother and sister. They were so poor, she says, that they nearly froze to death in the winter and had to cook their meals in the fireplace. She developed a weight problem, ballooning to 200 pounds

My family was so poor we couldn't even afford to pay attention

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal." ...

My family was so poor that if I hadn't been born a boy,I wouldn't of had anything to play with

My family was so poor that the skeletons in our closet died of malnutrition.

My family was so poor that the hobos used to drop off lunches for us kids.

My family was so poor we didn't even have lead paint on the walls to eat.

My family was so poor that once when somebody threw the dog a bone, he had to call for a fair catch.

My family was so poor that all the cockroaches died of starvation.

My family was so poor that on garbage day, we had to beg for garbage from our neighbors to put on our curb.

My family was so poor we couldn't even afford to live in the ghetto. We lived in the alley behind the ghetto........

My family was so poor that we saved up all year long so's we could have spam for Thanksgiving.

My family was so poor that the only clothes I had to wear were hand-me-downs from my older sister.....

[Chode]

when i moved out of the country i was living in a ~2000sq' house so i sold/gave away almost 2/3 of what i owned and it was a very weird feeling, an almost freeing if you will.

i wondered if that was how somebody about to commit suicide feels after giving away their stuff as some do

anyway, i shed even more stuff before returning to the states and now barely fill a 650sq' cabin.

but everything i have now, will last me the rest of my life...

[Ditter]

This lifestyle used to be called subsistence farming and it is a tough way to live. Lots of our ancestors lived this way as they moved across the south US to Texas. I come from people who lived this way and I remember their stories.

[Floyd Rivers]

Ha! One winter in VT ought to fix them quite nicely... They'll be banging on the doors of some well-off neighbor after their hatchet breaks and they have burned all the furniture for firewood.

[tickmeister]

We were so poor that we ate the cheese off the mousetraps for Thanksgiving.

The soles on my shoes were so thin that I could step on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Our farm was such steep ground that we looked up the chimney to see if the cows were coming home.

It was rough I tell you, and we got no respect. But that’s another story.

[ottbmare]

The soles on my shoes were so thin that I could step on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Shoes! You had shoes? You were rich compared to us! We were so poor we painted our feet black and pretended we had shoes! We were so poor we had to use fireplace ash mixed with water for the black paint! We were so poor we had to borrow used ashes from the neighbors! We were so poor that when we wanted milk to pour over cereal we milked the dog!

[tickmeister]

We could usually get shoes by the time we turned 30, but as noted, a bit worn. We did the black paint thing, and also learned to hold a walnut in our toes so it would sound like we had shoes when we walked into church on Sunday.