Anti-consumerism

I started reading about The Compact, a group bound to not purchase anything new in 2007 except for consumables.

It’s a great idea, I’ve had consumer burnout for some time.

There’s a yahoo! group, and a lot of the postings remind me of what I went through as a stay-at-home dad. I wanted to simplify my life at the time, get rid of clutter, get rid of the dozens of products we needed around the house. Instead of 4 different cleaners, I started using Simple Green for all of my cleaning. It’s non-toxic, biodegradable, smells nice, and works well.

I’ve started decluttering my house. We had a garage sale last weekend, I rid myself of my “trophy case” of technical reference books I hadn’t read in years. If I need a reference, I look it up on the internet. All of my pulp paperbacks are gone, I’ve only kept books from 3 authors I re-read. As I read books, I’m going to summarize them in a text file and donate them.

I had 5 laptop bags I never used and a laptop floating around that I’d gotten for free. Sold. An old Palm V - sold. Palm III - donated. The Palm Vs were a pain, nice, small, but the digitizers always drifted and I had to replace the battery, a non-trivial task.

Pens and pencils are a biggie — I have dozens floating around. In keeping with The Compact, free pens are everywhere, so I’m going to stick to free pens as a matter of principle.

I have so much computer stuff floating around that I can go a year recycling or trading up hardware as needed. There’s so much available for barter out there, too.

My ISP is a tough one — I really love him, and DSL is nice to have. I could imagine going back to dialup for some things, but the amount of SPAM has gotten so bad that I couldn’t imagine downloading my email over dialup. Ditto for web sites that load huge flash intros.