A Life Less Throwaway is a manual for how to shift focus from the materialism of our consumer society to a life of meaning, purpose, and connection. It’s thought-provoking, funny, and full of practical steps. Tara Button presents a vision of mindful curation, which, while overlapping with the goals of minimalism, does not need to result in a minimalist home to be successful.
Button worked in the advertising industry for ten years, and she gives us a peek behind the scenes, showing how marketing shapes our desires in ways we might not realize. As an example, they filmed children enjoying a treat, but the commercial secretly used the competing brand because the kids were spitting out the one they were supposed to be advertising. Another example would be the notion of a diamond engagement ring, which was invented by a diamond company. I wonder what would happen if someone started advertising engagement tacos instead? Research and statistics back up many of Button’s points. Something I found interesting was that the longer people spend getting ready, the more negative they feel about their appearance. Advertisers harp on this dissatisfaction to convince us that we need to buy clothes, accessories, and beauty treatments. Probably we would enjoy our lives more if we instead focused on other qualities, such as our friendships. This is where A Life Less Throwaway stands out, by offering tangible ways to disrupt these marketing messages and remember our true purpose. An area where most households can benefit from A Life Less Throwaway is by editing their clothes closets. There is quite a bit of material here. Button points out that the average woman buys sixty-seven articles of clothing a year, while in 1930 the average woman owned only nine outfits. The book includes worksheets on how to choose a personal style and weed out garments that don’t suit that look. It also has reasons why someone might want to keep something that isn’t being used, such as that someone complimented it one day. These are very relatable chapters! A Life Less Throwaway has some great ideas for teaching kids to be less materialistic, also. One example was to have them write advertisements for the fun toys they already own and then act them out. Another exercise that kids might find funny is to look at an ad with a celebrity showcasing a product, and then swap that person out for another famous person you don’t like as much. This is introduced as a mental visualization, but it could be done with art supplies or software, just saying. The concept of the ‘unwish’ list is also very useful, and something I’ve done myself. Following the principles of A Life Less Throwaway can lead to greater life satisfaction, better friendships, more savings, happier holidays, and less housework. I can attest to that because a lot of these ideas are a natural outgrowth of a frugal, minimalist lifestyle. In general, adding more shopping means more debt, more housework, less free time, and more quarrels. If we aren’t recreationally shopping, then what are we doing with our time? Button’s book is a solid choice as a handbook for a better, more meaningful life, A Life Less Throwaway indeed. Favorite quotes: “Overbuying habits are often linked to low self-worth.” “We look forward to experiences more than to buying material things because they create happiness even when they’re not happening.” If ever there has been a misunderstood idea, it is the concept of setting boundaries with other people. The reason for this is that each of us has a burning, shameful memory of a bad interaction with another person: a failed friendship, a betrayal, a bad breakup, a layoff, or some other interchange that has emotionally scarred us for life. We feel this way even though well-negotiated relationship boundaries might have prevented such a wound in the first place.
For me the killer memory is of another driver shouting an unprintable and probably physically impossible imperative command at me out of his truck window in 2005. I went home and sobbed for two hours, considered relocating back to my home state, and eventually just decided to quit owning a car! So, thank you for that, truck-driving Rude Man; you’ve saved me tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of freeway commuting. Any unfortunate events that have befallen you in the past thirteen years, go right on ahead and chalk them up to car-ma. Back to boundaries. Why on earth would I let a random troll infect my peace of mind? Why do it at all, but especially, why remember it for over a decade? So many things have gone well in my life since that day: I joined Mensa, remarried, reached my goal weight, ran a marathon, adopted a parrot, traveled to two additional continents, changed careers, published a book, and all sorts of other things. The truth is, no amount of achievements or accomplishments really feel like they matter when we’re mulling over a relationship misfire. The reason for that, I suspect, is that other humans are our natural predator. We are each other’s biggest evolutionary threat and most terrifying enemy. Communicating, collaborating, and cooperating with other people is our safety, our strongest survival trait. We like to think it’s using tools, but when we catalog all of the tools that we personally can use, we start to understand that we rely on each other’s skills more than we’d like to acknowledge. Nothing else can mess with our equilibrium as much as relationship drama, just like nothing else can help us succeed as much as feeling like our friendships and family connections are strong. This is where boundaries come in. The first principle of boundaries has to do with accountability. When we accept total and complete personal accountability in every aspect of our lives, this gets easier. We become trustworthy and reliable. It also becomes difficult to maintain relations with people who are not completely accountable themselves. That’s mutual. Those who don’t like being held accountable start to avoid those who expect integrity. (Personal accountability is not the same thing as the misguided belief that we somehow bring 100% of our trouble and drama upon ourselves. It just means that when bad things happen, we deal with them. Not my fault, still my problem). The second principle of boundaries is that each person brings 100% to the table. When we focus on giving, on listening, on being present, on connecting, then we can control those inputs. We can only feel the love that we feel, the love that we cause to well up inside ourselves. We can know, trust, and believe that others love us in return, but we can’t actually FEEL it. It’s up to us to give the love, affection, trust, and respect that we wish to receive. The third principle of boundaries is that everyone gets twenty-four hours in a day. Thus, we have only so much precious time to spend. Every minute we spend with a random stranger, troll, or anonymous commenter is literally stolen from those we love the most. We are required by the laws of physics to prioritize time for our loved ones, and that means spending less time with people we don’t care about as much. This is where we start to get into trouble. People start working themselves up over hypothetical situations, rather than picturing their own literal, actual loved ones. We count imaginary hurt feelings rather than counting the calendar minutes we’ve spent talking to, say, our grandparents. It’s not that I don’t care; I just don’t care. I don’t care about anonymous commenters as a policy. Any second of the day, I can go to a news article, blog, or Twitter and read anonymous comments. No scarcity there. I don’t allow comments on my own blog because 1. I don’t have to, 2. Moderating comments would create an entire second job that I don’t want to do, and 3. I want to protect my more sensitive readers. Anyone who sincerely wants to talk to me can email me or tweet at me using their actual name. I don’t care about insults. Trolling is a hobby these days, a stupid one. Trolling is proof that the troll literally has nothing better to do. This is definitive proof that this person’s opinions are worthless. I can’t care about a troll’s comments any more than I can care that a random dog barked at me. I don’t care about naysayers. Regardless of my goal, regardless of the relationship I have with the naysayer, it’s my time and energy to waste. If I want to do something, how is it hurting that person? The easiest way to avoid dealing with naysayers is simply not to talk about your plans until they’re finished. Inform people after the fact. Hey, I went to Morocco. Hey, I placed a product in stores. Hey, I had a conversation with someone in Spanish. Naysayers never seem to care about goals that are already complete. I don’t care what conversations or social occasions I’m missing. There are always going to be infinite possibilities that I can’t fulfill in one lifetime. People I’ll never meet! Parties and weddings where I wasn’t invited! Concerts I missed! I refuse to whip myself with Fear of Missing Out. I’m having the conversation I’m having right now. I’m living my life right now. Thus, I spend almost no time on social media. Also as a policy, I will help anyone I can in any way I can. If it’s specific, count me in. I grade myself on whether I’ve fulfilled my obligations, followed through, filled in for someone else, helped get something done, kept confidences, and shown up when I said I would. That doesn’t insulate me from trolls, haters, or critics - nothing would - but it does allow me to set my own values and measure my own adherence to them. The truth about setting solid boundaries with people is that they usually don’t even notice. We aren’t usually as important to others as we would like to think. As a rule, we spend more time dwelling on our hurts than those who have insulted us ever did with their casual cruelties. Other people spend their time thinking about themselves, just like we do, and it’s likely that the only memories of our past wounds exist in our own minds. More likely, most of our emotional scars come from our interpretations of others’ words and actions, things they never meant to cause any pain at all, things they have long forgotten or never noticed doing. What the heck is a boundary, anyway? A boundary is an expectation. We decide who hears our secrets, who gets to be inside our house or vehicle, who gets introduced to our friends, who uses our stuff or has access to our passwords, who we would vouch for, lend money, or travel with. In all of these areas, I tend to err on the side of caution. The minimalist way to set boundaries is to count your top five people. By ‘top’ this means you would consider donating an organ to this person, picking them up in the middle of the night if their house burned down, or bailing them out of jail. They’re on your zombie squad. For this small number of people, show up and be your best self. Be the best friend you know how to be. Make sure they know how much they matter to you. With the time that’s left in your day, consider how much of yourself you want to make available to the other seven billion people on the planet. This is bad. THIS is the kind of thing that makes me feel old. Here I am trying to do the splits, and I can barely get my legs in a V. How am I ever supposed to turn a cartwheel at this rate? I’m looking at this book with a bunch of granny ladies grinning while they stretch, elbows on the floor, and feeling like I have barely half their agility. Darn it! I’m reading Even the Stiffest People Can Do the Splits, and right now it feels like I’m going to need a lot more than four weeks.
I’m a pretty bendy person. Other people may have trouble touching their toes, but I can fold over and put my palms on the floor. I can sit down, stretch my legs in front of me, and grab the arches of my feet. No problem! I can reach one hand over my shoulder and the other up my back and clasp my fingers. I can do a headstand and I can spin two hula hoops at once. I like to think of myself as more agile than most. So why is it so hard to do the splits? This is a non-trivial problem, dumb as it may sound. My tight hips are likely behind some chronic problems. My current working hypothesis is that spending a month (or six) stretching and improving my mobility in this area will help to resolve these other issues. If I’m wrong, well, I probably won’t be any worse off, and I’ll be able to do the splits, which is rad. What are these tight hip problems? For one, my glutes on one side or the other will sometimes seize up so much that I start limping. This is bad for someone in her forties, and I imagine it would only get worse with each decade that goes by. I do NOT want to find out what it’s like to have a permanent limp. Next, I sometimes have some pretty fierce plantar fasciitis pain in my heel or the arch of my foot. This is weirdly worse when I’ve been sedentary; it didn’t bother me at all during my months of marathon training, and it’s more likely to flare up after my second rest day in a row. It was worst the first year after I quit my day job, when I basically slept all day. It disappeared after I became obsessed with the hula hoop. Right now it seems to have been reactivated by my martial arts training. A couple of times it’s woken me up in the middle of the night. I was sidelined from running by persistent ankle pain. Two MRIs and six months of physical therapy didn’t really resolve it. Talking to a personal trainer at the gym revealed some insights, and two months of weekly shiatsu massage focusing on my shins finally eliminated the ankle pain. The trainer said it originated in hip instability, and that endurance running tends to lead to weak hip flexors, glutes, quads, and core. True, that feels true. Martial arts training is definitely, visibly building these areas. Hundreds of snap kicks and jump squats will do a lot for your hip flexors, if nothing else! I’m finding, though, that I have a lot of trouble with roundhouse kicks, and that I feel a pinch when I do it at the correct angle that my classmates don’t seem to be experiencing. Even if I get nothing else from working on the splits, it seems obvious that it will help improve my roundhouse kick. I gotta tell you, though, it hurts. I was able to train into the headstand in only two weeks, and that just felt like fun. (Except for the one night when I toppled over, smacked my caboose on the floor, and woke up in the morning with a limp that lasted about three hours). Doing the recommended stretches to work into the splits? Is NOT fun. It’s so sore. Where do tight hips come from? Sitting, I imagine. I spent almost all my time sitting from my teenage years through my early thirties, partly due to my secretarial job. Or driving. I think driving causes more tightness on one side because we’re pressing on the gas pedal and leaning to one side to shift gears. Also we’re wearing seatbelts that cross over one side, and we tend to wear our bags on the same shoulder all the time, weighing one side down more than the other. These are extremely common issues, and they suggest that a lot of people are having some of the same issues that I am. I can also claim years of running and cycling as contributors. As much as I love racking up the miles in my endurance sports, they cause repetitive movement along only one axis. Forward forward forward. I want to do a fifty-mile ultramarathon for my fiftieth birthday, and it makes sense to work on my hip tightness before setting out on that type of training. I’ll be super annoyed if I have to cancel my plans due to a recurrence of the same ankle problem I had before. This is what I think about while I’m sitting on the floor, trying to coax my unwilling muscles to loosen up. Legs, I need more from you! This is where I remind myself that twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I had trouble just getting through the day, and sometimes I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without help. I’ve come a long way! I can’t help but wonder if doing this type of stretching back then would have helped. I sure wish I had, because with twenty years of daily practice anybody could probably do pretty much anything. Isn’t that what physical therapy is, after all? Daily practice, daily practice. My fitness role models are all over sixty years of age, and many are over eighty. This is because I’m very concerned that Old Me should be able to get around, climb stairs, sit on the floor and get up again, and carry things. She deserves to keep her independence. I remind myself that if I live to my eighties, I’ll have fifteen thousand days to get down and stretch. If that isn’t enough time for my muscles and tendons to adapt, maybe by then I can just download my consciousness into a robotic avatar and sign off on the whole project. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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