Spartan Consumption

Ancient Sparta, as envisaged by Lycurgus, is a foreign concept to the modern world. It seems so unnecessarily harsh and draconian, with its emphasis on physical endurance and militarism. But it was also egalitarian – it enforced equality on its citizens (citizens, okay, not helots, perioikoi or mothakes) by means of strict discipline and an emphasis on conspicuous non-consumption.

To be frank, Sparta was a foreign concept to its contemporaries as well. Athens, with its newly fledged democracy, and material society where wealth and power were inextricably linked, found Sparta almost barbaric.

Which begs the question, given that ulitmately Sparta fell and Athens did not, whether materialism is somehow inherent to humans, and whether minimalism is, in fact, possible.

Spartan culture did not place a high value on personal comfort or material riches. If you were powerful, you had land, which was given to you firstly as a citizen, and secondly as a reward for valour in battle – that is, service to the State. The State was the be all and end all, and it ensured everyone had what they needed to survive, but no more. At least, not where anyone could see.

And perhaps that’s what made the whole, ascetic edifice fall – daily bread and black soup, iron bars as currency – the simple fact that what a citizen was officially allowed wasn’t comfortable or tasty. So when, after the defeat of Athens, Spartans were exposed to all these luxuries, they rapidly acquired a taste for a softer life (at least behind closed doors).

But Sparta fell, in the end, not because it enforced egalitarian poverty on all, but because it was too rigidly disciplined to cope with a changing world and the changing views of its own citizens, and Athens survived because it was more flexible.

As much as it’s human to want to be the fittest/ fattest in order to survive, we have and right now, given the state of the global environment, we urgently need, the capacity to rethink the values we place on material wealth as opposed to happiness (an unnatural state, never achieved from the outside in, as we all reluctantly know).

Cash Poor

The distinct difficulty I have as a typically time-poor urbanite is that I am not as cash-rich as the articles tell me I should be every time they flag up yet another way to simplify and save time by delegating or automating parts of my life. I’d love to be able to delegate all the boring bits, but I can’t afford it.

Part of trying to simplify my life is that I’d like to stop wasting money on things that are neither useful nor necessary nor beautiful. I’m doing this in the quite possibly unfounded hope that it will diminish the panic I invariably feel at the end of a contract, before I have another one lined up. (There are times when I hate being freelance).

Most ways to save money seem to involve sacrificing time, and vice versa. This is NOT helping. So are there any simple ways around the problem?

Making my own lunch to take to work isn’t all that time-consuming – as I don’t generally wear make-up (cycling to work renders it pointless), I can afford the 5 minutes. It’s cheaper and simpler than spending ages staring at the shelves in the sandwich shop going “um…” Given the amount of mayo in the average sandwich shop offering, it’s probably healthier too.

A common money-saving tip is to shop around. Timewise, all I can say is thank God for price comparison sites.

I’ve started using a top sheet under my duvet. This may seem completely unnecessary but it means I can launder less often, because I only have to change the sheets on a weekly, not the whole bed. And sheets are a lot less bulky to wash, saving time and money at the laundrette (a major plus given the price rises at my local laundromats).

Of course, the first tip they give you for saving money is Budget: write one and stick to it. Um. And spend exactly how much time tracking my expenditure? I do this as part of my job, so I know how time consuming it can be to do it properly.

But the truth is, if you do it in a spreadsheet program, you don’t need to be an IT or maths genius to set up the formulas. And once those are in, it will pretty much do itself as long as you enter the outgoings. I’ve simplified these so all cash transactions fall under “ATM” and then I don’t need to track every last cappuccino. Then it takes 5 minutes a day, if that, and at the end of the month, all I need to do is clear one column and hey presto – it’s reset itself.

TIME POOR OR TIME COMPLICATED?

There are 24 hours in a day. If I sleep for 8, as per average recommendations, and work for 8, and commute for 30 minutes each way, I then have 24-17=7 hours left in which to do everything else: cook, eat, clean, socialise, relax, shop, exercise… It seems doable. On paper it seems very practical, but the problem is that we cannot consolidate our schedules in practice the way we consolidate them when listing our activities for the day.

We’re used to this – life in the big city has been time-poor and cash rich for many years, according to the lifestyle articles in newspapers and magazines. And while I’ve always been time-poor, I wonder about the extent to which most of us are cash rich. Life in the big city is busy and expensive, and it seems there is nothing we can do about that – to save time, or rather, to free it up for other things, we can buy services from other people to clean, cook, shop, launder, plan – you name it, just about.  The rise of jobs like the VA (Virtual Assistant) was inconceivable even ten years ago – the technology that enables it wasn’t available. We try to cram everything into the 67 hours a week we have spare (this assumes 16 hours of sleep over the weekend and a 5 day/ 40 hour working week. Most of us have a lot less free time than this, which only makes it harder). And the sordid truth is that the less cash you have, the less time you have, because you can’t afford the services that would help free up your time. We’re so busy we’re constantly playing catch up with our own breath. So is there a simple way to free up more time (without cutting back working hours)?

We can cut back on wasted time by making our commute more useful (reading, studying, walking or cycling).

We can try to see friends over lunch – although most of us already use lunch to run errands and eat at our desks

The trouble with all of these options is that they require us to multi-task, and that seems to contradict simplifying. And I have to wonder about the quality of the time and attention each task then gets – after all, one of the things I love so much about biking is that concentration has to be absolute – you can’t split your attention because you will come off. And that hurts.

So multi-tasking aside, what can we do?We can restrict our digital lives to reasonable amounts. What did we do before smart phones and broadband, other than stick to plans and consolidate our correspondence to one chunk of time?

This is what I’m trying to do, and so far it seems to be working out. I’ll keep you posted.

Zen and the Art of Minimalism

Minimalism is often confused, in the Western mind, with Zen Buddhism. I’ve done this myself, so I sought some kind of clarity.

After a few hours of research all over the web, I came up with this: Zen appears to have merged from the meeting of Taoism and Buddhism in China, and thence migrated to Japan.

The principle distinction of Zen from other forms of Buddhism is not about simplicity or minimalism – it’s the idea that there can be a "special transmission outside scriptures, not founded on words or letters" through which nirvana can be reached. So Zen is about means of spiritual enlightenment, not about a lack of material possessions.

Not to say it advocates materialism – few faiths do, because the whole purpose of faith is to lend weight to the non-material, gravitas and importance to the invisible and the intangible. Like all Buddhist paths, it advocates a focus on the spirit and the goal of spiritual transcendence from the physical, material cycle of reincarnations.

Minimalism is a term born out the arts world – it came from movements in the visual arts. So how the heck did the two get so tangled up together?

Japan has always intrgued the western world with its simplicity of execution and of conception – the traditional design of a Japanese house, the traditional menu and the disciplined (deceptive) simplicity of the haiku – these all appear to the west to advocate simplicity, and it’s easier for the west to ignore the fact that the peasants of any culutre tend to live and eat simply because they have no choice or resources to do otherwise.

Buddhists, too, tend to live simply – they are trying to free themselves of the distractions of the material world in order to achieve transcendence, nirvana.

But this is a spiritual choice, and a lifestyle, not an artistic expression. Minimalism has become a catch all term for the idea of simple, clean lines and a Spartan aesthetic. It doesn’t have anything to do with Zen Buddhism, except in cases of popular ignorance.

My subscription to Zen Habits (http://zenhabits.net/) aside, this is not about Zen – I am not seeking nirvana, nor am I a Buddhist. This is about creating a simpler, more disciplined, more Spartan aesthetic for my life in the midst of one of the world’s most complex environments – a sprawling, bustling capital city.