Let’s Make 2022 the Year of Less

Ready to try?

Maybe it was post-acute 2020 syndrome. After the pandemic initially shut down the world, I overcompensated in 2021. I bet I’m not alone. In addition to my usual writing of books, I began acquiring content for a publisher. I started a podcast — no, two podcasts. I found out the USDA was offering to cost-share for high tunnel greenhouses, so I applied. I adopted six chickens and built a predator-proof chicken coop. I started writing more for Medium, and even started a Substack account (though I haven’t done anything with it yet; it’s just sitting there, sending me emails…) Over the summer, I took the family on multiple camping trips, including a week on a boat-accessible-only primitive site deep in the Adirondack Park. My three kids kept my wife and I busy with soccer, piano lessons, karate. My oldest child went to the state championships for Cross Country. (And let me tell you, if you ever want a glimpse of industrial anomie, visit Binghamton, NY.)

While I was busy biting off more than I could chew, so was the rest of the world. In 2021, we consumed so many goods that we severely crimped the supply chain. The big tourist town near where I live had its busiest summer ever. Locals knew not to even venture onto Main Street, lest they never return from the cloying throng of visitors. A lot of people were suffering through the negative economic conditions wrought by the pandemic, but millions had great unemployment benefits and the stimmy in their pockets. Millions had money to burn, and so took those trips and started those home improvement projects and basically just consumed lots and lots of “stuff.” So much so that we caused inflation to spike.

Deep Breath…

I don’t know about you, but I need to slow down.

So this year, I seek the antidote to being over-scheduled and overwrought — I seek to delete. To winnow down. To do less.

This doesn’t mean to be lazy. I’m too compulsive to be lazy even if I tried. Less in this case really means fewer things. Which means more focus and concentration on the things I am doing.

But this isn’t an article on how to “maximize your productivity.” Forget productivity.

The Anthropause (yes that’s a word)

When the pandemic first hit — that is, when it became the zeitgeist and everyone was staying inside, wiping down their mail, figuring the end of the world had finally come — the air quality markedly improved. Many wildlife species benefitted. Industry briefly stopped — or at least came to a near halt. Construction projects shut down. Restaurants and hotels closed their doors. No more freeways choked with traffic from the big sports game, no more people taking willy-nilly trips on jets and cruise liners, using up tons of gallons of fuel just because they wanted the wind in their hair.

There’s even a name for it — the “anthropause.”

We slowed things down, and the environment benefitted. And while the pandemic was unquestionably hard for millions of people, putting stress on families and marriages and children all over the world, some good came of it.

I know we’re not supposed to talk about this, because it somehow undermines the negative experiences people had, but I actually had some exquisite moments during the pandemic. I’m very fortunate, without a doubt, to have gone through Covid-19 with a loving family and healthy children, in a rural area, safe on my little plot of land. But that experience was valid, too. For me, in those early days, setting aside obvious concerns about the pandemic and the health of my family, doing less was bliss.

The Inevitable

But then, gradually at first, things turned back on. Industry cranked up again. People traveled. I traveled. And I started adding things to my list of daily activities. So did you, probably.

We were making up for lost time. Or we just got swept along.

Now, just past the holidays, and as many people predicted, we’re in the midst of another wave. In my small rural county, daily new cases exceed 100. It’s so bad that Public Health has essentially shrugged its shoulders and said, “we give up.” They just don’t have the staff to keep up with all the contact tracing and babysitting people who ought to be in quarantine. It’s the honor system now, basically.

But this is the beginning of phase two of the pandemic, according to Nicholas Christakis, who studies the pandemic at Yale. Phase one, the initial shock of the pandemic and all that early chaos, is finally coming to an end. We have a chance to turn it around. And I’m not just talking about the numbers of cases. If South Africa was any indicator, cases should swiftly abate in the near future. This is about caution, this is about the honor system, but it’s also about doing less.

It’s up to us how we get through this pandemic; it always has been. Just like it’s up to us how we treat the planet. Whether we keep doing and buying stuff at a breakneck pace, shocking an already weakened supply chain, or if we try to practice living with less. I’m not espousing hyper-agency, either; I don’t mean to foist the brunt of the responsibility onto the individual. There are most certainly systemic problems that ought to be addressed and individual sacrifice, even in the most idealized aggregate, is not going to put a dent in the kind of consumption rates we’re staring at for the future.

We need system-wide solutions because we face enormous challenges. In terms of raw steel and concrete (the planet’s most consumed resource), it’s expected the world will build the equivalent of one New York City every month for the next couple of decades. The developing nations of the world want roads, bridges, schools, hospitals — and who’s to blame them?

If the Earth was a Space Ship…

Before the pandemic there were articles coming out about overtourism — a picture of a crowded Mount Everest, with hikers queued up the mountain as far as the eye could see, sparked a greater awareness that we humans are just ruining everything by our bottomless appetites. But travel and tourism is going to continue rebounding as we come out of the pandemic, and will surely surpass even where we were when “overtourism” was first coined. Demand for pretty much everything is expected to grow. Despite the proliferation of electric vehicles, fossil fuels consumption is increasing. Despite all we know about the terrible harms of industrial animal agriculture, meat consumption is expected to grow, rather than shrink, over the next twenty years.

Essentially, if Earth is a spaceship, that cockpit has had some red warning lights flashing for a good thirty or forty years. But instead of addressing those lights and heeding those warnings, we’re pushing the ship up to greater speeds. Now, the whole thing is starting to vibrate and the rivets are coming loose as we collective gnash our teeth and scream into oblivion. AAAIIEE!

So maybe, for 2022 — even if it’s just a gesture — we do less. Those of us who can (and I’m specifically side-eyeing YOU, fellow privileged white man in the Industrial West), we consider our individual selves slightly less all-important. We consider our desires slightly less immediate and pressing.

Can we just have a moment of calm? Of serenity? Can we shut off the endless nagging and bickering of social media? The exploitative infotainment complex turning every bad thing on Earth into an opportunity to sell laundry detergent? Can we take a lesson from that brief, merciful period of time when we had to stop everything, and the planet breathed a sigh of relief — can we try to do that this year?

Before the next pandemic? Or the war with China? Or the final heaving collapse of the biosphere, whichever comes first?

I like to think we can.

Happy 2022, may you be *reasonably* productive with a couple of important things, and enjoy a calm, simple life with less stuff.

— TJ