Unorganization: The Lifestyle Handbook is divided into the following sections:

 

LIFE IN THE 20th AND 21st CENTURIES

 

Introduction

The ladders of organized life

Organized work life is...

Trivial Pursuits

Shift down to gear up

RELAXING

 

On retaining energy

Exercise

Tiredness

Stress management

The beauty of "hozho"

Noise

A plea for solitude

Henpecking

RELATIONSHIPS

 

Friends

On three groups of Men Today

Girls, girls, girls?

Courting/ Romancing

Marriage

SPENDING

 

Conspicuous consumption

Against designer clothing

Possessions

Own not loan affordables

Clever consumption

Overseas travel and unorganized tourism

Just-In-Time Consumption

Saving and Investing

HOUSING

 

Physical versus intellectual property

Absurd Suburbia

Integrated Living Environments

Mort-gages, rent, hotels and motels

Fashion versus Function Flat

Do It Yourself?

LIVING

 

Loafing

Drugs

Smoking

Television

About cinema, film and video-on-demand

SOCIALIZING

 

Pubs, clubs and restaurants

EATING

 

Eating and cooking

Chop chopsticks

ENVIRONMENTAL

 

Chewing Gum

Attacking Packaging

We didn't oughta waste water

Queuing

From automobile to ever-immobile

Let the train take the strain

RELIGION

 

On Religion Today

UNORGANIZED LIFESTYLES

 

 

The Comfort Zone

The Unorganization Quiz: How unorganized are you?

Quiz Answers

Feedback

LIFE IN THE 20th AND 21st CENTURIES

 

 

Introduction

 

I have always believed and said that unorganization is not merely a business theory, but a lifestyle and philosophy in its own right. Unorganization: The Lifestyle Handbook tries to clarify and explain the core underlying values that lead to and drive the development of unorganization. The book is all about the values that I believe in and the way that I live and lead my life. I write it because the manner in which I approach and respond to a certain situation is very often different to that of other people's response to that same situation.

 

Following the kind of lifestyle that I describe in these pages is complementary to but not essential for unorganization. In an uncertain, changing unorganized world, it certainly helps to follow the advice on housing and spending and relationships. Some of the other things- noise, religion, chopsticks- are more my personal opinion and need not necessarily be rigorously followed for you to call yourself unorganized! It is however clear that people endanger their quality of life by persisting with organized lifestyles in the unorganized world.

 

 

Unorganization: The Lifestyle Handbook starts by dissecting the follies of organized life and then starts of explore how to downshift and relax and overcome the noise and tiredness and stress that pervade organized life. Relationships such as friends and partners and marriage are then discussed. The change in spending patterns from conspicuous to clever consumption is then explained. Saving and investing is analyzed, as are housing decisions such as where to live and how to pay for your living accommodation and whether to do decorating yourself. Living issues such as taking drugs and smoking are followed by talk about television and cinema and pubs and clubs and restaurants. Environmental issues such as cars, water and chewing gum are explored, finishing with religion. At the end of the book, you can take a test and answer 20 questions to find out just how unorganized you really are- the extent to which you believe in and practice the unorganization philosophy.

 

 

The ladders of organized life

 

Organized society has set patterns that people are all expected to follow. Organized life is all about socialization and culturalization- people are expected to fit in in certain ways and follow certain paths- not just by relations and friends and teachers and colleagues- but by mere acquaintances and strangers too. Following school, we either get a job or increasingly go to university. Graduates are then all looking for a job with the same old blue chip companies whose reality does not live up to their glossy brochures all falsely claiming that people can realize their full potential as an employee there. Whatever job you do, society and family expects you to find a partner (usually of the opposite sex and same skin color) and then get married and have children. You are expected to move out of home and get a place of your own- usually by getting a mort-gage (loan term loan from a bank). Couples who have not had any children (maybe they can't, don't want to, maybe they don't think the timing is right) are constantly asked when they are going to do so.

 

Organized life is all about ladders. You are expected to get a car, and then a company car, and then a car for your partner and so on. And get a promotion and change job and a bonus and make progress up the carrier ladder. And move from a flat to a house to a semi-detached house to a detached house to three and four bedrooms. As your income increases, so too does your expenditure as you move from house to house. Domestic holidays become overseas holidays and then faraway holidays and then exotic tours and cruises and timeshares and ownership of a second home. And you get your clothes from markets and then high streets and then designer clothes. You acquire more and more better and better things- always looking for another watch, a better watch, a more expensive watch. Consumption ends up all about what you want and aspire to, not what you need.

 

Loss of momentum in personal relationships leads us to constantly feel the need to make "progress" with our partner- get one, stay with one, go on holiday as a pair, get a place together, get engaged, get married, have children. The ladder of organized relationships means that we have to constantly be seen to make "progress" in order to have something to talk about in the relationship and tell other people about- family and friends. So often, the events that society accepts as progress take the form of exchange of possessions like rings and getting a joint bank account or mort-gage. Many of these "initiatives" are taken because they are expected or because the relationship is losing momentum or just simply for something special in organized life's routine to say and talk about.

 

Unorganized life on the other hand is not about following the set expectations of society, which judges you by the superficial yardsticks of the salary you earn, the clothes you wear, the place you live, the car you drive. Maybe we covert these things because they are tangible- they can be measured and compared more easily than intangibles such as "happiness" and "quality of interactions". As we will see throughout this book, people who follow the unorganized life do not covert possessions or designer clothing or high salaries in return for 70 hours of organized work per week. People should not have to accept the notion that if they are single, there must be something wrong with them. People should not bow to family pressure and get married at a certain age so that people can have a good day out and get lots of presents and spend lots of money. The truth behind unorganization is that there is no one best way, and the organized way is rarely the best way in this day and age.

 

There is nothing wrong with following this conventional route if that is what the people following it actually want to achieve and pursue. It is very wrong if people think that it is the ONLY option for them, that they have no other choices. People must not assume unquestioningly that they have to subsume their personal ambitions and beliefs to those of their employer who pays them and therefore finances and provides the rest of their organized lifestyle (or more accurately, straight jacket).

 

What is wrong you may ask in aspiring to have a bigger house or car or nicer clothes? Well, they are usually funded and sourced by being an employee in someone else's company, entailing a commute to work every day. They are the reward for the daily droll that work symbolizes- and the sacrifices it takes to ideals and freedom and preferences- and the tiredness that it induces. So the basis through which such consumption inflation is funded is highly questionable.

 

Instead, in the unorganized world, people and the connections between them matter. That is pretty much the only thing. People should work to fulfill their personal ambitions, whatever they may be and whatever route they may take. Children and relationships matter- providing children with enduring and endearing care that sees them beyond dependence and on to independence is important. Providing enough continuity in a changing world to make sure that children are happy and contented is a valuable challenge.

 

The organized world was about climbing ladders to bigger and better jobs and salaries and cars and houses. The unorganized world is about journeys back and forth and too and fro with the aim of achieving personal potential and discovering self. The reward from those efforts may well be leather seats and leather jackets. But they are a means to an end and a reward for reaching a valuable end rather than simply an end in themselves, pursued despite loss of freedom. In the unorganized world, ladders have become snakes and snakes have become ladders.

 

 

Organized work life is...

 

Organized life consists of getting up in the morning, putting on some smart work clothes such as a suit, getting into your car which might be a sports one. You fight your way into work where you fight to find a parking space after passing a half dozen signs warning that only authorized vehicles may park here. You get out of the car and go through several looked doors into your air-conditioned nauseous office where you are greeted by colleagues who ask you what you did last night whilst your boss asked you what you did yesterday and tells you what to do today. Disjointed voices and various forms of interruption persist until a few short hours have passed and its time for lunch.

 

Hooray! It is lunchtime. Then the mad rush begins as you and everyone else fights to get done all the jobs you have been postponing in the lunch hour that is not even an hour after you have got where you wanted to go and queued to do what you wanted to do. Then its back to the office for a few more hours of legitimized bullying and socializing until its officially time to leave. But everyone stays instead and flicks sly looks and furtive glances at each other until an ungodly hour arrives at which time the office can be left without explicit criticism of not pulling your weight- even if you feel vaguely guilty for leaving anyway.

 

It is then game on and lets get down to the gym where we can engage in more glancing secretly at other people whilst playing out a role that we are not comfortable with that is trivial. The gym is just an office with a different, wider private set of members. The same games are played- the same pretense at working hard, the same posturing and positioning- look at me, I matter, really. Then its back home, crash out, no time for children- they are either postponed for a meaningless career or already in bed- until morning begins again until five days have gone by.

 

Then, it's the weekend. Hooray! Except that the persistent cries of "what are you doing today" just get louder and more frequent. It's who can fill up their time with the coolest, most unusual waste of time that wins the implicit battle of coolest idiot. But its time to visit the family and spend time with people who you have nothing in common with expect the past that is no longer relevant. And you get to spend great winding hours doing nothing and achieving nothing with your partner and pretending that it means something more than the occasional physical fulfillment and a way of filling in the giant cliffs of time that life consists of. Then lets do some Do It Yourself (DIY) and "improve" our home!

 

Organized life is the perpetual search for something novel to do in an environment where nothing and no-one is changing. Organized life is the superficial veneer of perpetual compromise. Abandon it. Abandon the pretense. Gain your independence. Choose lean liberty not fat slavery. Listen to your heart- admit the truth of it. It is true, isn’t it? So change it.

 

 

Trivial Pursuits

 

Life is a constant struggle to avoid boredom. Boredom is the question: "what do I do to occupy the next time space?" Life is long and there are so many minutes in so many hours in so many days in so many weeks in so many months in so many years to fill. Work, hobbies, free-time, relationships, entertainment... everything we do is aimed at filling in time and avoiding boredom.

 

Life in the organized world tends to be boring with every day spent with people of the same nationality, friends from the same town, blasts from the past back to haunt you, the same places, little overseas travel, one job for your entire life, the same trip to work and colleagues day in day out. And it is such a long life for such a repetitive routine.

 

Every now and again, the worrying thought "What next?" passes through my mind. How do I keep the momentum going? I worry about the long length of life and get scared about what someone rightly described as "the incredible lightness of being".

 

Conversation in the bar or pub quickly moves to soccer and types of automobile. Five minutes after the first drink, diminishing information and entertainment returns have set in and it's all downhill from there. I stride the streets at lunchtime to a feeling of slow motion in the movement of others: sluggishness of mind and of body. I arrive at work to hear gossip and henpecking and politics that do not end all day long. This is the social aspect of work.

 

Arthur Miller’s great play Death of a Salesman "grew from images of futility- the cavernous Sunday afternoons polishing the car. Where is that car now? And the chamois cloths carefully washed and put up to dry, where are the chamois cloths?" (MILLER, Plays: One, 1958). That feeling that we fill our time with transient trivia when what we really want is immortality. "Had Willy been unaware of his separation from values that endure he would have died contentedly while polishing his car, probably on a Sunday afternoon with the ball game coming over the radio. But he was agonized by his awareness of being in a false position, so constantly haunted by the hollowness of it all." (MILLER, Plays: One, 1958). Willy became aware of the trivia of organized life as I hope this book will make you aware of it. Willy saw it and committed suicide. Instead, I advocate that we change it and ourselves and make life worth living by pursuing things that interest us and finding a moral dimension.

 

Such trivial pursuits are an inevitable by-product of the inertia and boredom caused by being in the same place every day doing the same tasks. I feel sure that this trivial behavior is caused by a lack of intensity in opportunity, be that opportunity work or non-work activity. When we have a string of tasks to complete or initiatives to carry out or facts to find out, we are pre-occupied and absorbed in pursuing task completion. We are inwardly focused on getting the task in hand done.

 

Our typical response to the boredom is busyness and other trivial pursuits. We cast our eyes and search our minds looking for another task and something else to do to take up our time. When we have little to do, or more likely little of interest to do, the natural tendency for all of us is to look up from our desks and make comments about what others are doing, try to engage others in conversation and other such external activities. We roam around, gossip, eat, fetch endless drinks and postpone doing those jobs that we do have to do. If we have just one job to do that day, we postpone doing it until fifteen minutes before work ends. No wonder people resort to busyness and playing politics- the organized mechanism of doing business simply does not keep us fully occupied and satisfied between the hours between 9 and 5. And eventually the groove deepens, the routine becomes habitual, the senses numb, and we mellow out. And our organizations and institutions actively encourage this. They are looking for just this type of settled person with their stable routine who is going to do loyally serve the corporation for a long time.

 

To overcome trivial pursuits, we need to downstructure organizations. The current practice of assigning company members to certain market sectors or client accounts means that work loads are not distributed fairly or evenly between people and over time. Arbitrary job titles and descriptions must be removed because they cause certain people to have to work all night one night when things are busy and then twiddle their thumbs and pursue trivia at other times (See Unorganization: The Company Handbook on unorgan.com for more information).

 

Those who say that time is more important than money, or that time is the most scarce resource and greatest competitive advantage there is, are probably doing so under the pressures of not being in control of their time. Time is not scarce as long as individuals have control over their own time. Time is only scarce when we are forced to let it get trapped in-between structures like management hierarchies, job titles and so on. Such coercion means that time looks scarce because when we do have freedom from our offices, we only get up to exactly one hour at the same time as everyone else gets their lunch hour. As such, so we have to run around getting all the other necessary and important things done in a short space of time. Time is in fact in abundance, there are at least 12 deployable hours every day of every week.

 

As George Lucas, the filmmaker said, "Dad, you know you’re going to do this morning exactly what you did yesterday morning. And tomorrow you’ll do exactly what you did this morning. I only want to do something once." (POLLOCK, Moonwalking: the life and films of George Lucas).

 

We need to identify and develop our own personal lifestreams that matter to us and interest us. These could be any kind of collecting, researching, mental or physical stimulus. We could very well need to try out and take up some new hobbies. We need to develop our economic and social activities around these interests to stimulate our bodies and brains. (See Unorganization: The Individual Handbook on unorgan.com for more information).

 

Many months ago, I left a very busy and hectic office job and began teleworking. This fairly simple change transformed my life for the better. I now have the discretion to deploy my time as I see fit on whichever of my multiple lifestreams is most active at that moment in time. I don't get stressed battling my way through rush hour to get to work on time or arrive home late at night tired out. My productivity- time spent on business not busyness- has rocketed- I have so much time that I keep writing new books every few weeks! On the whole, we create more when we have more discretionary time, because we can step back from busyness or intense business and see perspective.

 

Avoidance of this state of boredom is why we must refuse to mellow until we absolutely have to, not when we graduate but when we marry and have a family. When we are 30 or older, not in our early twenties. The secret of boredom avoidance is never to let the groove get so deep that you can’t step or climb out of it.

 

We should embrace the unorganized world with its diversity of people, places, projects- because these fill up the time in an interesting way. Meet new people, visit new places, read different books, go to the same place by another route, go to another place. Do something different, and then something else altogether again. We need to welcome the unorganized world and feel relieved not anxious to have it. Everything is changing, but then it needs to.

 

We must overcome fuzzy minds and cultivate fire in our bellies. Take control of your time, and in so doing, take control of your life.

 

 

Shift down to gear up

 

Downshifting can help use in the transition from organized to unorganized lifestyles. Downshifting is the practice of replacing busyness with business.

 

Downshifting is the deliberate act of opting out of conspicuous consumption and possession of possessions which end up possessing you, and rejection of non-job sacrifices such as missing reading the children a story at night because of pursuit of job promotions in the career rat race. However, downshifting is more than simply paring down possessions and throwing away most of the memos that come into our in-trays. This is a preliminary part of the process but downshifting involves additionally sitting back and sorting out what satisfies us personally and how to make a living from it.

 

We are moving from a world in which work predominates our activities to one in which work is play and vice versa. Downshifters eliminate activities undertaken with the primary aim of earning money. Downshifting is recognizing that we work to live and do not live to work, or more accurately, that we should try to earn a living by turning our hobby into our primary income source. I could say turn my Internet site into an Internet business. Having downshifted, people earn income in different ways- from lifestreams not as employees- and spend it on different things too. Shifting down does not mean dropping out and stopping working: it is just doing different work, often but not necessarily in a different place, it is not about doing nothing, but doing something different.

 

Remember money is just a means to an end and not an end in itself. You need enough money to free you to do what you want to do, that’s all. After all, you will not be remembered for how much you earned.

 

Downshifting is something a lot of people are doing independently of one another. It is a deeply personal thing, spurred by different reasons to do different things. But it is also a recognition that increasingly our hopes and dreams are personal and that the universal hierarchy neither understands, caters for nor satisfies these individual desires. Next time you feel over-worked, under-rewarded and under-appreciated, have a think about what else you could do and simplify your life to concentrate on what is important to you personally.

 

You obviously have to have a position to downshift from: sometimes it seems as though people who are down and out want to upshift, and high fliers dream of downshifting: we always want what we haven’t got. ("A [wo]man dreams of leaving but [s]he always stays behind", U2 song lyric). Shift down to gear up.

 

Downshifting is one way of trying to eliminate stress and relax more to overcome the stress, noise and tiredness that are the by-products of organized life.

 

 

RELAXING

 

 

On retaining energy

 

Look at the energy of children: the skipping and the silent singing. They haven’t got a care in the world. Then take a look at the glum faces of adults. Where does all this energy disappear to from childhood to adulthood?

 

Adults are burdened with responsibility and worry because people’s freedoms are suppressed by organized society. Societal pressure and systems ensure that people have to follow the adult conventions such as get a car, get a home- and try to pay for them. We end up traveling between different types of buildings trying to finance other buildings: going to the office in our car to pay for our home.

 

Grown-ups waste their energy by spending it on busyness not business. They spend too much of their efforts getting in a position to get something done, rather than doing that something. They queue, justify and defend. They waste their energies on trivial things such as playing politics and worrying about the wrong things, for example, paying the mort-gage.

 

Adults need to recapture the sheen of youth: not with cosmetics on the outside, but with energy on the inside. We need to find true motion, not just go through the motions. Children glow the most and have the most energy. To be energetic, adults must keep growing and learning too. The best way to create energy is to spend it.

 

If you have got to the stage where getting up in the morning and going to your current job no longer motivates you, but instead you have to drag yourself reluctantly out of bed, then you cannot expect to feel happy and contented.

 

To regain your energy, you must recognize those things that you are currently spending your energy on which are wasteful and then do something about it, such as change job or where you live to get out of the rut. When you get bored somewhere, move on. Variety is the spice of life.

 

The good news is that the best way to feel motivated and energetic is to be discontented yet purposeful. When there is a difference between where you currently are and where you want to be, creative dissonance occurs. We need to know where we want to go and should regularly compare where we are today with where we want to be and take steps to get there. This process means we consider the present and the future and live life for today but without losing sight of tomorrow. "Enjoy the present but take good care of the future, you will spend the rest of your life there". This is constructive discontent- a little stress can be a good thing, when it's not too much. You should harness it to work out how to get where you want to go and use your desire to be there to focus on getting there. Fire in your belly is the best form of stimulant there is. Purpose fuels motivation. Spending your energy doing business not busyness in turn creates more energy. Pursuit in itself will generate the necessary fuel to get you where you want to be. So go for it!

 

 

Exercise

 

Keeping fit is important for short and for long term reasons. In the short term, not having blood and air flowing throughout your whole body from head to toe can cause drowsiness and tiredness. In the long term, this could lead to real health problems- such as not sitting up straight leading to stomach or back problems.

 

In organized life, the car is driven everywhere- even to post a letter at the end of the road- and more and more creature comforts such as food and television are available more and more conveniently- from the sofa. In such a world, exercise often takes the form of going to the sports center or gymnasium with the other adults.

 

I personally believe that ideally exercise is carried out for more than just for the sake of it. For example, many people go to the gym or swim 40 lengths just because they think they ought to, even if they find it boring and repetitive. Instead, it is better to find a healthy sport or activity that you enjoy, that has the ADDED BONUS of enhancing fitness.

 

I play soccer regularly on Sundays and whilst I walk a lot since I do not drive, this is the only real hard breathtaking exercise that I get. I enjoy the legitimate context of having somewhere to go and something to do, playing in a team, winning and doing well, forgetting about everything else that is going on and concentrating on the game, exercising parts of me that would not otherwise be reached and so on. The biggest benefits are the therapy and bliss from decontextualization- the focus solely on the game in hand- and the overwhelming tiredness and aching that is felt at the end of it (and during the middle of it!). It must be good for you if it feels that bad!

 

Exercise is very, very important. Try not to take it for the sake of it- do something you truly enjoy and get something out of.

 

 

Tiredness

 

My whole life revolves around tiredness- I can understand my life from how tired I am. When I am not tired, I create best, which makes me tired. I get up in the morning and all of the things I do just to prepare myself for the day- shower, shave, dress, collect the newspapers, answer my email and post, find some clothes to wear- make me tired before I have even begun to create. (They are transaction costs that need to be navigated before transactions themselves can begin: see the trans: shaping interactions in the unorganized world book on unorgan.com). I try to create answers to the most difficult questions when I am least tired.

 

Daily life is an irresistible downward spiral towards tiredness and then renewal through sleep and then the wait for the onset of tiredness again. I battle to avoid tiredness and sleep to overcome it and cause it by spending energy. That perpetual cycle from not being tired to tiredness and back again.

 

Because I am so tired when I sleep, I do not have memorable dreams. This means that I can lose myself- stop thinking, stop being tired, stop feeling anxious, and all through sleep. I can understand why some people sleep late into the mornings at weekends and whenever they can. Organized life is very, very tiring- from the need to get up to go to the office, often via a peak hour commute, to the work itself, to the frenetics of lunch-time, all take their toll.

 

Sleep is one of the most luxurious activities on this Earth. I am the sort of person who needs eight hours of sleep a night if I am not going to simply wake up the next day still feeling tired- this may be seen as a burden or a gift, depending on your perspective.

 

I used to go to bed early and arise early and get into work and do a couple of hours of my own unorg work before my colleagues arrived. Now that I have taken control of my time and work from home, I tend to go to bed a little later and get up when I wake up. It does excite me to get up and know that there are newspapers and post and emails waiting for me. This is a great world- something new is always happening and there is always a good reason to get up.

 

Tired is an inevitable by-product of any life- organized or unorganized. Fortunately, sleep is the wondrous answer.

 

 

Stress management

 

Alongside tiredness, another feature of the unorganized world is stress. By definition, the unorganized world is full of instability and uncertainty. We could lose our jobs tomorrow. Those many people who are working as freelance talent do not necessarily know where their next work project is coming from. This makes it very difficult to plan for the future- we don’t even know where we will be or what we will be doing.

 

Being in this situation does cause great stress. It can lead to a constant churning in the gut. And whilst uncertainty is a certainty in the unorganized world, there are some ways of reducing it and putting yourself in a situation where you can react to feelings of uncertainty with a positive thought. These (non-spiritual) stress management tools include:

 

Build options and have choices. We need to ensure that we are not reliant on any one income source such as a particular job or employer. That way, if we lose that income source, it is not the end of our world. The need for multiple income options called "lifestreams" is described more fully in the Unorganization: The Individual Handbook book published on unorgan.com.

Saving. Have some savings in the bank. It gives you a positive feeling to know that you have a financial cushion for a few months. Saving gives you options. It is reassuring to know that when your current job expires or you choose to leave, you have some funds to invest in your own venture, take a break or fund whatever you want to do. Money is a tool, a means to pursue ends that you consider important.

Cultivate distractions. There are things in life that almost always let you lose yourself from the present and withdraw into another place. These include playing sports, reading, taking the children out, doing something different and so on. They are valuable in that they let you suspend your problems but are temporary such that you do not deny them indefinitely.

Avoid doing things you don't like. This is my simple and most effective means of reducing extrinsic stress caused by environmental factors such as henpeckers, driving, queuing or whatever else stresses you out. For example, I have now stopped driving in the UK altogether, since the mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Avoid busyness, maximize returns from business. As regards intrinsic stress- the anxiousness I feel because I always worry about my contribution when working for someone, I tend to charge high rates for consultancy since my level of worry is relatively unrelated to the amount I am earning. My fee is hefty, but then my conscience is abundant! High fees tend to compensate me for stress incurred- it is important to charge a fee that is closely associated with the benefits the anxiety level stimulates. That is why the elimination of busyness is so important- all that stress for little or no benefit.

Uncertainty is a constant these days, but the stress it causes can be alleviated, if not ever eliminated. We can react to the uncertainty by loafing around and saying that we can’t plan ahead so we won’t, we’ll live life day by day and take it as it comes. Or we can build in as much security as is possible by saving and building options. I suggest the later, because it is better to live head to wallet than hand to mouth.

 

A little stress is not necessarily a bad thing, and is unavoidable anyway. It focuses the mind and prevents complacency. A small amount of stress stimulates creativity by encouraging individuals to justify themselves and make the most of their situation now, just like the concept of "hozho" advises.

 

A low level of stress can be good, but manage it as best you can, by saving and building options and so on. And remember, chill out before you chill out!

 

 

The beauty of "hozho"

 

The concept of "hozho" is a very useful one for dealing with today’s high level of instability and uncertainty and living life to the full and appreciating one’s situation at any one time.

 

Hozho "refers to a total environment (ho) that includes beauty, harmony, happiness, and everything that is positive. Life for the Navajo [Indians who practice hozho] therefore consists of constantly taking steps to enhance hozho, to live in hozho... Navajo culture is a way of life that requires the individual not merely to create beauty sporadically but to think it, act it, and live in it constantly." (Millennium, MAYBURY-LEWIS, 1992).

 

"Living gracefully requires a determination that the aesthetic not be reduced to a commodity and ourselves to passive consumers of it, as well as a conviction that creativity and imagination are essential to our lives. It requires us to break the vicious cycle of compartmentalisation that obliges us to live and work in a functional world that leaves little room for aesthetic response. It requires us above all to understand that modern society separates: not only life from death, but art from life and all three from meaning. It is up to us to connect." (Millennium, MAYBURY-LEWIS, 1992). This is the move from an organized lifestyle to an unorganized one.

 

In today’s unorganized world, nothing is forever. Hozho can be interpreted as the need to make the most of every event in every day because you do not know how long your current situation is going to last for and where you are going to be in the future. We cannot afford to take anything for granted as everything could change at any minute.

 

Hozho also encourages us to be branders and not rankers. Hozho encourages the exploration and new discoveries that branders seek. Branders create and imagine and turn work into a performance art by being enthusiastic about what they do. Rankers on the other hand respond to increased organizational procedures by accepting them, letting themselves be compartmentalized and mellowing out. Branders realize that people are different and refuse to be categorized and put into a box on or off the organizational chart. The first box that branders get stuck in is a coffin. (See Unorganization: The Individual Handbook on unorgan.com for more details).

 

The beauty of hozho is that it spurs us to accept change and place ourselves in a position to enjoy and make the most of the opportunities it brings. Hello hozho.

 

 

Noise

 

Another by-product of organized life, alongside things like tiredness and stress, is noise. Of course, noise is a natural side effect of human actions like moving, talking and so on. It is a transaction cost- something arising from a transaction that is not an end but a by-product of the pursuit of an end.

 

I am sure that organized society is an uncomfortable environment for many people. They are continuously distracted by activity, by the noise of the people they work and live with and their neighbors. Noise could well be used as a tool of political government to prevent the subjects from hearing themselves think and being relaxed enough to listen to their inner voices of dissatisfaction with routines and the regularity that is the fa'ade of organized life. In certain places in summer, violence increases because all the open windows reduces the separateness of people living in close proximity. Dogs barking, car alarms beeping, it's enough to make you want to scream- silently of course!

 

Noise really stresses me out. I am personally adverse to noise- by which I mean the traditional meaning of noise- sounds. I have been for a long time- nearly 10 years and maybe more. I don’t know exactly what started it- it happened at about the same time as I started to think and study. It is hard to sit back and think and create in a noisy distracting place.

 

My noise aversion has caused discomfort for other people around me who have had to creep around trying not to disturb me. I sometimes disturb them by talking loudly on the phone, pounding on the keyboard, slamming down my phone. I cannot live on a busy road because I do not like the traffic sounds. I often think that I am only truly comfortable living completely on my own.

 

I am sitting here in an empty house and I am tense, because I do not have my earplugs in. Just having my earplugs in relaxes me- their importance is as much psychological as actually effective. I have become dependent on them over the years- it is almost as if I need them to stand any chance of relaxing.

 

It is not just noise that I am scared of, but fear of possible noise. Wait! I can hear a car driving by outside my window. I think the crux of the situation is the lack of control over what if any noises are coming next. I am at the mercy of whoever is within my field of hearing. I listen out for noise that I detest so I take out my earplugs to find out whether it is there. It is the very possibility of noise that torments me.

 

On the other hand, I do not mind some background music- in fact, I find that it frequently increases my productivity- but only as long as I have chosen it and I can stop and start it and adjust the volume as I please. I no longer mind having the window opening- it used to distract me to hear the birds sing- especially those persistent ones that warble repeatedly. Now it acts as a contrary noise that I control which balances out other noises from other places made by other people.

 

One thing that does annoy me is personal stereos. They are often played at a level that is just loud enough for other people to hear. This causes me to strain to try to make out the type of music! This can be distracting in waiting rooms and trains and so. They are also anti-social for users- they are hindering interactions between people. They preclude strangers from asking them for directions and friends from talking to them.

 

I am a believer in people having the ability to restrain and prevent others from making some types of noise. This is micro-intervention in someone else’s life, but the so too is the noise itself. I do not think that this intervention necessarily has to mean someone from say a local council coming in and impounding stereo systems. Too often, people create noise without even thinking of or realizing the adverse effects on the activities of other people. Most people are willing to reduce the noise levels once the problem was been raised to their attention. Ideally the problem can be sorted out voluntarily. Perhaps exit to a quiet enough place is necessary, perhaps with compensation for inconvenience from the noisy person. Forced behavior modification should be a last resort.

 

Noise! Noise! Noise! Modern life is too full of it. We all need spaces where we can relax- beaches and parks, somewhere, anywhere, where when you listen, where you cannot even hear the faint rumble of traffic in the distance. Too rare. And do we know how to cope with such silence anyway?

 

A plea for solitude

 

I want people to leave me alone and stop commenting on what I do and asking me the same questions over and over again: Have you done that yet? Do you know where you are going yet? Why are you watching that?

 

I feel like I am looking over my shoulder all the whole time: I am always on the defensive. I can never relax because I am constantly trying to justify my actions and activities to others: at my parent’s house, at my company’s office. Why should I? Why can’t I just be left alone to get on with doing the things I want to do?

 

I seek the solitude of an empty place, like having the house to myself because everyone else is on holiday and I know that no one else has a key to get in and no-one will be back for a long period of time. That way, I know that there is a whole world going on out there, but I control the way it interfaces with me.

 

Only then can I relax and totally focus on what I want to do, see, watch. No more looking out of the corner of my eye and thinking before doing- no wondering whose principles and spaces I am violating just watching a video in the front room or taking a phone call sitting at someone else’s desk.

 

Solitude is not loneliness. Loneliness is being alone and wishing you were with someone else. When we are lonely, we often for instance act out imaginary conversations in our heads with someone else. Solitude is being content to be alone. You could say be generating content that can later be communicated with someone else. If you are lonely, you tend to be inwardly anxious. With solitude you are inwardly content. Being alone and going home to an empty place and so on is perfectly fine and enjoyable when you have something to do with your time. It is only when you have time to kill that you have time to commit to a relationship.

 

The biggest problem these days is not too much loneliness, it is too little solitude. Judge no one, make no comment. Let me be, please.

 

 

Henpecking

 

Henpecking occurs when someone complains about the way you are doing something or performing some particular task, even though they are not involved or affected. For example, I am often told not to buy a certain compact disc, not to use that type of envelope... don’t do this, don’t do that. One of my former colleagues told me to stop reading so much, start drinking alcohol and "Get a life". In other words, get a life exactly like my colleague's. Henpecking is widely prevalent, particularly amongst spouses, family members and work colleagues.

 

Sometimes it seems to me personally that everything I do is wrong, such that I am constantly walking around on imaginary eggshells trying (with inevitable failure) not to annoy someone. The result is extreme and futile stress arising from having to continuously look over my shoulder all the time and await the inevitable criticism from others.

 

Why do people henpeck others? What makes them think that they have got the right to tell other people what to do and how to live their lives? Of course there is a requirement for compromise where people are proximate to and affected by the actions of others. Compromise means that these interdependent relations can remain mutually beneficial without the actions of one person having overly negative affects on others. Compromise is essential in all close relationships, give and take critical.

 

But whereas compromise is necessary, henpecking is very definitely wrong because the complainer is not directly affected by the other person’s action. Instead, they are just trying to influence others by projecting their own opinion about how something should be done for the sake of it, not to benefit the other person or the completion of the task but just to spite them. They do this out of some shortsighted and misguided view that there is one best way to do something and they invented it. Issuing advice and giving someone their opinion is OK when requested and not repeated.

 

All unrequested interventions in and comments on the safe and independent actions of others is unnecessarily intrusive. The lower the level of the intervention in an individual’s daily life, the larger the infringement on their personal liberty. By this measure, henpecking is one of the most fundamental evasions of individual privacy imaginable. It brings only cost to that individual without conferring any benefits.

 

Do yourself a favor and don’t let anyone domineer you. Don’t let your fiancee try to change who you are and what you do. They are in the wrong, not you. We are in the unorganized world now and we can and should live and let live.

 

 

Henpecking is a by-product of relationships between people- lets now look at some of the main types of relationship- between friends, soulmates and husbands and wives.

 

 

RELATIONSHIPS

Friends

 

Meeting of minds and sharing of place are what starts the friendships off. Respect and enjoyment of each other's company gives the friendship a greater degree of specialness.

 

A good friend is a reliable and consistent friend. The thing about this unorganized day and age is that it is not stable. Hence, retention of old friendships can be a challenge, but also confers a lot of good feeling because of a shared history irrespective of what the differences are now and the changes that will continue in the future.

 

Factors that affect the way a friendship develops include:

 

Personality

People in the friendship have to like and admire the personality of their friend if the friendship is to endure over time. Convenience is an implicit factor that contributes to friendships- friends solve a need to have someone to go out with- who that person actually is of secondary importance to the fact that they can be relied on when the other person wants to go out. But to go beyond convenience, respect and admiration of the friend's personality is important- this is the key factor as to why people get on better with some people than others- the "meeting of minds", the shared enjoyment of the other person's company.

 

Busyness

Apart from diverging lives, the other reason people lose touch is busyness- it is more than enough of a challenge to manage and deal with the various activities that regular life throws up on a daily basis. This is partially laziness and partially disorganization- not systematically keeping in touch, even though we may have a lot in common with those old friends and think about them quite a lot. Writing or picking up the phone and trying to explain and overcome the lengthy silence is difficult.

 

Distance

Distance also matters- proximity is essential for boyfriends and girlfriends but it is important for friendships too. Nurturing rather than neglecting the friendship means having some expectation that making the effort to keep in touch is going to be worth it because it is likely that you are actually going to see that friend in person again at some discernible time in the future.

 

Direction

But as with any relationship, friendships endure over time whilst the direction those involved are taking is convergent. Many of my close friends from university are now pursuing organized lifestyles. We no longer share the same values or goals, and what keeps us in contact, if sporadic, is simply those special times in the past.

 

I tend to lose quite a lot of interest in people who are settled into a routine and whose life is mapped out in front of them in a conventional way. They are not pioneering anything and not therefore able to teach me much new truth, they simply confirm a lot of things that I think I already know and already know I don't like. On the other hand, many of my friends covert the same things- a nice house or a promotion- and are likely to keep in touch and advise each other about these things. They may well be as close as or closer than ever before.

 

 

I personally think that friends do change over time as life moves into different places and stages. My friends from one school changed when I moved school, I made new friends at university, each of my jobs and so on. At each stage, I lost regular contact with most of the people I was at that time in daily contact, retaining only a handful of close friends who I really got on well with and kept in touch regularly with over time. That is not to say that old friends go away never to be seen again- it is just that the relationship, as anything else, is a dynamic thing, and changes in intensity and nature over time- this is a natural process as people move off in different directions.

 

No person is an island, everyone needs some friends at all times. As with everything else, different people need different levels of company at different times. It is important to have at every stage of life some friends who you can call up and you know will not let you down and be reliable. Friendship really is a kind of ship- it changes course sometimes and is sometimes calm and sometimes choppy. It can sink and disappear or diverge and take a different channel. But it remains an important vessel of sanity in the unorganized world.

 

On three groups of Men Today

 

Unusually, I had the opportunity one day in the late 1990s to observe three different groups of men and what they were wearing and how they were behaving. I did no formal work all day long because I felt like a change of scene from teleworking at home. So I got up at 6 am and went up to Birmingham in England for an exhibition on soccer called Match Of The Day. I was in pursuit of Coca-Cola collectibles- indeed, the last time I has been to the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre was for the BBC Big Bash with Coca-Cola- the things you do to develop your lifestreams!

 

Because I was up early and on the train from Newbury to Reading at about seven o’clock in the morning, I got to observe the commuters on the train. These happened to be primarily men, and they were a pretty depressing lot- tan mackintoshes, battered briefcases and shoes, glasses, plain ties clashing with white shirts. And it was not just what they were wearing- it was the weariness and lack of life and inquisitiveness in their eyes and faces. They were on autopilot as they began their daily procedure (yet again). The lack of momentum and the dull thud of routine were palpable. I must admit to asking myself whether I could really hope to turn this group of "rankers" into "branders". (Se Unorganization: The Individual Handbook on unorgan.com for more details). You dream more and believe that you can achieve more if you work from home- because you are less exposed to the unfortunate reality of organized life.

 

I changed trains at Reading to the cross-country express going up to Scotland via Birmingham. By the time we got up past Oxford and towards Coventry, the train had begun to fill with teenage boys- all on their way (like myself!) to the soccer show. These young teenage men were all different but the same. They were mostly thin, they all wore the same sorts of clothes but with a different brand name and in different colors. Baggy trousers were obviously back in at that time, with big pockets at the side, rucksacks were commonplace, caps frequent.

 

And it was not just what the teenage guys were wearing- it was the reservedness and uncertainty in their eyes and faces. They were subdued, and those many standing up due to a lack of seats were casting furtive glances around the carriage. They were not smiling, or even talking, much. It did not look as though they would challenge or trouble anyone. Two girls who had been on the train all the while that I had were visibly the most confident of all the youngsters.

 

And after a wide sweep of the (disappointing) soccer show (very little imagination was used in working out the exhibits), and a visit to my alma mater Birmingham University, I was on the train back to Newbury. That evening, I went out into Newbury to the Chicago Rock Cafe (for a drink, a dance and some ice cream. The best way to avoid the queues is to book a table so that you don’t have to queue at the door- its cheaper that way if you take into account the time you save).

 

There was an upper bar there with a balcony looking down over the dance floor. It was from there that I was able to observe the women and men dancing and standing around drinking on the dance floor. The guys were all in their twenties- young people out to have a good night. Button-down shirts were not tucked in, trousers and not jeans were everywhere, different designer labels were on show- and were usually more subtlety announced than those of the teenagers.

 

And it was not just what they were wearing- it was the open and obvious looks at the women, the awkwardness of the men on the dance floor, the drinking and the posturing whilst drinking. There was a dynamic there- gesturing and activity from the men towards the women- but it was usually spurred primarily by a desire to touch women. The women did not seem to mind the attention much.

 

So, on the one day, I had the chance to see three groups of men: teenagers, young people in their twenties and the thirty and forty year old commuters in their careers up to their necks. Each group had its uniform and its behavioral expectations. And none of the groups of men were very impressive, and none of the groups was very confident. That was the one characteristic that stood out throughout- an uncertainty, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of a dynamic spurred by confidence rather than a desire to hide a lack of it.

 

These were confusing times for men- with girl power and young girls seeming to get all the attention and have all the fun (especially in Japan, where the men work and the women shop and chatter amongst themselves). And all of those magazines like GQ and Loaded were telling men what to wear and how to behave and which grooming products to use. And no one was telling them what to talk to girls about beyond sport and cars and where on Earth they can find some self-confidence. At least men still endure over time in a way that youthfulness rarely unfortunately does, and men can still largely walk the streets on their own at night- at home and away.

 

The only author I know who gets anywhere near to accurately describing the modern male agenda for the twenty-first century is Nick Hornby with Fever Pitch about soccer, High Fidelity about avoiding commitment and About a Boy about families. Read them guys, if you want to.

 

We’ll have to see what happens in the balance of privilege between the sexes- one thing that will certainly be true is that those with self-confidence, not arrogance or timidity, male or female, will do all right- because they will be different. Good luck guys.

 

 

Girls, girls, girls?

 

And what about the girls?

 

On a general macro level, I sincerely believe that women should be treated with respect, promoted to the level of their ability and not ogled if they do not want to be ogled and are not encouraging it by what they are wearing. I find the way that Japanese women are treated- ogled and expected to follow convention and marry before they are 25 and be office girls- deeply offensive. I find the fact that females are often constrained in their freedom to walk the streets and travel alone deeply dissatisfactory. Not being able to walk around on your own without guys hassling you is disgraceful, yet it was still happening around the world in the late twentieth century.

 

In personal relations between women and myself, I am however personally deeply ambivalent and uncertain about women. On the one hand, a pretty women is great to look at when standing in a queue or otherwise killing time. But when you have things to do, then that same women is nearly always a distraction that can prevent concentration on work. Like the majority of men, I like women but I understand them too. I understand why a women wears a short skirt or tight top, in the style that the majority of women adopt these days- after all, I am always telling people to leverage their assets! I do however like the practice in some Middle Eastern countries of women covering themselves up and wearing loose clothes. Lycra is one of the most brilliant inventions of the late twentieth century. You can tell this from the fact that Lycra leggings are still being worn years and years after they first came into fashion, and the fabric has been incorporated into all sorts of other clothing products. But tightly worn clothes can be a real distraction.

 

There is a tendency to get blas' about women- to suffer from option fatigue- a nice woman may pass you by now but that's OK because another one will be along in a minute. And the most certain thing in this life is that deterioration is inevitable. Those women that look good now are unlikely to stay looking that good into the future. I admire the cutting social analysis of Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities. He describes the women at a dinner party as being either "lemon tarts" or "social x-rays". The former are young blonde trophy models and the later being older women who have starved themselves to the extent that they appear to be almost translucent. There is some truth in this, although the majority of older women simply let themselves grow larger over time. Some women are prunes and some are balloons- some are low maintenance because they are naturally beautiful and slim and do not deteriorate as rapidly over time- much of this depends on intrinsic factors such as metabolism and nationality more than it does exercise and other extrinsic factors.

 

People are traveling around a lot and proximity is a pre-requisite for personal relationships. I don't like to be in a position where I can't act upon a positive opportunity. For these reasons, I am not a big fan of monogamy. Women are so nice that monogamy- loyalty to one partner- is very difficult.

 

And so I am watching the women, and watching out for them too.

 

 

Courting/ Romancing

 

Courting a potential partner is obviously essential in getting to know each other better and assessing suitability. It is about getting more information because from imperfect information comes imperfect decisions. The more you know about that person, and the more you can assess that information honestly and truthfully, the better decisions you will be making.

 

I have seen relationships change people very substantially. A friend abandoning his or her friends to spend all their time with their partner is a common occurrence. Football teams collapsing as the boys get more interested in other types of balls. That is the worst thing about close personal relationships- they distort perspective and turn intentions inwards. People become preoccupied with their partner to the exclusion of other people.

 

I myself have had one deep relationship and it is largely this that has made me very skeptical about the whole thing with relationships. I lost all perspective and didn't interpret other people's feelings at all. I was very romantic- cooking meals regularly for my partner (the only time I have had the desire to be bothered to do this) and taking her on the bus a dustbin liner full of about 1,000 flowers! I became very withdrawn and unhappy when I was not with her. I then wasted other opportunities- for example, on holiday, I didn't want to go out because she was not there. I sincerely wish that I could get hold of the romantic love letters I wrote her on a very frequent basis so that I can destroy them all immediately. I am embarrassed to think of some of the rubbish I wrote!

 

Relationships require mutual effort to work. Communication from both parties. Efforts and sacrifices by each. And this could be compounded if there is not physical proximity between the people- in other words, if they live quite far apart from each other such that they have to commute a distance to see each other. I have come around to thinking that even if you find the right person, if they are in the wrong place, then the potential relationship can falter.

 

Once the partners have navigated themselves to be together, the negotiation and compromise begin. Do we watch this film or that or go here or there? What shall we do now? Relationships are so often characterized by inertia, repetitiveness and exclusiveness. Relationships consume a lot of time and energy- maybe that is the secret of them- people living organized lives are looking for someone to share the huge wedges of time that life comprises. It is back to the characteristic of organized life being the search for something novel, for some superficial progress such as going on holiday together and getting a place together. I would certainly say that living with your intended partner before marriage is a good idea since it generates good quality information that helps both parties to ensure that they have made a good decision about trying to spend the rest of the lives as a couple together.

 

I can well understand how some couples click so well and like and respect each other so much that they want to live together and settle down. If the circumstances are convenient and convergent- such that the context and the content of the relationship are right, then settling down could well seem like a sensible and natural thing to do.

 

It is of course a near biological necessity to find a partner of the opposite sex to have children. I adore children and the pleasure that can be derived from watching them progress to independence. Once again, there are disadvantages in the loss of mobility and the necessity to provide a stable standard of living for a couple of decades. I find it good to have children in my near and far family and see the children of friends, rather than having children of my own. That way, I get many of the joys of listening to children's questions and comments and seeing their energy without the loss of mobility and solitude for working. I would like to have some children of my own one day once I have fully pursued my dreams- I don't want to compromise my mobility and perspective too early and then regret not having given it my best shot. Once I have reached a position that I am relatively comfortable with, and found a direction I enjoy following, then I may be willing to settle down with a partner who understands my preoccupations and occupations.

 

In sum, close personal relationships are about compromise, killing time, lack of self-confidence, loss of perspective, choice and freedom. All of the henpecking and disadvantages of enduring our partner's bad habits and compromises are rarely worth the sex we get in return. I find that the advantages of relationships are strongly and soundly outweighed by their disadvantages- what other people fell depends of course on how they and their partner feel and how much time they have to spare.

 

 

Marriage

 

As someone who has already said that relationships go through stages and monogamy is difficult, it follows that I am a skeptic about marriage. Marriage is a costly day out and lots of presents and a religious ceremony leading to an official piece of paper, a ring, a nice holiday, a change in name and an end to allowable interest in other partners. In theory, marriages are meant to be forever "until death us do part", yet in many countries, half of all marriages end in divorce.

 

I simply don't see the point of marriage, beyond the fact that it is what you are expected to do. It could be argued that marriage is an explicit commitment to each other that provides a firm basis for having and raising children. I believe that there are many different contexts in which children can happily and successfully be bought up- marriage only one of them, and increasingly less important at that. Then again, it could also be claimed that since marriages are easy to terminate, they don't mean much anyway.

 

In sum, relationships are about a couple of people voluntarily collaborating. Whether strong personal relationships need to be accessorized by marriage is another matter.

 

Marriage involves much spending and consumption. Consumption patterns are changing from conspicuous consumption in the organized world to clever consumption in the 21st century.

 

 

SPENDING

 

 

Conspicuous consumption

 

My belief is that the modern consumerist society is wasting a lot of economic and environmental resources on unneeded and unnecessary purchases. It is devoid of moral purpose. The advertising industry creates false needs in the minds of consumers, promising fulfillment through consumption. People are susceptible to superficial images in adverts such as empty roads.

 

One television advertisement in particular stands out in my mind as encapsulating the follies of organized society. It was for Kelloggs Special K, a cereal brand. A women says "Does my bum look fat in this outfit?" looking at herself in the mirror. A male voiceover replies something like "She eats so little fat that to me, she always looks great". The shot then cuts to the couple running along an empty sandy beach with a small child in tow. The child is the accessory. Let me just repeat that amazing phrase: "Does my bum look fat in this outfit?"!

 

Conspicuous consumption is the purchase of goods whose cost greatly exceeds the benefit and whose price greatly exceeds both the cost of manufacture and the price of other goods that fulfill the same function. Such conspicuous consumption is undertaken as much to make other people envious as for personal intrinsic need.

 

In Unorganization: The Political Handbook, I argue that punitive levels of indirect taxes should be levied on goods and services that are unnecessary, wasteful, addictive or harmful in the unorganized world. Goods on which a relatively high level of sales taxes would be levied include:

 

Designer clothing: unnecessary and wasteful expenditure. 75% of the purchase price pays for the little (or large) label on the breast.

Automobiles: cars are not as important in the unorganized world where work is carried out primarily from home.

Antiques: unnecessary. The vast majority of relatively less well-off households have few if any antiques.

Perfumes: unnecessary. Toilet water packaged in fancy bottles that makes people smell, often strongly.

Cosmetics: often unnecessary and ineffective.

Sports equipment: the more elite the sport, the more equipment is needed. Sports such as soccer which do NOT require much equipment would be less affected by high sales taxes than the fancy sports such as skiing and golf.

Cigarettes: harmful both to self and to others. Disease-inducing. Foul, disgusting and smelly.

Alcohol: turns idiots into dangerous idiots. Increases the incidence of forced or uncontrolled behavior.

Non-renewable fuels such as coal and petrol. Polluting and scarce.

Home furnishings: the only property worth owning in the unorganized world is intellectual property. Focus and effort expended on physical property and do-it-yourself household goods is busyness and not business.

Conspicuous consumption is often financed by credit and debt, which reduces mobility and stifles true independence. People are dependent upon others to earn the money they have to have to pay for consumer goods. These goods may outwardly be symbols of independence such as mort-gages and car loans, but they are actually creators of dependence. Possessions reduce freedom because such property has to be paid for. People who want to be free should refrain from living beyond their current- and future- needs. Few individuals today are foolish enough to conspicuously consume like they did in the 1980s. People do not know what is just around the corner. In the organized world, you paid your money and you took your choice. In the unorganized world, you pay your money and you take your compromise.

 

Avoid all commitments that increase your dependence on organizations. Commitments include ownership traps such as mort-gages paid with salaries: you will be locked into your company and your home. Reduce the traps in life and thereby reduce the amount of fixed expenditure you need and therefore your reliance on a full-time job. What a person basically needs is a roof over their head, a good pair of shoes, a good coat and a full stomach. And courage and Coca-Cola, and very little else. How much money do you need as long as you can afford your personal luxurious necessities like favorite magazines and newspapers and chocolate?

 

I was offered a company car- and I turned it down. I initially resisted moving out of my family home. Why did I refuse to follow the expected ways of growing up and being independent? Because I did not want to waste my time, money and brain cells on the selection and maintenance of metal, bricks and mortar. I do not want to talk about types of mort-gage, interest rates, business mileage allowances, car tax and insurance and so on. Car specifications, alloy wheels, passenger airbags, the spacious dining room and central heating mean nothing to me.

 

Such trivia are a beating in disguise. Items that are considered on face value or received wisdom to be symbols of independence are in fact tools of domination that constrain the very freedom they were supposed to confer. These details can lead you into debt and negative equity. You end up trapped in and dependent upon a job you do not enjoy trying to pay for the symbols of independence which society and family dictate that you should have. Avoid social stereotypes and peer pressure. Conventional wisdom is so called because if you follow it, it will force you to be conventional.

 

Avoid ownership traps. The things you try to own can end up owning you. Independence is not a car or a house. Freedom is not a possession, a tangible option, a thing. Freedom is the air that surrounds you and the right and ability to run in any direction you please.

 

As the novelist Malcolm Bradbury rightly said, these days, conspicuous consumption is much less important than "inconspicuous unconsumption".

 

 

Against designer clothing

 

Let us take a closer look at one type of conspicuous consumption- designer clothes labels. The quality of the materials and cut certainly does surpass that of lower priced versions of the same garment type. However, the price mark-up greatly exceeds this better quality.

 

In fact, a significant part of the inflated purchase price represents a payment for the garment’s logo alone. I am simply baffled by the apparent success of the "Tommy Hilfiger" brand in the US and now Europe. All the company seems to have done is take out eight page adverts in every publication and blanket marketed themselves. That a brand that paints "HILFIGER" massively across its apparel can grow so big so quickly in the apparently subtle 1990s amazes me. It is enough to make you wonder if the word "brand" was derived from the fact that people are brandished and branded with a brand about their person.

 

Whilst I am a staunch advocate of building a brand and leveraging it through licensing, I cannot support paying a price premium of more than a few per cent for branded goods such as designer clothes. Brands (and the people who purchase them) are made up of the product itself and also its packaging. Inflated brands unevenly concentrate activity and attention on the packaging rather than the product itself, which is often nothing very special.

 

I must admit to a grudging admiration for the way the fashion houses are structured. They have a flagship brand which does the fashion shows and makes the weird clothes that do not sell. They have their high end brands with their flagship stores with the flashy decorations and expensive marble floors to rival the plush head offices of major corporations. With such real estate, these top end exclusive brands must bleed cash but the clever bit is that they act as a loss leader by creating an image and name and getting publicity.

 

Piggy backing on the investment in the flagship brands are off-shoots called diffusion lines aimed at carefully sub-divided more mainstream markets. That’s why Versace has haute couture and then Jeans, mens, jewelry. The fashion houses then license their brand names to watch, sunglasses, perfume, furniture makers and the rest. I mean the CK branded perfumes (again, blanket and blatant advertising) are made by Unilever... the people who make your washing powder. Naturally, this fact isn’t heavily publicized in the literature- not good for the carefully designed imagery!

 

But how is it that the different "independent" designers end up with the same types of clothes each season? How come they all simultaneously rediscover sleeveless jumpers ("tanktops")! I suspect that this "uniform innovation" is a conspiracy to ensure that the buying market is not confused by the choice that would be generated if the creation process was free of collusion. The fashion industry realizes that its customers lack the self-confidence to decide for themselves what they should wear. Other industries have leading companies who set the standards to reduce consumer uncertainty and therefore risk and stimulate volume purchases. But these collaborations are at least in the public domain.

 

Basically, like managers micro-managing and acting like dictators, conspicuous consumption results from people’s lack of self-confidence. When you buy designer goods, you buy (and buy into) a brand image created by product advertising. But so what if the advertising says you are buying not a mere garment but an [organized] lifestyle as well! Never mind that the shape or color often does not suit the fashion victims who wear these designer goods. When people buy a designer brand, they buy a badge that is supposed to signal their worth. The purchasers of designer goods are just hiding behind an image created by someone else because they haven’t the independence and originality to create their own lifestyle.

 

The only people who express who they are by what they wear on the outside are those with little worth displaying on the inside. Like the inflated brands, they too are all front and very little substance. Sometimes I come across people who are simply amoebas- they are spineless, slimy little creatures who are have no discernible morals or principles- they simply are what they wear and this is the only statement they make. You won’t be remembered for your brand of shirt. If you think you will then chances are you won’t be remembered for long. We should certainly not be so shallow as to judge people merely on the basis of a superficial look at the brand name on their clothing.

 

The key to enduring success is have intrinsic worth and value. Style speaks for itself and transcends mere fashion. The bigger you are, the less you have to shout about it.

 

 

Possessions

 

Possessions cost money and weigh you down and thereby hinder mobility- they are transaction costs that hinder transactions. Physical, actual objects can by termed as either tools or possessions- some things we need and some things we want. The tools are the things we need to carry out our business- telephones and laptop computers and optical support wear (glasses) and desk and chair we sit on and so on. The possessions are the things we don't need such as ornaments on the mantelpiece and when we have too many of the same things such that we do not use them much. These ornaments need dusting and the clothes need washing and ironing.

 

Cleaning is one of those unavoidable transaction costs. Dust settles on floors or possessions. A house is to be lived in and not looked at- it is inevitable that things will get dirty and broken and start to look less fresh. Deterioration is inevitable here too. It is distracting and inconvenient to work in an unclean and untidy place, stepping around things. There is some truth to the saying that an untidy desk means an untidy mind. But uncleanliness can simply be a lack of time to tidy up. When there is too little time or inclination to clean, get a specialist in to do the job.

 

What determines whether something is a tool or a mere possession is the usage intensity. How often do you use something? If you don't use it very often then it is a possession- unnecessary- nice to have but not essential. That is why it is spurious to have more pairs of shoes than you can ever wear, more pictures than you can ever look at, more books than you can ever read or refer to. The usage intensity is just too low to warrant purchase and retention of those possessions.

 

Collections are usually simply a conglomeration of related possessions- they take up time and space and cost money. Yet they can be justified as an investment- they can increase in value over time- and if this value is realized, thereby provide financial freedom. If they are on display- at home or in a museum or shop- they can be justified too. And if the value is increasing, they are kept in a safe place or wrapped up and not on display and therefore have a low usage intensity, retention can nonetheless be justified as an investment. The act of collecting them- discovering and securing them- and unwrapping them- and looking at them- can make the cost of purchasing and sharing them well worthwhile.

 

Take a look at the usage intensity of your own things and eliminate those that don't get used much or have any value. Don't hoard things just in case you might use them, instead donate, sell, clean out. Realize any latent value. And the motto for unnecessary presents is: "Pass it on"!

 

 

Own not loan affordables

 

We loan out and get loaned lots of equipment. Yet, loans are very often more trouble than they are worth.

 

A lot of loans are about product placement: getting goods into the hands of decision makers, early adopters of new technologies and anyone who is in a position to demonstrate or recommend a certain product.

 

Loans give us a chance to evaluate several different alternatives rather than committing to purchase one model and then forgetting the rest. This is an advantage of loans- they allow us to try before we buy- for example, I am glad that my employer provided me with a handheld computer since I have never been bothered to learn how to enter the special alphabet. I would never have wanted to discover this barrier to communication at my own monetary expense.

 

Whilst loans can help to understand disadvantages and costs, if you get things on free loan, you never learn their true value and benefits. Loaned products are far more likely to gain visibility if they solve a problem and serve a requirement better than other alternatives, rather than just being accepted because they are free and then left sitting unused and little valued in a cupboard.

 

You probably don't even know how much the loan kit is actually worth and what you would pay for it if it was not on loan and you had to purchase it outright. You don't personalize something that you don't own because you don't know when you are going to have it give it back. You treat the goods less carefully because after all you did not pay for them and you do not own them- or you don't use them for fear of breaking them and having to pay for them.

 

Many loans are reciprocal, in other words, when I loan you something, you loan me something in return. This is the modern equivalent of barter, where two parties to an exchange need to locate goods or services of equal value, that they both want, find each other as suppliers and actually exchange the goods. Where loans are reciprocal, we can either pay for each other's goods or exchange them. I see no reason such an exchange cannot take place- it costs more to manage and track loans than it outright purchases which end the transaction. However, if the goods are new or unfamiliar, then it may well be better to try before you buy. Costs and benefits to be weighed, as with most things in life.

 

Organizing loans is certainly complicated. They have to be logged if there is going to any chance of tracking them and getting the goods back at some dim and distant date in the future. Typically, a loan agreement form needs to be drafted, sent, received, completed, returned, authorization obtained, the goods located and dispatched and so on.

 

No wonder there is no such thing as a short-term loan because loan periods stretch out well past their original return dates. I've still got books loaned to me five years ago by university friends. I loaned compact discs to people back then too, and haven't seen them since. These "invisible" costs should be taken into account in any buy or borrow decision.

 

The great thing about buying something outright is that this brings an end to that transaction there and then. You don't have to remember it, have it in the back of your mind and sort it out later. It is over and you can get on with something more worthwhile. I still feel guilty about having those books.

 

Giving and receiving loan equipment may allow us to avoid spending money. But instead, we need to take account of the visible and invisible costs involved as well as the benefits and write off those loans that we cannot claw back.

 

My view is that those things that we can afford such as telephone numbers, email addresses and even laptop computers should be owned directly by ourselves. These tools are an investment in ourselves. After my first job, I purchased my own personal telephone numbers and email address so that I didn't lose contact with people as I changed jobs and locations. I then purchased my own printers and telephones. Eventually, I bought my own laptop, since although they seem to break down frequently due to bloated software, and was fed up with transferring over old emails received from one machine to another. I then owned all of the essential day-to-day tools that I needed to create content and own a living. This considerably reduced the disruption from changing jobs- handing back all the employer's equipment.

 

There is a difference between trying to own "large ticket items" such as houses and cars and more readily affordable items that can be funded from ongoing earnings such as telephones and printers. It all depends on your income level of course, but the biggest ticket item that I can self-fund was my laptop computer. I advocate and practice ownership and purchase of smaller ticket items and avoidance of ownership of expensive larger ticket items that require money to be borrowed in the ownership attempt.

 

Quite simply, loans of affordable items are often more trouble than they are worth. These days, we may boast more about what we save rather than what we spend, but we should not boast about what we get on loan.

 

 

Clever consumption

 

Despite the problems with conspicuous consumption, it would be impossible to live in today's unorganized world full of competition and innovative entrepreneurs and prolific new product introductions without celebrating the sheer joys that spring forth at ever greater frequency.

 

A few years ago it was difficult to find useful and novel Christmas presents, these days there are all sorts of presents developed for different family members. For example, there are greeting cards for every niche occasion- even for pets, but strangely no valentines cards that are not covered in loving hearts suitable for sending to friends.

 

I like to distinguish between conspicuous consumption and clever consumption. Conspicuous consumption is exemplified by purchases of designer clothing that is non-special items made to look special through nothing more than imagery and a little innovation in fabric quality. Clever consumption is a deliberate and justified celebration of the innovation that the profit motive drives- the creative imaginations that are spurred by the thought of capturing imaginations and delighting consumers. Conspicuous I despise, clever I love.

 

How can anyone find fault with a world that generates innovative, clever products and services such as:

 

"Boots Busy System": the vitamin system (not merely a supplement) designed and developed especially for busy and stressed out people

Vitamina K, the digital phone and service from the Telecel mobile phone network in Portugal aimed at 8 to 15 year olds, with bright colors and buttons that connect to mummy or daddy with a single button press

Muji: the Japanese store that made a brand out of not being a brand, delivering useful, practical and well designed products such as compact disc boxes and business card holders

Crease and wrinkle free shirts that you simply "wash and wear"

Advertising Post-It Notes stuck into magazines that consumers can take out and stick somewhere else to remind them to purchase that product or visit that Internet site!

The Miele Cat and Dog vacuum cleaner with its "Turbobrush" and "Active Air Clean charcoal filter to absorb and eliminate odours"

Ready to eat bacon- pre-cooked and ready to inhale straight out of the packet

The Burger King Whopper with its impeccable balance between cool lettuce and tomato and hot burger

Do It Yourself Law Packs- with everything you need to set up a company in one simple pack!

What a wonderful world! The secret to responsible (and cost-effective) consumption is to see the goods for what they are and what use they are to you- and not merely buy the image without thinking about it. The great products and services worth investing in are, just as with people, those that have a great inner core AND a great outer core: they both look good and are good quality and useful to you. Seek the innovative products that are unique- not merely the same T-shirt you could get for a third of the price were it not for that little (or large) logo on the front.

 

In the organized world, much of what we spent money on was on our external, outward appearance such as the car we drove, the house we lived in and the clothes we wore. In the unorganized world, what is more important is the things we buy to develop our knowledge and communicate with our friends. In the unorganized world, a disproportionate amount of spending goes to goods and services such as:

 

Media: books, magazines, newspapers

Technology and communication: Internet service provider fees, telephone charges for data and voice, laptop computers and modems, Internet site hosting fees, snail mail communications such as postage charges, printer ribbons

International travel: flights, hotels, trains and buses

Preventative medicine: vitamins, Coca-Cola, aspirin/ mild pain relievers

Entertainment: television, music, cable

Luxurious necessities: these are the things in our daily life that are affordable and we like and enjoy, such as a certain newspaper, chocolate bar or food item. We could do without them but the process of purchasing and consuming them is so enjoyable to us that we get real value for money. (My personal luxurious necessities are The Wall Street Journal, Coca-Cola and a bar of Nestle Milky Bar white chocolate).

Practice clever rather than conspicuous consumption, celebrate innovation and enjoy the fruits of hyperspeed and the unorganized world.

 

Overseas travel and unorganized tourism

 

Let us take a closer look at one type of clever consumption.

 

Overseas travel is essential for broadening horizons and perspectives. A year out traveling- before or after university or after working for a couple of years and realizing that work fulfillment is a lie- is a great idea. There is plenty of time to work during life's long stretches. People get to meet other people and see how they live- this helps to gain a sense of perspective. To be local in a global world is deeply dangerous to development. The great thing is that the cost of overseas travel has fallen rapidly and considerably as deregulation in the airline industry has spurred competition.

 

I advocate the deliberate exploration of new countries and regions. I try to get to at least one new sub-continent every year- be that the Gulf States, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Andean region or wherever.

 

 

Whenever you go to a new place, there are organized and unorganized parts to it. The organized areas are the history; the old towns, the institutions, the traditional seats of power. The unorganized parts are the centers of commerce and arts. The organized is the past, the unorganized the future. The organized parts are the buildings and the unorganized parts are the people. For example, in London, there is the organized area of Buckingham Palace, Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square and so on and also the unorganized areas linking Oxford Street to Soho to Covent Garden.

 

It is my contention that it is not enough to understand a place only by visiting its organized areas. You need to catch the spirit of the place by seeing and interacting with the people in the unorganized areas. For this reason, it is of course always good to know local people who know the area and the context and the changes. It is also good to have a hobby such as collecting Coca-Cola which gives you a reason to travel to the suburbs where the big factories lie to provide a wider perspective.

 

Be an unorganized tourist. When it is safe, go beyond the well-trodden paths, you will still be a tourist, but you will also be an adventurer.

 

(See Unorganization: The Travel Dispatches on unorgan.com for a tour around the world and ratings according to how unorganized they are).

 

Just-In-Time Consumption

 

The phrase "Just-In-Time" usually refers to the production model which cuts the time from conception to completion of a task to a minimum by eliminating unnecessary waste. Just-In-Time production conjures up images of virtual supply chain integration where suppliers collaborate with one another through electronic data interchange and extranets. They closely coordinate their production activities so that they are synchronized and complement one another.

 

But in the unorganized world, the concept of Just-In-Time also relates to the other side of the economic coin, consumption. The information age has bought with it an hitherto unprecedented ability for individuals to determine and receive what information they want when they want it. These days we can transact from wherever we are, using, for example, electronic banking.

 

After all, many things which entertain and employ people such as television pictures and documents are just electronic information which can be far more easily time and place shifted than the physical objects of production more prevalent in the industrial age.

 

The increased ability to shift time facilitates an increased ability to share time. I can spend time with the children because I can video a program and watch it later, or just receive the video-on-demand when I want to watch it by ordering it from a big multimedia jukebox in the sky.

 

People now increasingly expect to receive services on demand in real time and are (rightly) impatient when this does not occur. Waiting and queuing are inconvenient annoyances is a world where convenience is king. I want it all and I want it now.

 

Responsiveness in meeting production and consumption demands is everything in the unorganized world. Those who can turn on a dime, Just-In-Time, will earn more than just a dime.

 

 

Saving and Investing

 

Disposable income arrives in our bank account and we have the option of spending it on clever or conspicuous consumption. It is very important, and very difficult, to live within your means and buy within your budget. There is great truth in the statement that it does not matter if you are earning a million if you are spending a million, and there is a tendency for spending to expand to encompass disposable income. Not having any saving is the modern equivalent of living hand to mouth. Chasing the next pay packet, relying on your current job to carry on your current lifestyle.

 

It is important to have enough saving to finance the next few months of life's journey. This confers independence from the current income source and allows people not to have to worry frequently about how they are going to pay for their ongoing comforts. It is reassuring to know that when your current job expires or you choose to leave, you have some savings to invest in your own venture, take a break or fund whatever you want to do. Money is a tool, a means to pursue ends that you consider important.

 

Even if we have very little saving and earn a low wage and have little opportunity to participate in saving programs such as stock options (see below), there are still some easy wins that can be looked at. One form of hidden saving that I like a lot is modern collectibles- start acquiring things that you think will have enduring value over time- Coca-Cola bottles, fast food meal toys, the latest cartoon characters. Some of today's collectibles will be tomorrow's antiques. The value of something like Coca-Cola does not even take that long to realize- as soon as that can or bottle cannot be bought in retail outlets, the value increases several times over. Posting a quick advert on the trademart at cocacola.com or ebay.com and something that costs little can rapidly be worth a lot. It is all about anticipating what people want and looking for bargains and unusual things. You don't have to necessarily invest a lot- just have an open mind and consider the possibility- however amazing it may seem- that some piece of packaging or free gift could be worth something to some collector somewhere.

 

A lot of people find that the best- and often the only- way to save is through deducting the money from their wages before they get paid- through share-ownership and stock option programs and so on. Employer-driven programs such as stock options and share ownership are a very useful way of making some good levels of savings. This is the case because employers typically contribute a sizable proportion of funds to supplement the employee's contributions and these programs often have associated tax breaks (in other words, they are government approved).

 

I myself hold some stock options in a US company I was employed by- they can be translated into shares at a low price in the event of an Initial Public Offering of the company on a stock exchange. This was a significant factor in my decision to join the company. However, the company was also clever to link the number of stock options I received to the amount of time I stayed with the company. (Another trance of options was to be allocated to me shortly AFTER my original contract had ended- inducing to stay with the company if they wanted to offer me a contract extension).

 

Other companies routinely use benefits programs of these kind to lock employees into the company- linking them to time- with the real benefits seen only several years later. People should realize that employer-driven programs are a useful way of building independence and NOT dependence. Employees always need to be weighing the cost of cashing out of the employer-led program versus staying in and accruing more paper gains. It should be remembered that there is always a limit to how much money you actually NEED rather than want- why kill yourself to earn a little money which you do not need if you are managing your consumption and saving in a sensible way.

 

Another form of saving- deferred spending- is pensions. My personal belief regarding pensions is that they are for wimps- by the time I need a pension I will either be a billionaire or dead. I realize that this is a somewhat cavalier approach to planning for the long-term! My advice would be to try and find investments that earn a good return for you, but allow some holdings to be kept in cash funds. Since stock market valuations can often defy underlying fundamentals, and currencies such as the euro and the yen are always (rightly) under threat of attack from speculators, it is important to keep any savings for the long-term in a readily convertible form- such as art or gold.

 

I am personally adverse to stockmarket related investments- because I think that all governments are incompetent and will do something stupid which will have an adverse affect on investment values. It may however be worth investing in specific stocks whose fundamental value has not been fully appreciated by the markets. The lifestyle changes discussed and described in this book do open up opportunities for those who can afford to take a risk and wait to see if they become reality. I like stocks in vitamin companies for example. Global hotel chains also seem poised to do well- it is difficult for a visitor to have enough knowledge to pre-select a cheaper or more suitable place to stay. If someone could set up a permanent "house sharing" type scheme such as that run during events such as the Olympics, mediated through the Internet, then that could cut out the hotels who trade on visitor ignorance to charge inflated prices. Lots of similar investments could be considered.

 

It is easy to live life on a day by day basis and find things to spend your money on now. It takes discipline to deliberately save, but never forget the magic of compound interest: the fact that even a small sum well invested such as in a performing stock and held for a long time, often leads to large returns over time.

 

Traditionally, people's biggest "investment" has been in physical property often financed through a mort-gage. But in the unorganized world, investment intellectual property will become much more important.

 

 

HOUSING

 

 

Physical versus intellectual property

 

In the 20th century, a lot of rich people made their fortunes from property- speculation and development. This will not be the case in the 21st century, where Internet-driven businesses will thrive. Physical property is a means to an end and not an end in itself. In the unorganized world, the only property that matters is intellectual property, the only matter that matters is brain matter.

 

Most people who invest in physical property principally as a place to live and are not in the real estate business will not make substantial financial gains from having a mort-gage and trying to own a property. Remember that property ownership is a myth- a mort-gage simply represents an attempt to own physical property- in other words, debt.

 

Whatever the advantages of owning a home that you really feel comfortable in, these are outweighed by the costs. These range from the loss of mobility due to keeping up with the repayments (property ownership loans are not called mort-gages for nothing) and the internal rather than external focus (on decorating and so on).

 

I very much doubt that I will own property in the next couple of decades- I am reluctant to do so- Mahatma Ghandi never did during his entire life- he recognized the value of profound simplicity, inner spirituality and retention of mobility.

 

At life's end, you will not be remembered for where you live. After all, you don’t know where I am writing this from, and it doesn’t matter. If you have the location and environment you need to work in at an affordable price, then that’s sufficient.

 

Nowadays, physical property is only a means to an end. Pursuit, acquisition and distillation of intellectual property is the priority in the unorganized world of the 21st century. Reality is not a realtor.

 

We have to live somewhere. So where should we live?

 

 

Absurd Suburbia

 

In Great Britain the government-owned television broadcasting company the BBC cut The Simpsons from its Saturday prime-time slot of six o’clock in the evening after just a two or three week run in early 1997. The middle classes evidently couldn’t relate to everyday life in a modern family. Not only that but they replaced it with a program called Dads Army set in the Second World War in which a squad of soldiers prepare for nazi attack. So what if the show is a comedy and the context is the war whilst the central stories revolve around relationships between the characters. Most of the actors are long since dead now anyway. That such a show with its particularly racist and nationalistic theme tune and opening credits (flags just everywhere) gets the prime time BBC channel slot for weekend tea-time family viewing strikes right at the heart of the gulf between the old organized and new unorganized worlds.

 

"The white South of England middle-class Englishman and women is the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world... Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor... Americans and Australians have something they can sit in the pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze hard when they feel like it, but we have nothing, or at least nothing we want." (NICK HORNBY, FEVER PITCH, 1992).

 

Suburbia is just so nice, so safe, so familiar. There is just a feeling that nothing ever happens there of any consequence. Those in the cities long to escape to the countryside, meanwhile those in suburbia need to discover the pace and race of urban life. Suburbia is the place to move to when you want to have a family and need to get a mort-gage, not a place to make your mark in. Only where there is texture is there creation. The familiar by definition is not full of unknowns that provoke new thoughts and solutions. Unorganized is more about riding across the rough snow when snowboarding than skiing across the smooth snow plains into oblivion.

 

But, just as we need stable land-based property, we also need a quiet place to gather our thoughts. We must cultivate that wonderful learning cycle of input from the fast city, process in the suburbs and output back in the fast city. We must not neglect the chance to go somewhere, anywhere, to think. To Discovery Bay when in Hong Kong, when too much of either the city or the beach would drive you out of your mind. It is nice to arrive back in safe, known suburbia from unknown and potentially dangerous places overseas.

 

Of course, even those people who are as comfortable and rounded as suburbia itself are subject to unforeseen shocks. Let us just hope they are prepared for these rude awakenings. Enjoy suburbia, but don’t let it dull and lull you into a false sense of security. Suburbia is absurd- okay to come back to, but don’t forget to leave in the first place.

 

Whether living in a city or a suburb, location and environment are important factors.

 

 

Integrated Living Environments

 

I am a great believer in integrated living environments- in other words, living, working, studying, entertaining facilities are located in such a way that people can easily travel around without recourse to the automobile. I like these kinds of environments where everything is readily accessible and you do not have to get into a car to get to where you are going. Everything you need for everyday life is right there. I like pedestrianized streets that combine offices with flats where people live with shops with schools and play areas all in harmony with each other as part of the same street and community and all within easy walking distance of each other.

 

I am not therefore a believer in out of town shopping developments and suburbanization. I am a city dweller myself- the sort of person who would feel uncomfortable living in the countryside where you have to get in the car and drive to the nearest shop. I simply do not ascribe a high priority to organizing my shopping and therefore often run out of essentials periodically- the secret of a happy life is after all about setting the right priorities. Having a shop around the corner means that I don't have to worry about this. I expect to see rejuvenated town centers in the 21st century through pedestrianization, cafe society, street theater and so on- with a lot of businesses that vacated the town centers for the shopping malls coming back.

 

Integrated living environments put the people first- the amenities and services are built to support the people's requirements. Dispersed living environments on the other hand force the person to navigate their way to use those services, and exclude those people who can't or won't comply with outmoded organized practices such as car ownership. Let us build a world in which all of life's activities overlap a little.

 

 

Mort-gages, rent, hotels and motels

 

So how should we pay for our place of living? When you move out of your family home, there are several options about where to go and live. Let us take a systematic look at these options and their advantages and disadvantages.

 

The decision about where to live assumes of course that the reader has the luxury of being in a position to choose whether to move out from their parents or not. In areas with high property prices (such as Hong Kong), young people have no choice but to carry on living with their parents, sometimes even after getting married.

 

There is really nothing as cheap as living at home, as typically you are sharing the fixed costs of property tax, heating and eating with your parents- who usually bear the brunt of this expenditure. Offspring chip in a little towards rent and move out despite the higher costs because they want greater privacy and freedom and/ or because their parents have had enough of them living with them.

 

When the time comes to move out, you could get a mort-gage: a long-term loan to buy a property, typically over a 20 year period. It is almost impossible to imagine what you will be doing in 20 years time. Not only that but mort-gages introduce a fixed monthly payment obligation which necessitates that you have an income-generating job. Continuous employment is not always possible or desirable in today’s unorganized job market. How bad having a mort-gage is often depends on the supply and demand of properties and finance in the housing market. Try to buy at the wrong time, when prices are high, and if they subsequently fall, you could end up in "negative equity" with the mortgage to pay off a far greater sum than the current market value of the property.

 

People who already have a mort-gage could rent out their property to cover the mort-gage payments and make some money over and above that, but they still have to find -and pay for- another place to live. Mort-gages may be a good choice when you are settled and married and planning a family.

 

Alternatively when you get your own place, you could rent. This entails making a regular rent payment which is higher than the equivalent mort-gage payment for a similar property. But the higher cost is worth the greater flexibility and mobility that renting a property confers. Some people see renting as dead money because it is not an investment: when you leave, you don’t recoup any of the rent outlay. But in these days of intellectual property, rent money is just a means to a roof over your head, and better dead money than dead person locked into some place. And if you rent, you are unlikely to be distracted by Do It Yourself decorating.

 

The problem with renting is the minimum commitment to a rental period is typically six months. As with mort-gages, you have to also pay fixed costs such as lighting and heating and property taxes. This soon makes the total cost of renting very high.

 

So what else could you do? You could share with a friend- move in with someone else to share the cost burden and divide the fixed costs of a certain space between more people. Having the income and the company often outweighs the loss of privacy and capacity. Often, sharing is the only option anyway if you want to live in high rent areas.

 

You could alternatively live in a hotel. This would mean paying just a fixed nightly fee with no minimum length of stay and also no fixed fees to pay- all hot water and lights and property taxes are included in the nightly fee. There is no responsibility for any problems with the plumbing and heating.

 

The problem with hotels is that the nightly fee is typically higher than most people can afford for any more than a couple of weeks a year. Hotels are priced for the business market. Employees put the cost on expenses or it is billed directly back to the company so that they don’t even see the high cost of their hotel stays.

 

The fourth kind of place you could live in is in a motel or bed and breakfast. This is the low end of the hotel market offering fewer facilities than you get in hotels. As with hotels, you avoid all the fixed charges and minimum stay periods.

 

Many people claim to need to buy or rent a place they can call their own, a base that they can decorate and furnish and retreat to for privacy and relaxation of an evening. Hotels and motels are just too impersonal. You need a place to store your stuff- your possessions and other accumulated belongings. However, having pared down rather than hoarded possessions, you may not have too many things that are unnecessary. And if you don’t have much, chances are you can store it at your parent’s place. They’re probably glad enough to get rid of you and therefore happy to keep some of your stuff for a little while! This is a fair point, but time, money and energy is not necessarily best spent narrowly focused on your physical property.

 

But let's not be too theoretical about moving out. Different people want different things- the location and situation of where they live varies- some want solitude, some bustle, some countryside, others town life. You need your own place for more than just storage, it is also necessary to have a quiet place to retreat to and think and relax and work. I certainly benefit from having a place where I can write my unorganization content. It is easier to have an on-going place to live that you know you are welcome at and can get a room in. It's not worth the hassle spending your time looking around for somewhere to sleep every few days. The amount of money that accommodation costs is not the only factor involved, especially if you can afford your own place.

 

In sum, different people need different places at different times. Always remember that physical property is just a means to an end.

 

Fashion versus Function Flat

 

I was looking for a place to rent and viewed a couple of flats. Both properties were close to a town center, both unfurnished and costing around about the same monthly cost. Both were above shops. But, they were also very different structurally- one was a Fashion Flat and the other a Function Flat.

 

Both flats were located in an integrated living environment. I am just a few yards walk away from the shops and my family and pubs and restaurants and so on. Everyone and everything I need for everyday life is conveniently accessible.

 

The Fashion Flat was a brand new place above a hairdresser’s shop on a side street from the town high street. The Fashion Flat had a narrow, winding staircase and some wooden beams in the bedroom. It was on two floors and had some steps leading up to the front door with a patio. And although the Fashion Flat is small and the ceilings are sloped and it is not open plan, I really liked it.

 

The Function Flat was just around the corner on the main street itself above a newsagents. There were two other flats next door on the same landing- one of the doors was open and it looked as though a business was being run from there. The Function Flat was much larger than the Fashion Flat, but on one floor. It stretched from a room overlooking the high street to other rooms down between shops and offices, with an inadequate kitchen and bathroom. It had high ceilings, a pantry and a door that the letting agent did not have a key to.

 

The Fashion Flat was the sort of place that you would be happy to show people around and invite them to. The Function Flat could be made comfortable with a lot of furniture. There was something about it that made it more suitable as an office than as a home. The Fashion Flat was on a one-way side street and every few minutes a car drove down which I could hear. You could set up one of the rooms further back in the Function Flat and use it as a study and be oblivious to the traffic on the high street just a few yards away.

 

And you know something- I chose the Fashion Flat. It was the imagined entertaining that I was doing in it- despite the fact that for most of the time I would be on my own working in the place. I get a good feeling every time I walk past the flat or up the stairs and look through the windows. Costs and benefits- the levels differ for each option. In this case, I went for fashion rather than function.

 

Let me just mention the follies of "feng shui", the Chinese art of optimal placement. Apparently, how and where you put your possessions can cause good or bad luck. You are supposed to have fish tanks and other calming influences placed around the place and the location of buildings compared with the elements like water and sun really matters. Feng shui is actually a systematic assessment of a place compared with the less rational method of gut feel about a place which I relied on when choosing the Fashion Flat in preference to the Function Flat. But I am not a great believer in the factors that feng shui uses- my greater concerns are for a lack of clutter which inspires a feeling of calmness in itself. I am more concerned about things like noise than the elements.

 

Six months after moving in, and I really feel at home in my Fashion Flat. It turned out to be pretty functional after all. It is amazing how close you can be to a busy main street and yet still have a quiet living environment. Few cars or pedestrians walk down the side street at all. The new year's celebrations can be going on and I am just 50 meters away and yet my street is deserted. I have the convenience of proximity to shops, yet the peace of suburbia. Whilst I am living in this town, I hope to stay here. I even went so far as to commission my favorite artist, Susi (see www.ArtBySusi.com), to create a drawing of my Fashion Flat.

 

It even crossed my mind that I would not mind owning the Fashion Flat, even though it is not for sale. It would be good to know that is there in my home town when I get back from traveling. I could even rent it out and make some money out of it. So I do grudgingly and reluctantly admit that there are some advantages to owning your own place- but the costs to take that option, the loss of mobility that derives from the need to get a mort-gage, far outweighs the advantage of having a place of my own. After all, if I get the mort-gage, chances are I won't be able to afford the travel as well anyway.

 

Once you have found a place to rent in an integrated living environment, the question of how to decorate the place and whether to get experts in or Do It Yourself arises.

 

 

Do It Yourself?

 

There was a big boom in Do It Yourself (DIY) in the late 1990s in Britain- as more and more people sought to improve their homes. There were all these television programs and magazines on home improvement explaining and showing how people can do all these things to brighten up their house. Meanwhile, the government embarked upon a series of advertisements to help people carry out DIY safely- warning against certain activities that could cause injuries.

 

DIY is all about people filling in giant chunks of time doing jobs working on projects that are a challenge and with visible outcomes at the end of it. DIY projects are something to talk about and show people- something they often notice and comment about.

 

As with so many other tasks in life, home decorating is a choice between Doing It Yourself or getting in an expert to do it for you. Clearly DIY is cheaper in terms of actual costs incurred because the labor costs often outweigh the costs of the materials themselves. However, DIY enthusiasts do tend to have to pay more for tools than the experts who already have most of the tools they need to get the job done. But when you take into account the opportunity cost; the time spent on DIY decorating that could have been spent developing the lifestreams that people specialize in and earn a living from, then the decision to do it yourself should begin to look like "false economy". This is especially true if the results are sub-standard at the end of the redecoration, due to non-expertise.

 

Doing It Yourself may be simpler, because you are not reliant upon anyone else to get the job of decorating done. However, of course, you do rely on your own personal skills (and tools) which may be lacking. Unorganization advocates independence and self-sufficiency, but certainly not to the extent that people do not consult and work with other people who can carry out the job more professionally.

 

My parents run a kitchen business, and half the challenge in a successful kitchen project is the design and placement of the units and the actual fitting itself. You can have an expensive kitchen with high quality units and appliances- but if it is designed or fitted badly, then its false economy again. My parents do not do it all himself- he sub-contracts all of the services to experts in tiling, fitting, plumbing and so on. The important thing is that he offers a complete service to the customer. Business partnerships allow him to offer an exquisitely professional turnkey complete kitchen solution. This high level of service which would not be possible if my parents did everything themselves, because of his lack of time and ability.

 

We are seeing increasing specialization in business contexts too- as companies and people identify what their "core competences" are- what they do best, and ruthlessly focus on them, partnering and outsourcing all the rest. There will be little value in being a jack of all trades and master of none in the twenty-first century.

 

Do you think someone is going to write on your tombstone- "In life, Mary spent a month decorating the bathroom in yellow"? This may happen if you are a specialist and decorating is a lifestream of yours. Increasingly, you are better off using the services of a specialist who has carried out the task a hundred or more times than going through the full learning curve yourself.

 

If you are going to do it yourself, make sure you can do it properly. Else hire someone who can.

 

LIVING

Lets take a look at the what people do in their houses and how they behave.

 

Loafing

 

There is a mode of organized life that I call sofa life lived by a group of people I call loafers that is bereft of moral purpose and oriented merely to maximizing their amusement today whilst expending minimum effort.

 

Fat Slavery (organized life with its government welfare programs and large hierarchical employers) supports two main modes of lifestyles- frenetic pursuit of worthless postures in a corporate environment and complete vegetation in home environments. Sometimes, the same people carry out these two modes at different times as part of their organized lives. They could, for example, be frenetic during the week and vegetative at weekends. The tendency is however for the different modes to be carried out by different people in the same society at the same time.

 

The loafers living the sofa life are never concerned with asking themselves the question "What business do I want to achieve/ what have I actually achieved today?". Instead, they ask themselves "What amusement can I create to make myself happy today whilst expending the least amount of effort and money, preferably whilst never leaving the sofa?"

 

It is trivial pursuits- the anchorless pursuit of no higher goal than filling in the long hours of the day looking out of the window, smoking, doing the crossword, watching the television, playing on the games machine, watching videos, making telephone calls- all the while, laying down or lounging around on the sofa. Getting up off the couch just takes too much energy and money- so the pre-requisite is that the amusement comes to the loafer on the sofa.

The loafers who live their lives on the sofa are not even people who do not work- they are not living off government wealth redistribution programs such as unemployment benefit. They have jobs that they do not like and are not committed to. They are using income from their job to finance day-to-day life with no other purpose than to continue tomorrow what they are doing today. The loafers do want to improve their lot- their ambition extends to finding ways to do less and get more- and thereby maximize their opportunities to spend time vegetating on the sofa.

You may say that these loafers living their sofa lives are one step up from the unemployed. But there may well be unemployed people that genuinely want to work and would work hard and smart and be committed, if only a job opportunity would arise. Loafers on the other land just don’t care- their philosophy is do as little as possible and get as much back. They want to earn enough to finance the cable subscription and pay the rent month-by-month.

 

It could be argued that we should leave the loafers living their sofa lives alone- they are not harming anyone- they are not helping anyone or achieving anything but that is their (passive) decision, their inclination. And I would have to reluctantly agree with that- no-one can make someone realize their full potential if they are not willing to. There is little that can be done about those living the sofa life. It is very difficult to change such a person’s attitude.

The loafers are actually not as stupid as they may appear. After all, their contemporaries in organized life, the frenetic posturers, are busting a gut to earn someone else a profit for pitiful reward to be spent on superficial conspicuous consumption. Their work is usually no more important than that of the loafers- they just have different levels of commitment to their pointless jobs. The frenetic posturers living their organized lives refuse to be honest with themselves and mentally acknowledge the ridiculously high costs and low benefits associated with their activities. Loafers set their targets so low and so selfishly that few if any other people ever benefit from their existence and life on this planet.

 

The loafers are actually continuously implementing a crude form of implicit cost-benefit analysis- they are always sensibly trying to get the most return for the least effort. The problem is the only return the loafers strive for is personal amusement- they are not interested in helping anyone else or really doing anything proactively. Their business extends merely to the consumption of entertainment- they could sit on that same sofa and create new truths- but all they want is to be passive and entertained.

 

Neither mode of organized life- loafers on sofas nor frenetic posturers, are lifestyles that are in tune with the Fat Liberty that will characterize the twenty-first century. Here, you work hard and play hard, often simultaneously. "Revolution is not a dinner party"- true fulfilment from life is directly related to the commitments you make and what you invest in it. Don’t be a loafer on a sofa.

 

 

Drugs

 

Loafers are quite happy to sit on the sofa and light up a joint- some "soft" drugs. Anything to relax man so that the TV remote control can become their magic wand rather than their feet or their brains.

 

And it is not only loafers who are susceptible and amenable to taking drugs- in fact, an increasing proportion of young people- and others- are too. I recently heard a story about a dozen teenage girls at a private fee-paying school who were expelled because they were smoking soft drugs- cannabis. One of the girls suffered ill effects from this experiment and they all voluntarily admitted their behavior to the school authorities. Let us think about this for a second: $15,000 dollars per year fee income per pupil lost as a new headmistress protects the long-term reputation of her school. These pupils were "permanently excluded" (in the modern parlance of the nanny state) just two or three months before taking some important examinations.

 

Someone told me about someone who had gone to a police station in Britain and confessed to smoking soft drugs. Before he knew it, a police team had descended on his house and searched it from top to bottom! Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut- at the taxpayer’s expense of course.

 

These stories vividly illustrates the gaping gulf between the attitudes of young people about the recreational use of soft drugs and the attitudes of the teaching and political establishment. The young people probably didn’t even realize that they were committing so serious an offense in the eyes of the authorities and never expected to be punished so severely when they owned up.

 

Let me state categorically that I detest the use of drugs- soft, hard or otherwise. I think that hard drugs should be outright illegal- without exception- because more often than not, the person taking them loses control and endangers other people. I believe that if you haven’t got naturally occurring energy, stay at home and go to bed.

 

I remember looking at people on soft drugs at university and seeing their incoherence and lack of control and thinking how stupid they were. I have never and will never take drugs- soft or hard and I strongly advise you not to either.

 

 

Smoking

 

I also detest nicotine. I have never had even a single drag of a cigarette. I cannot see why anyone would want to put a firework into their mouth.

 

The problem is that people start to smoke for lifestyle reasons- as children because of peer pressure, or young women because they think it helps keep them slim. Then when they want to give up, they are already addicted to the nicotine.

 

When I travel to places like France and Eastern Europe and China, I see high proportions of the people smoking. Even where the percentage of people who smoke is relatively low, it is still much too high.

 

I think that access to tobacco should be severely restricted through measures such as:

 

bans on all kinds of tobacco advertising

a minimum age for smoking of at least 18 years old

very hefty sales tax levied on each packet of cigarettes

restricted distribution. I remember seeing cigarette vending machines nailed to the wall on nearly every residential street in Germany. This should not be allowed.

I really dislike the great distance that the smoke from cigarettes travels. Sometimes people smoke on the street below my house and the fumes invade my living space through windows and doors. I immediately know when they light up. There is nothing passive about the affects of passive smoking. People who passively breathe in other people's smoke have no choice: they are forced to do so because of the smoke's pervasiveness. When you go to a bar, you end up smelling like a bonfire- you can only wear clothes once because they need to be fumigated.

 

As such, my attitudes towards passive smoking are very Californian- I think it should be banned in public places. In the USA, where smokers are judged to on par with people who don't have a car- in other words, social deviants- is useful. People exert an influence over others- this is a form of market-based social accountability. Whether this peer pressure is used negatively to start people smoking, or positively, to discourage them, depends on the influencing people's attitudes.

 

My hardline views against hard and soft drugs and nicotine often surprises my libertarian friends- such freedom-of-choice philosophies advocate that people be able to go to hell if they choose to do so.

 

Every time you smoke, a portion of your life goes up in smoke. Don't.

 

Now lets get back to those loafers on their sofas and find out what they are watching on their televisions- which some people also consider to be a drug.

 

 

Television

 

Have you noticed how television is often children's best friend? They sit transfixed looking at the flickering images on the screen. They can learn a lot from some of the programs but it does annoy me when they won't allow anyone to talk during their favorite cartoon shows!

 

In the days when I was noise-adverse, I used to never watch television. I did not have a television of my own until I was 24 years old. Since then, I have either had music or television in the background to raise my energy levels and make the time go faster by dividing it into segments of half hour slots or features. I prefer music, whose content is more controllable and predictable, and therefore less distracting.

 

The quality of television programming is low- much of what gets shown is rubbish- it has a low information intensity- units of valuable information communicated per time period- or is simply repeats or old films from a few years ago that have finally reached terrestrial television. And all those bad news days, when the same news dominates for weeks on end. There is a lot of time and channels to fill- after all, time is NOT scarce!

 

I could very easily live without television. I would only miss very few shows- such as Only Fools and Horses, The Simpsons, James Bond films, Football Focus, Morse and the like. And I could get these on video and simply watch them without all the nonsense inbetween. I don't watch science fiction programs- because I believe that we have enough to worry about and contend with and achieve with reality. Maybe these programs are invented for people to escape the reality of their organized lives.

 

I do watch some soap operas since I find that my familiarity with the characters and the plot means that the entry barriers are low and I have to concentrate less to enjoy them. Of course, soap operas are driven by everything that makes for bad relationships- incestuousness- everyone sleeping with everyone else- lack of communication, misunderstanding and repeated adversity, with the same person or family regularly hit by another disaster. A soap opera is an example of pure transaction costs- all of the storylines are based on people getting together, falling out, not communicating, communicating too much, having accidents and so on. I prefer the Australian soaps in which a particular storyline never lasts for more than a couple of episodes to the British soaps in which one storyline can drag out for months on end.

 

On one July night, prime-time television in Britain comprised EastEnders, a soap opera, followed by Animal Hospital, a program about ill animals being cared for by a charity called the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals), then Crimewatch, a program about crimes and then the News. The soap was of the genre described above.

 

Let me simply say about Animal Hospital that the RSPCC (Children) is much more important to me than RSPCA (Animals). In a world where resources are limited and not every "good cause" can be supported, animals come low down on my list of priorities. I find pets to be unclean and constrainers of mobility. When I was very young, we had a dog that died and it took with it "to the seaside" my favorite teddy bear. Maybe it is this psychological trauma of this that makes me one of those people who has no positive feelings towards animals. I resent it when I see cats and dogs lying around do nothing all day in the garden sunning themselves- they remind me of the loafers on sofas!

 

The program on the police was useful in that it staged and filmed reconstructions of crimes, some of which were forceful acts. By raising awareness of specific crimes, such programs often generate new leads for the police. The News was full of talk of government spending. Not a great night of television at all, but very representative of a typical night's viewing "entertainment".

 

I could not however live without books. The information intensity is far higher for books than for television. I feel uncomfortable when I do not have a book to curl up with and read. I went from reading mainly business books to reading a lot of biographies. I donated a lot of books to my former university's library since once I have read them, I tend not to re-read or refer to them. As with other possessions, its all about the usage intensity. I would rather they went somewhere where they are used regularly than simply decorating my walls for the occasional photo opportunity showing how well read I am!

 

I would certainly not let any child of mine have a television in their own room. And I would monitor the quantity and quantity of television that children watch- and make sure that they get access to a range of multimedia- toys, books, sports, people and so on in balance with television.

 

Television is a double-edged sword than transfixes more than it transforms. Like any media, you can find compelling content and crummy content. The later predominates, but so is life- it cannot be an unending series of peaks. Television can confirm truths that you have learned, but in more than one way, it is a second hand media- it not only recycles old material periodically, but it cannot replace first hand discoveries- being there, seeing it, doing it. Watch some of it, but watch out for it too.

 

 

About cinema, film and video-on-demand

 

Like many people, I enjoy the escapism and intensity of films- they move and flow more quickly than regular television content like soap operas. However, I hardly ever go to the cinema- my friends and I made a considerable and special effort to see each of the Star Wars re-releases but that was a while back. I don't feel comfortable going to the cinema alone, can't be bothered to travel the many miles to the nearest multiplex, queue for tickets and popcorn. The transaction costs are just too high- even when there is a film I would really quite like to see, I seldom make the effort to negotiate and navigate myself to a cinema.

 

Even getting a video out from the store is hard work. Getting down to the store, selecting a video that is in stock, remembering the membership card- why do they automatically expire if you don't use the place regularly, rewinding the film when you get it home, tuning it in, fast-forwarding through the previews, rewinding it, taking it back again.

 

As such, I tend to see a lot of films when on aeroplanes. Some airlines annoy me by having a few large screens- like a micro-cinema and no choice of film- you always get those middle-of-the-road comedy romance films (usually edited!) but never mind, at least its convenient- flying is a transaction cost so why not enjoy that time. Of course, I prefer the personal videos and video selections in some airlines and many business class sections.

 

Seen from a transaction costs perspective, the past hype about video-on-demand is understandable. I would like to be able to access content just-in-time by having say a giant super-computer in the sky beam down videos to me when I want them into my own home- without me having to go anywhere to watch them. When video-on-demand was first heralded, the timing was wrong- the technology had not caught up with the rhetoric- the communications or computing bandwidth was insufficient to store and beam the content down to more than a few homes at once. All that will change though over time as computing speed increases and its cost falls. Video-on-demand will occur and I for one, and I suspect like many, look forward to it.

 

If you want to get away from 2-D entertainment see real people, try the pubs, clubs and restaurants.

 

 

 

SOCIALIZING

 

 

Pubs, clubs and restaurants

 

Social spaces such as pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants are great because they provide a public place for friends to meet and relax and socialize in whilst simultaneously allowing their customers to see other people they know, meet new people, observe people they don't know and so on. They would clearly never have sight of and access to this audience if they had stayed in their own home. Obviously, customers of pubs and cafes and clubs do pay a premium for the food and drink they buy there- to cover the cost of staff and place and other overheads. Sometimes it can seem that these price levels are too inflated- paying several dollars for a drink for example. But you count your money and you take your choice.

 

I prefer social environments that are conductive to interactions between people- open restaurants for example without separate rooms or high dividers. The environment should support rather than dominate the people. Quite a lot of light is preferable- to see where you are going and to stay awake! I don't like large tables that are full of ornaments and decorations that get in the way of the people eating there. Some restaurants have communal benches and chairs and you sit right next to a stranger. You do tend to meet more people in such places- it is difficult to ignore someone sitting that close to you.

 

The ideal environment does however depend on the nature and form of the current relations between the people using the facilities- a romantic dinner may feature dim lights, candles and much space between tables. A place where the functional act of eating and overcoming hunger is the driver would tend to be more quick service, fast food oriented.

 

It is natural and positive to have an inquisitiveness about and interest in other people- friends and even people you do not know. Social places such as pubs cater for this context as much as they do the content of the glasses and plates they sell their customers. A problem with relationships is that the participants become very self-centered and inward looking and focused on a few people within the four walls of home. Staying in for a quiet night in front of the television and inviting friends and acquaintances around for dinner parties becomes the order of the day, the preferred form of socializing.

 

At the other extreme to never going out to public places is going out on the town every night. There is a definite shelf-life to such activity- outgoing people may be able to go out every night for awhile- but there is inevitably a certain repetition fatigue since you are typically going out to the same places with the same people each time, even if the people you get to watch are different.

 

Socializing is an area where balance is important- not going to either extreme of never going out or always going out. Sometimes we feel like seeing and being seen, and at other times, we simply want to curl up on the sofa and not have to fight our way into smoky, busy pubs and battle to get a beer at the bar. The balance differs according to different people and the same person can get tired of being out all the time and start to stay in more. But too much of either extreme can be bad for you.

 

Restaurants every day could be quite expensive. So what about eating and cooking?

 

 

EATING

 

 

Eating and cooking

 

I don't drink a lot of alcohol because I like to be in full control of both my actions and my faculties during the day and the night. I am not tea-total- I am more than happy to drink a couple of bottles of lager.

 

In my first year at university, I did cook quite a lot, primarily because I had the incentive in that there were other people to cook for. The costs are relatively fixed whether you are cooking for one or for six- the food gathering, preparation and clearing up times are not very variable. As such, I rarely have the inclination to cook anything special for myself these days.

 

I am a great meat eater- I would happily eat a plate full largely of meat with just a little vegetable. And I would be happy when eating out to start with the after dinner mints and progress back to the dessert before having a meaty main course and then a starter. I usually avoid starters because what is meant to be an appetizer can very rapidly become an appetite killer. One's eyes are so often bigger than one's belly, as the old saying rightly goes.

 

I think it is important to get some fresh vegetables at least a couple of times a week particularly since I often suffer from repetition fatigue in that I eat the same ready-to-eat meals over and over again, day after day. I then end up not eating anything much since this fatigue turns me off my food. A new form of dieting perhaps!

 

In sum, I see food as a means to an end and not an end in itself. It fills the stomach and prevents hunger and creates a little energy to burn on other more important things.

 

 

Chop Chopsticks

 

When I do eat, I refuse to eat with chopsticks: the wooden implements popular in some places to assist with eating as an alternative to hands or knives and forks.

 

Disadvantages of chopsticks include:

 

Usability. You cannot just pick up a set of chopsticks and start using them to eat. On the contrary, you need a few lessons and a lot of manual dexterity to manage to scoop up any food at all. They have competitions on television showing skills with chopsticks such as catching flies. But this is merely a reflection on the trivia of television and does not justify their existence. You have to learn how to use a knife and fork, but at least they are shaped to help achieve eating! A couple of pieces of wood called chopsticks have got to be the most unimaginative and ill conceived design concept on this earth. Why didn’t they curve the end to make it easier to actually capture at least a mouthful of food at a time- as opposed to two or three grains of rice?!

People friendliness. I have been to Chinese restaurants and seen nothing but the top of the chopstick user’s head all meal long. They were leaning their head over close to plate and sucking up the food from their plate! This practice is not good for getting to know (or like) someone! The people matter- trying to interact with your food should not predominate over the interaction between the people doing the eating.

Culture. I have engaged in heated debates with friends (well, acquaintances) fortunately wielding only chopsticks who have argued the cultural advantages of using chopsticks as demonstrating a willingness to respect local cultural and historic preferences and habits. I simply do not believe that we should retain or learn cultural symbols simply for the sake of culture. They should have a practical value as well.

Environmental friendliness. People may have reusable chopsticks at home and disposables at restaurants, but even so, environmentally friendly, they are not. Such high costs for such low benefits.

A word of warning for fellow non-believers in chopsticks going to rural mainland China- take your own knife and fork with you!

 

These problems are entry barriers and transaction costs. These are not problems that I like to dismiss lightly. Take my advice, give chopsticks the chop!

 

Chopsticks rank up there alongside chewing gum with environmentally stupid ideas.

 

 

ENVIRONMENTAL

 

Clearly, the tyrannies of organized society such as cars and queues cause considerable stress to the Earth's environment and inhabitants.

 

 

Chewing Gum

Nightclubs these days seem to universally confiscate chewing gum upon entry when searching clubbers. They know how difficult it is to remove used gum from the walls and floor. It is a well known fact that chewing gum is banned from being sold in Singapore, in that case because of problems with vandalism of public transport by sticking gum between train doors. Payphones, ticket machines and other machines are also the frequent targets of juvenile delinquents and other vandals. Even when gum is not used for deliberate vandalism, but simply chewed by ‘decent’ ‘normal’ people, throwing spent gum out of windows or down drains, this can also be a real nuisance for other people.

 

Let's face it, chewing gum is not a nice habit: it makes it difficult to breathe and speak normally and doesn’t exactly look endearing. According to the book The Hidden Persuaders, we chew because we are frustrated breast feeders seeking relief from tension. These days, we are told in chewing gum advertising that sugar free gum is good for you because it generates saliva which fights the troublesome bacteria that causes dental problems. And we are told that chewing can reduce stress too. But I dislike chewing gum because I think that any benefits it confers by no means outweighs the costs thereby incurred.

 

You cannot justify chewing for an hour when after disposal the gum takes many years to break down naturally in the environment- and a lot of effort and money to remove by cleaners. Just as we need to realize that water does not disintegrate when it disappears down a tap, we also need to take into account the person who ends up with gum on their shoe after we throw it out of the car window. I am referring to the public cost to the environment of discarded gum. This is simply an untenable and unsustainable cost benefit relationship.

 

When it comes to reducing the suboptimal selfish disposal of chewing gum, the choice is to pursue a legal system such as Singapore's outright ban, or social-based regulation such as instant fines and bans for customers caught sticking the gum anywhere they please. This would be quite difficult to enforce- proof, identification and enforcement would be issues. Monitoring could even be an employment creation measure! Sale and chewing would not be banned- only selfish disposal. It is clear to me that vandalism is an offense- and banning people caught misusing gum from clubs is an acceptable measure if clearly communicated to all customers. In this way, people have a choice and are in charge of their behavior.

 

A confectionery company somewhere needs to develop a gum-like sweet that slowly breaks down and can be swallowed after half an hour or more of chewing, and thereby prolongs consumption whilst delaying completion of eating- giving the benefits of chewing without the costs of gum.

 

Chewing is okay, gum is not. Instead of "chew it, wrap it, bin it", we should say "don’t buy it, don’t chew it".

 

In the same way as the gum lasts for a lot longer than the chewing, the packaging on products lasts a lot less than the goods. This is another unsustainable cost-benefit analysis.

 

 

Attacking Packaging

The socks that I got for Christmas are rustling. Inside I find a rectangle of tissue paper.

 

The amount of packaging disposed of last Christmas in my household alone was huge. We received pajamas in boxes, vegetables shrink-wrapped in plastic-covered card, tiny chocolate coins wrapped in two pieces of silver foil and the like. The worst of a bad bunch was my new work shirt, with its plastic collar supports, cardboard and tissue interiors, plastic arm clips and drawing pins. This wasteful excess disgusts me.

 

Packaging such as the tissue paper in my shirt performs none of these purposes, as it only becomes visible when you unwrap the goods and it is too flimsy to protect anything. It is merely a device to signal to the recipient that those particular goods are expensive. This is a virtual definition of packaging in the cosmetics and perfume industry, other than the success of retailers such as The Body Shop with its plain, non-boxed, refillable shampoo containers.

 

Packaging is unnecessary when its lifetime bears no relation to the lifetime of the product it packages. The shorter the time period between the product being packaged at its place of manufacture or assembly, and the time the goods are consumed by the end user, the more wasteful the packaging is. For example, my shirt will last me a couple of years, yet the packaging has already served any purpose it may have had. As with all possessions, its usefulness is a question of usage intensity.

 

Packaging should be optimized (reduced to the minimum necessary levels) at all stages of the production process. Many food and clothing retailers are implementing a system called Efficient Consumer Response (ECR). ECR is basically close cooperation between companies at different stages of the retail supply chain, such as distributors, retailers and food manufacturers. As ECR is taken up by more and more retailers, stocks of packaged goods are reduced and product packaging lasts a few weeks at the most, subsequently taking a very great deal longer to break down naturally in the environment. This relatively efficient use of packaging in distribution belies an inefficiency in retail customer packaging.

 

Packaging does have its positive uses and can of course be justified to distribute for example liquid goods such as non-alcoholic beverages which would otherwise be difficult to transport and sell. Packaging is used to protect the goods prior to their use or consumption, and also to advertise the contents and inform consumers about the ingredients.

 

Each of us individually needs to resolve to change our purchasing patterns to favor less packaged goods. Cumulatively, our uncoordinated but mutual actions can have a big impact on sales.

 

Never forget what my mother always tells me: "Never mind Simon, its what’s inside that counts!".

 

 

We didn’t oughta waste water

 

It is only late winter, yet already hosepipe bans are in place because of a lack of rain and a consequent shortage of water. Water can be used for lots of purposes, from drinks to watering the garden or washing the car to putting out fires. It is so useful that securing adequate water supplies will cause a lot of conflicts and wars in the future.

 

The problem of wasting water is largely caused by a lack of economic incentive to save water or use it wisely. People don’t typically consider water to be a scarce or valuable resource and do not therefore stop to think whether to use those few liters to water the plants or bathe the baby. Instead, they think that water is a God-given right, part of nature itself. But as the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rightly said, the water may come from the clouds, but the pipe network and water treatment plants and the rest of the water delivery infrastructure are far from free of charge.

 

Individual consumers need to think more about what they use water for. Tourists traveling to Spain always used to be reminded that "the water in Majorca don’t waste like what it oughta". Lets just hope this doesn’t become the case all over the world, as we cannot rely on pure, bottled, still or sparkling water "fresh from the springs of the valley" forever.

 

Industrial consumers of water need to minimize the amount of water they use in their production processes, recycle that water and be sure not to contaminate other water sources with polluted industrial waste. I will never forget the story that on the day of the reunification of east and west Germany, a public holiday was called. So all the factories closed down to celebrate. And on that day, thousands of fish died in those rivers, because they didn’t get the industrial waste they were used to.

 

In the past, most people paid a flat rate charge for their water. However this should change because water meters are the best way of equating the supply and demand for water and its costs and benefits. If people have water meters and therefore know that they are paying for the quantity of water they use, they will think more about whether that usage is really necessary. In fact, they may end up thinking about every unit of water they use, and thereby stress themselves out.

 

Suppliers of water need to make sure that they plug any leaks they have in their water pipes. Some water companies waste a quarter or more of collected and treated water is through such leaks. The flow of water through pipes can be monitored these days anyway using technologies. Whenever the water level or flow drops off, a mobile phone connected to a water flow measuring machine can automatically send a text message to an engineer to investigate for possible leaks.

 

Each of us needs to treat water as a valuable product rather than a mere limitless commodity. I’ll always remember the unforgettable tagline for a television advertisement I saw back in the late 1980s in Florida, America: "If its yellow, let it mellow. If its brown, flush it down". Save water, please.

 

 

Queuing

Don’t you find it really annoying and stressful standing in a queue at the post office on a Tuesday morning when the pensions are being paid out and all you want is a first class postage stamp?

 

Queues, be they traffic jams or any other restriction in movement to an intended destination, are inconvenient at the very least. Most people would agree that waiting in a line is an annoying waste of time, but I would go further than that and say that queues are a fundamental restriction in human civil liberties.

 

The cost incurred by an individual when standing in a line is the opportunity cost of time spent which does not add any benefit to the completion of the intended task. It is what you could be doing if you didn’t have to queue. Whether the queue at the post office is two or five persons deep is separate from and irrelevant to the actual achievement of my objective of purchasing a stamp.

 

Clearly, we live in a busy and complex world both in terms of living and physical objects. You only need look at chaos theory to work out that if someone presses his or her brake, a bottleneck in traffic can arise three miles behind that vehicle.

 

Some people see queuing as the fairest way of allocating access to scarce resources. Clearly, the benefits would not justify the costs (including environmental) of building a 100 lane highway just so that no-one ever had to queue. Given this fact, lines equitably reward people on a first come, first served basis without discrimination according to age, fragility, sex or anything else, including the type of service required.

 

Indeed, this very later fact is part of the problem, because allocation by transaction type would help alleviate some queues by introducing "fast lanes" for routine transactions such as buying stamps or paying in cash. This is one very simple way to reduce the length of lines, you separate queuers according to the number of items purchased, payment method and so on, as some retail outlets currently do.

 

Queues are a problem, but there are some solutions. Political governments should not however intervene and try to reduce them in an attempt to win votes. Private sector businesses acting in free markets will always meet market requirements. This is the entrepreneurial function. That is why pessimists are incorrect to claim that the Internet will fall over under the burden of data traffic. Impatient individuals will demand quicker and more reliable access to the Internet and entrepreneurs will collaborate voluntarily to achieve this.

 

Queues arise where purchasers outweigh sellers. The best way to prevent queues is to free individuals from the requirement of being physically present at a particular location between certain times to transact with a particular person. There are lots of different ways of overcoming queues by localizing the means of obtaining services and making purchases. Applications of technologies can help to alleviate queues, if not eliminate them. Electronic transactions should be encouraged, including telephone banking, direct debit payments, postage franking machines and home shopping. That’s why vending machines are such wonderful inventions, for everything from non-alcoholic beverages, postage stamps to videos.

 

 

However, increasingly, technologies can be applied to reduce queues thereby helping to overcome some environmental damage. Instead of having to drive to the cashpoint machine or Automatic Teller Machine (ATM), you can transact electronically. Instead of buying your stamps at the post office which people are using for other purchases, you can use a vending machine. Instead of driving to the stores you can order your shopping on-line. You can access the Internet from your television. You can have a voice mail box stored in a telephone network rather than physical answering machines. You can email files rather than sending them on diskettes. There are no physical limits to growth in the ideas economy, just mental ones.

 

 

Technologies such as vending machines and electronic banking can help to reduce queues, but queues often perform a useful social function. Sure you can do everything from home: work, shop, bank and so on, but that does not mean you want to. Old people and young people still want to go down the supermarket or post office and use the common context of being in the same place and queuing in the same queue as a way to start a conversation. And of course they are very right. All I am saying is that technologies are giving people new choices: no longer do they have no alternative but to queue, no longer are they beholden to some company or institution.

 

Queues are evil, but we can alleviate them not just through use of electronic technologies by retailers, but, as ever, by changing our individual behavior as purchasers. Patience was a virtue in the organized world, but in the unorganized world, impatience is a right. I like the advertising slogan: "No queues, no stress, Avis Express".

 

Traffic jams are another kind of queues.

 

 

From automobile to ever-immobile

What was a symbol of freedom- the car- has become a symbol of mindless sameness now. Despite the lies and myths portrayed by television advertising, there is no such thing as a winding, open road for most drivers. Instead, they spend their time queuing, fending for themselves against other motorists, polluting the environment and stressing themselves out at the same time. What is more, because in such conditions driving is not enjoyable but merely a means to a destination, it is a non-productive activity which lends itself more to busyness than business.

 

No other sphere of our lives pits us so directly against total strangers and reveals so clearly the human inclination to impatience. Driving is bullfighting for the unorganized world. It consists of many slow build-ups leading to quick spurts of speed, a duel with another driver at a junction and a very high relative risk of getting yourself killed. Anger towards other motorists, known as road rage, is the inevitable consequence of a traffic system where there are too many cars and too little road space.

 

Many people are inherently unsuited to driving: they simply have no natural understanding of the relationship between themselves and their car, the road and other cars. Most motorists break traffic regulations and motorway laws by lane hopping, speeding, obstructing junction access and such like, often intentionally but sometimes out of ignorance. And yet we all have to drive, it is a career pre-requisite needed even for jobs such as child-minding. Without a driving license you cannot expect to progress in an organization.

 

I have a driving license, after passing my test following several failed attempts. But I do not drive at all in my home country Britain. It takes too much concentration to weave around other vehicles on narrow streets. And it takes too much time to sit in traffic jams. In Europe, I travel by foot, train and taxi. I walk to the train station, get to near where I am going and then either walk or take a taxi to my final destination. Because of my personal ineptitude at and dislike of driving, I feel that this saves me stress and time and money. In the US however, I find driving much more amenable (See Unorganization: The Travel Dispatches on unorgan.com to see why).

 

I like The Observer newspaper’s "Blueprint For Transport" (18/06/95). We should abolish distortionary company car taxation policies which encourage drivers to drive a certain number of miles. It is absolutely the case that tax relief earned after a certain number of miles have been clocked encourages unnecessary driving to push business mileage into higher tax brackets. I remember driving with a colleague from London to Scotland simply to clock up the necessary miles to earn a tax break. I was amazed to read that half of all trips are less than two miles. That takes ten minutes to walk and less to cycle. Unless you meet people on the way, which of course is much more likely… at least you won’t end up fighting with them, but can contentedly coexist. Carving roads through our valleys is not the answer, because the number of cars tends to expand in direct relation to the amount of new road capacity built. As with public-financed health systems, supply creates its own demand.

 

We saw in the "Queuing" section above how technologies facilitate electronic transactions replacing physical ones. For example, we can work from home, reducing our need for cars. Depending on what job you do, living without a car is perfectly possible in any country in Europe or Asia at least where the public transportation systems are reasonably well developed. It is not as easy to forego a car altogether if you are a traveling salesperson responsible for quite a large region.

 

When you step back out onto the pavement and observe either the crawling traffic queues or the fast-moving dashes for gaps, you realize that cars are no longer a symbol of personal freedom to go where we want when we want. We need to consider the automobile for what it really is these days- an ever-immobile- and change the way we travel.

 

 

Let the train take the strain

 

To supplement and complement this anti-car polemic, I thought I’d try and outline why I like traveling by train.

 

The automobile does have some advantages as a means of transport for sure:

 

Directness. Cars take you door to door- at least if you can find somewhere nearby to park when you arrive at your destination.

This directness could mean that cars get to your destination more quickly, especially if you begin or end your journey in a country village, unlikely to be served by trains, or if you are somewhere like America where cars really are the only available way to travel and every other form of transport is neglected from buses to walking.

The mere fact that trains take longer is not however an argument in itself. Time can be utilized more easily when traveling by train. It is difficult for drivers to get on with any other activity whilst at the wheel.

There are a lot of short journeys we take that are quicker and easier to make using cars. We go to the supermarket for shopping (or "marketing" as the author David Lodge perceptively calls it). However, these short journeys tend to be even more dangerous than long ones by car. You have to pass through all the one way systems and bus lanes and duck and dive and weave and stop and start.

Privacy. Cars are certainly more private than trains. This may be the reason why decent upstanding citizens feel able to wave their clenched fists at other motorists from behind the "safety" of metal and glass.

Of course, as we all know, cars have their disadvantages:

 

Cars cause a lot of environmental pollution and turn people lazy- always driving everywhere, even just down the road to post a letter.

Cars are dangerous and account for the death of a lot of road and pavement users through accidents, drinking and driving, road rage and such like. Motorists face all the hazards of the police, the weather, roadworks, other motorists and pedestrians.

Driving is stressful given all of the rules- formal and informal- of the road and the fact that so many road users ignore these rules or are simply ignorant of them.

You get all these traffic jams, and its not as though they are predictable enough to always occur in the same places at the same time. Sometimes you are pretty sure that there is going to be a tailback and the roads are clear of traffic, and vice versa. Unlike with trains, you cannot plan your estimated time of arrival accurately in advance.

Driving costs a lot- as with property you are faced with (big bad) fixed costs of road insurance and tax, maintenance et cetera not to mention the variable petrol costs. It is not even as though you can just pay these costs- there are (big bad) forms to fill out as well! After paying these fixed costs and because of company car tax distortions, you are forced to drive the vehicle everywhere you go as the variable costs are such a small proportion of the total costs.

Then there is the status issue, with people aspiring for a bigger, better or simply different model of automobile. You are pleased to get on the first rung of the company car ladder, but it is not long before employees become dissatisfied and long for the next grade of car up. There is nothing wrong with wanting more, just make sure that you want more of the right things.

There are some advantages to traveling by rail:

 

You have the choice to get on with something else. After all, just about all travel is merely a means to an end and seldom an end in itself: it is dead time which we would sooner wish to avoid.

Trains are safer.

You get to meet people.

Catering is available.

To be sure, rail travel does however also have some disadvantages:

 

Trains are so popular that you don’t always get a seat.

Travel between major cities (hubs) is very often fast by train but waiting for transport to you own town (spokes) can be prolonged.

Train travel is indirect: you do not go direct to your destination and therefore have to think about getting yourself to the rail station to catch your train and from the station to your final destination.

All in all, there are of course naturally costs and benefits associated with both cars and trains. For me personally, it is the destruction of brain cells from the need to concentrate that I dislike most about driving. Let the train take the strain.

 

 

RELIGION

 

Religion did not fit in too well anywhere else in this book, so it is here at the end. Maybe that says something about both the importance and fit of religion in this day and age.

 

 

On Religion Today

 

On Saturday 11^th April 1998, the day after the Easter bank holiday for Good Friday, a religious festival celebrated in my country of birth Britain and elsewhere, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious group, knocked on my door. They did not say which religious grouping they were representing- this information I gleaned from one of the brochures they gave me- I think that any grouping should explicitly state up-front who they are and what they stand for.

 

They wanted to remind me about Jesus Christ, and that is what they did. According to the people on my doorstep, Jesus came down to the Earth 2000 years ago and saved the people. Jesus must therefore, according to the script they were reading from, have been a pretty important man. It is true to say that anyone who helps people and makes a sacrifice for others is important. I was asked whether I thought I would be remembered in 2000 years time- I said that I was working on it (and I was at the time of their call writing on unorganization).

 

The group gave me two publications to read up on: The Family Under Threat: Will It Survive? and How far can Science be trusted?, which I was told "should be right up your street". The people had some children with them- they clearly believed in the institution of the family.

 

I am a practical man- I do not believe in some all-seeing all-knowing magic wand up in the sky, any more than there is such a politician on this Earth, and I do not spend any time thinking about events that happened 2,000 years ago. I spent Good Friday tuned to BBC2 watching the events surrounding the peace agreement in Ireland and not the historic epic religious drama Ben Hur on BBC1. Of course, the Irish troubles are also deeply rooted in the past 400 years, are also deeply associated with the notions of religion, geography and physical land. The relevance of these constructs in this day and age is deeply dubious, as we saw for example with the discussion of intellectual property. People should be able to live their lives in peace without the constant fear of force.

 

People should be able to access and use scientific techniques that have been proven to prevent or alleviate a certain illness or disease in a cost-effective way. And even if this has not been proven, but the sufferer is willing to take the risk for a potential risk or return, then they should have the opportunity to try. People should be able to make choices for themselves.

 

If the family unit is working for a certain set of people, then great, let it remain. If it is failing and making people unhappy or endangering their health and constraining their freedom without conferring sufficient compensatory benefits, then that family structure should be flexible and dynamic enough to splinter. People matter, nothing else- if it helps people, then fine.

 

Decisions about science and families, like those about religion, are personal choices and a means to an end, and not an end in themselves that should be rigidly adhered to in every (diverse) case. If parts of something work sometimes- if it helps people, then I am happy to have it and use it, if not, reject it. The key is weighing costs and benefits- sometimes the benefits outweigh the costs over time and sometimes they don’t- but the costs should not have to be endured over time merely for the sake of preserving some static structure.

 

My only other religious experiences were when I was about 12 and I went to see Billy Graham, the famous evangelist on Greenham Common, a US military base near my home town that used to store nuclear weapons. My sole reason for being there was to try to collect some American Coca-Cola bottles and cans that were available on the base. At the end of Mr. Graham's sermon, he started to ask people who had turned to the lord to rise up and come to the front. Several people did just that, such that my friend and myself started to laugh and snigger to such a degree that those Christians on the row in front of us turned around and told us aggressively to shut up.

 

I was also a member of my bible club when I was a very young child. I have a confession to make- we used to meet in the local community center and everyone sat around in a big circle and prayed. I used to position myself close the kitchen and when everyone closed their eyes to pray, I sneaked off and had a couple of extra biscuits from the communal plate.

 

Religion is another one of those things that I am really very skeptical about. Maybe it can help as a calming influence and comforter in times of uncertainty ("God will provide"). Maybe you get to meet people if attend church. But you get religious zealots who justify their violence and discrimination as a holy war. Religion causes many of the problems that pester progress. I think that its costs far outweigh its benefits.

 

 

UNORGANIZED LIFESTREAMS

 

 

The Comfort Zone

 

I have designed "The Comfort Zone" to bring together all of these diverse elements in the unorganized lifestyle. A comfortable and compelling lifestyle consists of:

 

Heat- an ideally heated place is not too warm or too cold. If it's too cold, it is difficult to get to sleep. If it's too hot, you can feel lethargic.

Light- a well lit place, with a combination of natural and artificial light. I need at least 100 watts of light to function- which is why I dislike dimly lit restaurants and other places where you can hardly see and feel like falling asleep in. Just switching on the light in those places can elevate the energy level.

Freedom from tiredness. Not feeling drowsy and yawning but instead awake and alive and fresh. Good health to prevent fatigue.

Intact senses. To see, hear, touch, smell and feel fully and clearly. Intelligence- clarity of mind and thought.

No-commute. Not having to get up and go to work to be in office a certain time. Some traveling around to visit friends and customers is of course unavoidable for retaining personal and business relationships. It is all about having the discretion to choose when to go, and the balance such that is it not an automatic.

No compromise. Not having to do a job you don't like to finance the rest of your life.

Peaceful living. Peace and quiet and some solitude to get the work done.

Saving. Enough saving to finance the next 12 months of life's journey. This confers independence from the current income source and allows people not to have to worry frequently about how they are going to pay for their ongoing comforts.

Reliable computing. Computers that do not get bugs, Internet access that it is reliable, batteries that last, software that isn't bloatware. In so far as possible, these things should be wireless- without cables to tether freedom and complicate connectivity. These things and others similar prevent the stress and frustration and inconvenience of not having your daily tools available for use.

Facial relief. No spots and acne to have to worry about.

Freedom from hunger and thirst- in such a way as to not suffer from "food fatigue"- fatigue at preparing food or fatigue from repetition of menus due to avoidance of food preparation!

Independence- financial, emotional and intellectual. Controllability.

 

The Unorganization Quiz: How unorganized are you?

 

Now take a test and find out just how unorganized you really are- the extent to which you believe in and practice the unorganized philosophy. The points for answers to the questions are weighted in such a way as to reflect the importance of each belief to the unorganized lifestyle.

 

Answer each of the following questions:

 

Question 1: I work in:

 

A. a hierarchy

B. a flexible humane company

C. my own company

 

Question 2: When it comes to living, I:

 

A. live with my parents

B. rent my own place

C. have a mort-gage

 

Question 3: I would describe myself as a:

 

A. shopoholic

B. careful buyer of things I need

C. tightfisted person reluctant to spend any money

 

Question 4: I take soft and hard drugs:

 

A. sometimes soft, never hard

B. sometimes both

C. never either

 

Question 5: I like to smoke:

 

A. occasionally on a casual basis when someone offers or I am out socializing with friends

B. never

C. on a daily basis

 

Question 6: I like to drink alcohol:

 

A. occasionally on a casual basis when someone offers or I am out socializing with friends

B. never

C. on a daily basis

 

 

Question 7: My personal debts excluding any "big ticket" items such as cars and mort-gages are:

 

A. less than one month's disposable income

B. significantly less than one month's disposable income

C. significantly more than one month's disposable income

 

Question 8: My level of savings for a rainy day are:

 

A. less than one month's disposable income

B. significantly less than one month's disposable income

C. significantly more than one month's disposable income

 

Question 9: In my regular home environment, I prefer to travel by:

 

A. foot

B. car

C. public transport such as bus or train

 

Question 10: I view cars as being:

 

A. an important status symbol for earning the respect of my friends, customers and family

B. a means to an end that needs to be reliable but need not be flash

C. a petrol guzzling expense that pollutes the environment

 

Question 11: When I see a queue for a service I need to use, I usually:

 

A. patiently wait my turn

B. impatiently wait my turn

C. turn around and leave the premises

 

Question 12: My attitude to overseas travel is:

 

A. I am constantly looking for, creating and taking opportunities to travel to new places abroad

B. I have never been overseas and don't want to

C. I have been to the typical summer holiday resorts

 

Question 13: When it comes to having a personal relationship with a partner:

 

A. I always need to be in a relationship to feel comfortable and confident and complete

B. I am waiting for my "one" "big love" to come along before getting serious

C. I avoid long-term serious commitments

 

Question 14: When a job needs doing in the house, I usually:

 

A. do it myself

B. get a skilled friend, neighbor or relative to help me out

C. pay an expert to come in and do it

 

Question 15: My attitude to television is:

 

A. there are some good shows which I selectively watch

B. I always have it switched on

C. I don't have a television

 

Question 16: When it comes to cooking, I:

 

A. always cook a fresh meal

B. occasionally eat or cook a fresh meal

C. never cook myself a fresh meal but rely instead on microwave dinners and ad-hoc snacks and take-away meals

 

Question 17: My attitude to the environment is:

 

A. I actively incorporate environmental factors into my daily actions such as purchase and disposal decisions

B. it is there to be used

C. I care about it but it is too much hassle to bother acting on

 

Question 18: My attitude to marriage is:

 

A. it is essential

B. it is a highly questionable concept

C. I believe in getting married before having children to demonstrate real commitment to my partner

 

Question 19: When it comes to exercise and keeping fit, I usually:

 

A. go to the gym

B. don't bother

C. play my favorite sport regularly as part of a team

 

Question 20: My ideal role model is:

 

A. someone who is successful at their job with a nice car, house and salary

B. someone who has lived an interesting life and traveled and changed jobs and created a lot

C. someone who tries to get as much as they can from other people and is living a typical, average life

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quiz Answers

 

So how unorganized are you? Scores range from 0 to 200, with each answer to each question worth the following number of points:

 

A=0, B=5, C=10

A=5, B=10, C=0

A=5, B=10, C=0

A=5, B=0, C=10

A=5, B=10, C=0

A=10, B=5, C=0

A=5, B=10, C=0

A=5, B=0, C=10

A=10, B=0, C=5

A=0, B=5, C=10

A=0, B=5, C=10

A=10, B=0, C=5

A=0, B=5, C=10

A=0, B=5, C=10

A=10, B=0, C=5

A=5, B=10, C=0

A=10, B=0, C=5

A=0, B=10, C=5

A=5, B=0, C=10

A=1-, B=5, C=0

Score Analysis:

 

0- 50: Highly organized. You believe in and practice traditional conventional organized practices. You find most of the contents of this book offensive. Goodbye.

 

50- 100: Quite organized. You have started to realize that the world has been changing and this has changed your life in some ways.

 

100- 150: Quite unorganized. You have started to actively take advantage of the opportunities that the unorganized world is creating by modernizing the way you think and act.

 

150- 200: Highly unorganized. Acting as an independent brander who is in tune with and living the unorganized lifestyle, you are well placed to enjoy the plentiful opportunities of the twenty-first century.

 

Feedback

Feel free to email Simon Buckingham, the author of this book at simon@unorgan.com with comments and queries on Unorganization: The Lifestyle Handbook. There are several complementary handbooks to this on www.unorgan.com.