Consuming mindfully, in a culture of abundance, is worthwhile. In a culture of mass advertising, it is a seditious act.

I am concerned only with the kinds of "simplifying" in which I sacrifice no pleasure or comfort, and create no additional work for myself. I also won't spend more money than I otherwise would, in the interests of "paring down."

A fertile field for simplification in my life, without incurring myself greater cost, or sacrifice of any kind, has been the area of homecare products. Homecare products are such "easy pickins'" for a household simplification campaign, because they'd grown so complicated, the intricacies of their packaging and extra ingredients long unquestioned by society, thanks to mass-marketing. In getting back to basics, I'm unraveling a web of illusion that has been generations in the weaving.

Madison Avenue created needs where they didn't exist, as for garbage-liner bags, sold on the vague promise of sparing labor by neatening trash and "protecting" the inside of the waste receptacle. Besides creating "needs" for new products, the advertisers also birthed mythologies that likened cleaning preparations to astral bodies, comic super-heroes, and mythological beings.

Before it perpetuated itself on habit, its origins forgotten, the success of the advertisers' homecare-product mystique established itself on the need for the 1950s housewife to wield power. The macho, weapon-like homecare products were the expression of her repressed masculine side, her "animus projection." She didn't work for pay, initiate sex, or do much in the way of driving, but from time to time she could put on rubber gloves and route out grime with a cleaner so potent, you had to throw open the windows.

Her chlorinated cleaning products, often as not, were the reason the prim, aproned housewife's ritual cleaning caused such noxious fumes.

The housewife's ideal of "macho" overkill in housecleaning serves no psychological need of mine. Rather, I live in a time when chemical additives to food and homecare products are actively questioned.

At best, chlorine in household cleaners is redundant. Touted as a disinfectant and whitener, the known hazards of the element, to human health and to the biosphere, continue to mount. Most recently, its household use has been implicated by research on "anti-bacterial" additives in soaps, as actually promoting more durable, resistant microbial strains.

In 2003, I stopped using any cleaning product that contained chlorine. I collected my chlorine bleach and chlorine-based cleansers and put them in a cardboard box labeled "free" and carried them out to the park benches near my home. The repressed 1950s housewife was dead, a stake through her bland heart.

I haven't missed the chlorinated products, at all. I still use a commercial cleanser occasionally; I like the abrasion and the sudsing for a quick clean-up of the stove-top or fixtures. But my current cleanser brand contains no chlorine, perfumes, or dyes. I use it without gloves.

After chlorine bleaches and cleansers, I banished spray cleaners from my cupboard. These represented two generations of mass-marketing. The first was contemporaneous with the war boom and the space age, and emphasized "potence." The newer wave of products marked advertisers' exploitation of ecological, "green" consciousness, starting in the 1970s.

The "potent" space-age household spray cleaners, besides their ornate packaging, were apt to contain petrochemical perfumes and dyes. The "green" spray cleaners were supposed to be "biodegradable," but they had too many ingredients, they were wastefully packaged, and they left a soapy residue I disliked.

Rather than any specialized spray cleaner, I now use generic-brand pure ammonia in the gallon jug, splashed on a damp rag. My cleaning solution leaves no residue or trace of any kind, as ammonia biodegrades into harmless nitrogen. Compared to specialized cleaners, it costs pennies on the dollar. It's perfect. Not only has the 50s houswife died; her grown offspring, the "hippie consumer," seems to totter on the brink.

But the "hippie consumer" is a hypocrite, wringing hands about consumption, while actually as hooked on convenience as the previous generation was. That postwar worship of convenience, at a point, checks my own efforts at simplification. It keeps me tethered to certain homecare products because I don't see any way to cut their use without complicating my life. If you can show me convenient, cost-effective alternatives to petrochemical-based shampoo and laundry detergent, which pollute and which may affect human health, I'll gladly use them. I just don't know of anything soap-based that can rival their easy, thorough cleaning.

The other specialized homecare product I cannot imagine life without is my daily shower cleaner. Figuring the active ingredient is all the same, I buy the cheapest brand, in the ugliest bottle. The stuff costs me less than $2 a month, and it is unbeatable. I spray it after each shower and it saves me the hours I'd spend scouring through soap buildup on the tile, or the money I'd pay somebody else to do it.

Maybe my need for convenience isn't "bad." Maybe it's a neutral constraint, one that still allows me lots of room to define "simplicity," against the wiles and insinuations of mass-advertising. For that matter, market forces themselves might not always be at cross-purposes with consumer and environmental well-being. Probably, responding to consumer demand over the decades, manufacturers have improved household petrochemical detergents since they were first introduced, to where they are milder and pollute less.

As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh observed, "compassion" isn't a static goal. Outside the enlightened state, it really can't be "attained." The compassionate ideal is relative. The monk used the illustration of a military general, streamlining attacks to lessen civilian casualties, as an example of one engaged in a thoughtful "striving for compassion."

I'd say questioning habit, and the parts of myself the mass-advertising engages, constitute a striving for simplicity and "mindful consumption." I don't need more, I don't need judgment.
6:50:39 PM    comment []