Some Thoughts On Living Small

When we sold our house in Edmonton and bought this yacht, we had not yet thought through the issue of what to do with all the “stuff” in the house.  The furniture, cloths, dishes, small appliances, paintings, and myriad other items including many books.  We stored it all thinking we’d buy ourselves some time with the idea that we could always go into a condo if we did not like the cruising the world in a boat neigh 50 feet long.  

We are now halfway into our 5^th year aboard Terratima.  She is our home and we find we miss nothing.  Our son has spent almost 1/3^rd of his life aboard this boat.  So now we confront the issue of our “stuff”.  After some discussion, we have decided to retain items we feel we have a special connection to.  These are picture albums, some books, and some paintings.  Everything else we have decided to sell and what does not sell will be donated.  

In dealing with this, we confronted a bit of a demon - the one that pushes us to accumulate.  Sitting through a typical half hour television program will put every model of car in front of you that always seem to be subjects of perpetual sales discounts.  At the same time we are hearing that the American economy is driven by consumption, the American middle class (all those consumers) are dwindling, that the Canadian economy is simply supported by resource exportation and that Canadians are carrying a unprecedented levels of personal debt.  We are, in addition, pummeled by ads in BC and by the feds related to the need for growth of the economy and this is repeated by every government in the free world - all echoing the voices of businesses  and industries both big and small.   Is it not obvious that this is all simply unsustainable?  That ultimately we cannot grow without limit.  

The objective of just about any growth in business, companies, economies is virtually hyperbolic.  This is not possible.  The physicists call the upward arching curve, the “singularity”.  In Civil engineering, we can even work with these using what are called singularity functions to manage the discontinuity from one side of the curve to the other.  

The “other side” of the singularity is usually decline and collapse.  Now some companies have avoided this by “relaunching” or - to use a very good term - “innovating”, and in essence restarting the hyperbolic function at a lower level.  Apple and Google have done this very well.  The trick is (and this is put forward mathematically by Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute quite neatly) you have to keep innovating in shorter and shorter time frames.  This at least delays the inevitable singularity and its implied collapse.  

In Nature we see an equilibrium of staggeringly complex interrelated systems.  I often wonder what a world would look like where we were in synch with and a non-antagonistic partner of these complex systems - living in a sustainable civilization.    Living in a world that creates yet does not waste; that consumes and yet replenishes; that leaves the world better off with each passing generation.  What would this world look like?  What would our cities look like? (And yes, there will be cities, probably bigger and denser than our present ones.  The arguments for this are compelling and worth a read of the working papers of the Santa Fe Institute on this topic).  

We get a small and imperfect taste of this living on a sailing yacht - of living within the technical constraints and the circadian rhythms of the planet.  We are suddenly aware of the what the boat is made of and how it was made (oil and resins), of the consumption of water, of how to get fresh water continuously, of how to deal with waste, of what power generation and consumption mean, of how to try and balance the good things of our technology and our innovation with the bad that it often contains - sometimes manifesting itself years later.  

All the while, we are aware of the ebb and flow of the wind, of how our sails can harness that flow to move us along and to do so with a  grace that is this beautiful machine  we call a sailboat that seems to have its own soul and personality.   And we hear her speak to us in the sounds of water rushing against the hull and wind whistling in the rigging.