Category: Essays

There are certainly far more important topics to cover than social media, but I’ve had some thoughts on this topic bottled up inside my brain for about a year now and I felt it was a good time to unburden myself of them. Our collective preoccupation with social media may seem pretty innocuous, if not wholly ridiculous, but I feel strongly that it can have some really negative consequences for both mental health and interpersonal relationships.

I’ve gone through periods of time when I get completely jaded with social media and I’ll temporarily deactivate or delete all of my accounts. Part of it is my frustration with my own addictive personality and how I can get so wrapped up in it, but I know I’m not alone in this. 

It can be pretty freeing in some ways to completely ghost from your online life. Last year I deleted all of my social media accounts for six months. All of them. Even LinkedIn, for crying out loud. I was so committed! I was going to be present, dammit! And in a lot of ways, it was the happiest I’d been in a really long time. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but the evidence is pretty compelling that if we’re more present in our everyday lives, it pays dividends in the form of happiness and contentment. 

Some of the benefits: Freedom from prying eyes. Less opportunity for judgment. Freedom from bullying cleverly disguised as differences of opinion. Much less exposure to extremist politics or worrying about being politically correct. Fewer interruptions. More focus. Better in-person connections. Freedom from those phone notifications buzzing your thigh every thirty seconds. 

For the most part, it was fantastic. But leaving the online life behind wasn’t without its growing pains. 

As weird as this feels to write publicly, there were some amazing moments and experiences I really wanted to share with the world. I had recently started dating my fiancé and it would’ve been a convenient way for far-flung friends and family to get to know her, if only in a virtual sense. But what I was least prepared for when I quit social media was how it can feel like some people stop caring about you. Scratch that. How it feels to seemingly cease to exist to people with whom you thought you had a stronger connection. 

For instance, just one month off Facebook and the only people who got ahold of me on my birthday were my Mom and my two brothers. No joke. It’s in those moments when you realize who the most important people are in your life, and there’s a pretty good chance they’re not the 200 people who wished you a happy birthday on your Facebook timeline. 

But you know what? After the initial shock of being social media-less wore off, I was probably happier than I’d ever been. It was pretty amazing to actually feel like I was living in the moment—in all of the moments—and not constantly worrying about sharing with the world whatever thing I was doing at the time.

Recently I’ve been feeling the pull toward living without social media again. But one of the biggest deterrents to not going completely rogue is that I’ve got this blog now and it’s difficult enough as it is to get the word out. Hell, you can’t even have a Facebook page for your brand without an actual personal Facebook account. So there’s that. 

But there’s also the 13 years of status updates and photos and memories that I’d rather not have weighing me down anymore. I’d rather focus on myself now and the man I want to be rather than who I was before today. I don’t care what your algorithm says, Facebook. I neither need nor want that memory popping up in my feed every year ad nauseam. 

After some serious thought, my solution has been to compromise. I deleted my Facebook account that I’ve had since 2004. I’ve started clean, scaled back the friends list to a manageable level, and I plan to nurture those online relationships that are the most enduring, meaningful and mutually supportive.

A few weeks ago, I spent some much needed rest and relaxation in my home state of Michigan. Not only was it good for the soul to go back in summertime because northern Michigan is a true gem, it was an opportunity for me to introduce my partner to family and to show her some of the prettier parts of the state since she had only been to Flint (no offense, Flintstones). Besides, I was starting to get a little bit bitter about spending all of my vacation time on frigid Christmas holidays.

One of the biggest things I miss about home are the lakes. Their beauty and charm are ubiquitous to natives, but vague and seemingly pretty dull to a lot of people I’ve met in the west. Shar, upon seeing Lake Michigan for the first time, said:

I forgive her. In my experience, west coast natives have a terrible sense of geography for anything east of the Rockies. I don’t blame them. There’s just too much going on out here geographically speaking to care much about what’s going on back east. But I still like surprising people who don’t know any better with a trip to Sleeping Bear or the like. 

Here in the west, there is the ocean and the mountains, all of which provide stunningly gorgeous scenery. I’m continually in awe of it all and their novelty hasn’t worn off yet. But there’s just something about the Great Lakes and the thousands of inland lakes in Michigan that give summer a different feel than what I’ve experienced here in the northwest. It’s peaceful and relaxing, and it seems like every other person or their family member has a cottage or second home on or near a lake of some sort. It is engrained in the culture of the place. 

With the lakes come quaint lakeside villages and towns. It seems like they’re everywhere. Tourists flock to them in the warmer months, bringing much needed commerce. I don’t see the same thing here in Oregon or Washington. The major cities are amazing, dynamic places, but there just aren’t that many historic little towns to escape to. It’s pretty sad, actually. 

But having lived in Michigan for 34 years, moving away, and then heading home for a week or two at a time as a tourist gives me some perspective. Those little towns, as comforting as they may be, are depressing places for most of the year, especially for some of the people who live there. There may be a few of them that can survive on skiers or snowmobilers bringing in some tourism dollars, and maybe a couple places have capitalized on being port cities, but there really isn’t much going on in terms of vibrant economies. Truth be told, I can romanticize them all I want, but they probably wouldn’t be great places to live full-time. Even if you’re lucky enough to be of retirement age with a substantial savings, chances are you’re a snowbird. 

I don’t think the reasons for this situation have very much to do with the seasons changing. I think it has more to do with how their economies are structured, and more importantly, how we’ve chosen to structure our national economy — including allowing the middle class to shrink and the gap between the rich and poor widen.

There seem to be two schools of thought out there, both of which I think live in their own little myopic bubbles, yet both have truth to them. On the one side, people claim there would be better paying jobs if only we shopped locally – ‘SHOP MAIN STREET!’ they cry. A well-intentioned philosophy with some truth to it. The other argument is that if good-paying jobs weren’t shipped overseas and we didn’t make such little money, we could afford to support good local businesses. People would use their higher incomes to purchase goods in the local economy if there were better paying jobs, which would support still other jobs, etc. Again, well intentioned, but not the full story. The macro and the micro have to be taken into consideration together.

I’m very pro community and economic development and want to see local economies thrive. However, what bothers me the most about the ‘Shop Local’ movement is how some adherents to this philosophy seem to ignore the macroeconomics at play that are completely and utterly stacked against Main Street and the working classes. These days, ‘Shop Local’ is a privileged movement for middle to upper income people. 

People shop at Walmart and Amazon and Walgreens because their budgets are squeezed, not because they don’t like Uncle John’s TV and Electronics Shop. And why shouldn’t they? Who am I to judge the working class family who shops at Walmart so they can scrimp and save to put their kids through college? They’re just working within the confines of the economic environment they’ve found themselves stranded in, where once vibrant and thriving economies have long since disappeared. Sure, people probably buy way too much shit. Big screen TVs, cell phones, unnecessary automobiles. You name it. But if the primary sectors of the economy in which our middle class was built are shipped off to places with cheap labor and little to no environmental standards, how can you expect them to spend what little disposable income they have on local shops? And I can assure you that spending money at Uncle John’s TV and Electronics Shop is not going to create any middle class jobs save for perhaps John. Maybe. 

What our downtowns in small places have become are caricatures of their former selves and the play things for people who are well off. Take a look around the next time you’re in one of those places. There’s an ice cream shop and a few trinket shops hawking tourist goods like M-22 shirts and bumper stickers. But the majority of businesses in so-called thriving places are full of breweries and restaurants. As great as these things are — I literally had the best burger of my life at 7 Monks in Traverse City — these are the only types of businesses that can’t be outsources. Yet. And it’s not because people particularly enjoy spending $15 on a hamburger (usually). They’re doing it for the convenience, but more importantly they’re doing it because they like the atmosphere or the experience.

These things are privileges, unlike the days when there was only one appliance repair shop in town and you knew the owner by name. The days when a diverse downtown full of businesses providing necessary goods and services was a way of life.

As far as I know, there currently is no way efficiency, automation, or logistics can make a burger-eating experience more enjoyable. However, is it very difficult to imagine some not-so-distant future where people spend most of their time in their homes on virtual reality headsets attached to their phones while all of their food is delivered via Uber Eats? Is it that far-fetched when people can order all of their household goods from Amazon by simply saying the word “Alexa – I need toilet paper”? What would happen to our downtowns then? 

There used to be businesses of all varieties, but those peddling everyday products and services can’t compete anymore and they’re not coming back. Totally gone the way of the buffalo. Should we be ashamed of this? In my personal opinion, yes, but that’s not why I’m writing this. What’s done is done. But what I would like to see is the locals acknowledge that “buying local” is a privileged perspective and that good-paying jobs are not in retail or restaurants. Any “buy local” campaign should be coupled with a strong economic development plan that goes beyond redeveloping or promoting Main Street. 

There are other benefits to buying local. In my opinion, they are namely the positive impacts that retail and food industry jobs have on historic preservation, and the psychological and community impacts of living in a place that is vibrant at street level. These can, in some circumstances, attract larger economic drivers—sometimes even in small tourist towns. But this is not possible everywhere and let’s not continue to fool ourselves about the economic reality on the ground for most people when we talk about the importance of buying local.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how a change in environment, whether physical or social, can cause people who might otherwise work together toward common goals to be at odds with one another. Sometimes these changes are caused by things beyond our control such as a natural disaster, but sometimes they are by design in order to keep us distracted from larger goals. 

One of the most interesting courses I took in college was an anthropology class on ancient civilization. We learned about Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, both part of what was known as the Fertile Crescent. What struck me was how these societies, despite their proximity to one another, evolved so differently. How was it that the Egyptians lived in relative peace for so long while Mesopotamia had so many warring tribes and no real semblance of unity? The difference, it is thought, has a lot to do with the rivers of the region.

The Nile, on the one hand, has always been pretty predictable in its course. Ancient Egyptians built their civilization upon its predictability, and because they were able to rely on it to irrigate their crops and provide water for basic needs, they built one of the greatest civilizations in history. Their society certainly was not without its problems, but it was relatively stable because the river’s course stayed true, and the region prospered for it. Economic wealth was certainly funneled up the chain of command, but people were generally able to provide for their livelihoods. On the other hand, the Tigris and Euphrates were not so reliable, and civilization there evolved very differently. These rivers have changed their courses many times over the millennia, and this fact had major impacts on the people of Mesopotamia. 

Imagine trying to farm alongside a river that periodically changed its course. In an arid region, irrigation is essential, so if you suddenly weren’t able to grow crops for your family, or if your community became extremely food insecure, it’s easy to imagine the stress this would cause. These periodic shifts in the courses of the rivers caused a lot of strife and wars to break out between different groups of people who fought for access to the waters. Although today the region’s problems are incredibly complex, there are some anthropologists who even argue that these rivers played such an important role in the region that their irregular courses and the strife this caused centuries ago laid the groundwork for the culture of conflict that exists in the Middle East to this day.

This may seem like a big leap, but I think the situation above is relatable to our modern lives and the political climate we are currently experiencing. Most of us in the U.S. may not have to worry so much about war, genocide, or a river shifting its course on us. At least not in a literal sense. But millions of Americans struggle with poverty and economic hardship within a quickly changing system that is very much the equivalent to a those shifting rivers in ancient times. It frightens me to think about our social safety net dissolving, and the resulting chaos that could ensue. What’s sad is that I feel like sometimes, because of my privilege (perceived or real), that people view me as an enemy instead of an ally. I am a white male who is approaching middle age and I live a comfortable lifestyle. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have something to contribute to the betterment of society. 

As an adult, I didn’t have what I would consider a middle class life until I was about 30, but I did have a social safety net. I had a family who backed me up, provided support when they could, and I had many luxuries by the very virtue of that sturdy ground my family relationships provided. I was lucky, even before I account for the privileges my race and gender afford me. I know that even the fact that I was able to go to school, fail, and go back again (twice if you count my master’s degree) was an enormous privilege. As hard as it was to succeed at times, I know countless people did not have the same opportunities that I did, and I’m grateful for those I did have. Yet for someone as reflective and socially minded as I am (if I do say so myself), I struggle at times with accepting my privilege.

Sometimes it’s hard to admit how good I really had it. Sometimes I get angry when people assume that I had everything handed to me or that I didn’t have to work for what I have. Like my hard work wasn’t really work at all because of my privilege. I have to try hard to keep myself calm and not get personally offended when people assume I didn’t struggle because of my race or gender. 

Sometimes I fail miserably and lose sight of the larger goals of social justice in the face of defending my personal circumstances. I fail at times in formulating my ideas and in communicating my feelings with others. But I do take people’s opinions to heart and try to understand their perspectives and hardships. I recognize my own shortcomings, for the most part, and know I still need to work on them. But, in my experience, the social justice warriors certainly don’t make it easy to be on their team, either. 

I think what bothers me most is the condescending tone from many people who are social justice-oriented. It bothers me a lot, despite me believing in and supporting many of the ideas they espouse and the policies they support. It feels bad to have my motives questioned when I share a differing opinion, like my actions are worth less than my words despite having worked 10 years in the affordable housing industry, for instance. To have my character questioned and my perspectives minimized simply because of my privilege does not feel good. 

Make no mistake: I believe that all people should have similar footing and predictable ground on which to build a life and not be damned at birth by whatever station they were born into, or by their race or gender or sexual preference or anything else for that matter. Everyone should have a place where they have an opportunity to thrive and provide for themselves and their families. Furthermore, I think sometimes the only means we have in capitalism to provide those opportunities is through social programs. 

I am angered and scared and saddened by the current administration and the potential for its policies to reek havoc on disadvantaged people from all walks of life. I’m scared for the people I serve at my job and what the future holds for some of them. I feel the swell of emotions and the fear is palpable. But my biggest fear of all is that the alienating language of social justice advocates to the ears of the majority will be counterproductive to the cause and we won’t get anything done. 

I don’t pretend to have a solution, and I don’t mean to minimize the rage of the oppressed and less fortunate. Hell, if you’re NOT angry, then you’re not paying attention. But I feel like most people won’t listen if they feel alienated. Would you? This is anecdotal, but I feel like the last election was indicative of that. There were other things at play, not least of which was misogyny. But I know a lot of progressive people who felt alienated by the Democratic campaign because it felt like a war was being waged against them because of their privilege. 

We have to do better and that starts with, at very least, acknowledging those who are on our own team, and then having more productive and respectful conversations with each other. Let’s not allow these assholes to change the course of the river in order to divide and conquer. If we do, we’ll have a lot more to deal with than just having a Cheeto-faced clown for another four years. We’ll have another swamp to drain. 

Your Identity is Not Defined by Who or where You Came From

Over the years, and for as far back as I can remember, I was intensely interested in genealogy and the stories of my family’s heritage. Growing up, my biological father didn’t have a relationship with me. But even after he died, I kept in contact with his mother because she showed an interest in me and my brother. She was born in the US to Italian immigrants and I was always really intrigued by her stories of them. Like the one about my great grandfather being one of the construction workers who put the gold roof on the Fisher Building in Detroit. 

For one reason or another, I always felt like that one-quarter Italian blood running through my veins was more important than the rest. I don’t think my feelings on this had anything to do with genetics or familial success. Those on my father’s side were neither particularly good looking nor very successful. What I’ve concluded is that it probably just had more to do with the fact that my Italian heritage was easily traced and that I had real stories going back to the mid-1800s in Vigo di Cadore. The other three quarters of my genetic makeup is such a mix that I never really knew where to start researching, and even though I did make some gains, I didn’t feel a connection to any of the other cultures the way that I did with my grandmother’s Italian heritage.

I don’t think I’m alone in this interest of researching my family’s past. It’s practically an American pastime to celebrate, usually in some comical or caricaturistic way, that drop or two of Irish or German blood we claim to have within us. What I suspect is that this pride of ours for heritage is somehow a combination of our collective national identity crisis stemming from the melting pot of our culture, a national philosophy steeped in individualism, and our human tendency toward tribalism. Who knows? What do I know?

Over the years, I’ve had my own fair share of pride in this regard. Periodically, I’d sign up for one of those Ancestry.com accounts where you can research your family heritage. But without fail, I’d usually end my subscription in frustration after only a month. Not because it wasn’t working; quite the opposite. I’d cut off my subscription because it was working too well.

If you’ve ever actually sat down and looked at a family tree, you might know what I mean about getting frustrated, even if you know a lot about your heritage already. These things start out easy. You write your own name down. Check. Then you write out your parents’ names, your grandparents’ names. You put on some coffee. You come back and maybe you know most of your great grandparents’ names and you ask Uncle Charlie for the others. Then it starts to get interesting. You start asking people for help filling in major gaps or you have to go digging through censuses and draft cards and ship manifests. This can be fun. If you don’t get frustrated at this point and you have some success in your research, the tree continues to grow, and it can grow damn fast, especially if you connect with other users with a common ancestor. At some point you will hit dead ends, but rest assured that each successive generation doubles, whether or not you know who contributed to your genetic makeup or not. A lot of people had sex to make you.

It’s even easier to visualize this doubling of ancestors that occurs each successive generation with what’s called a fan chart. It’s basically a series of successive circles that start out small. You occupy the center circle, your two parents in the second circle, your four grandparents in the third, etc. Each successive layer gets exponentially larger, and by the time you reach your 10th great grandparents, 2,048 people constitute the makeup of your gene pool. Ten generations might not be that far back, either. There’s usually 3-5 generations in each 100 year period.

If we think about deeper time, at least as it pertains to our species, some people estimate that humans as we know it have been walking this earth for about 200,000 years. And if the average generation is 25 years, that means there have been something on the order of 8,000 generations that came before you. Other scientists estimate that humans have only been around 50,000 years and current estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on earth is about 100 billion. That’s 15 times the amount of people who are alive today. This fact inevitably left me with the feeling that researching my family’s heritage was little more than a fool’s errand.

Our egos may search for meaning in the past to help us define ourselves today, but we can only come back empty handed. By looking back, it’s my experience that we are not able to distill some powerful meaning out of our past from a handful of cultures or events or people we are blood relatives with. With any amount of time and reflection, we most often come to the realization that we are all beautifully diluted and that 99.9% of our makeup is the same genetic material as everyone else.

The point is, we are made up of the genetic code from a vast array of people, and every single one of those people lived a life of their own. Some of them were shitbags and some of them were saints and we’ll never know which were which or even who the vast majority of them were. Furthermore, no amount of historically significant information dug up on our relatives has any bearing on who we are today. We are our own accomplishments and failures, not theirs.  

Still, throughout all of my research on my family tree, whenever I’d hit a dead end, I found myself wondering what might have happened to that person so that they left no trace and no further information to be found. They probably had children who loved them and parents in turn who probably loved them as well. But the branch just goes quiet. I think this speaks to one of our greatest fears. That’s the fear of our own branch dying, going quiet, and being forgotten.

Most of us would like to be remembered after we die. I’m not really sure why, but it’s probably the ego again wishing for some small part of us to remain immortal. Unfortunately, history has shown us that the people who are most likely to be remembered are those who were in power, and I’m inclined to believe that the majority of what we think we know about those people has been fabricated.

For the rest of us, your great-great-great grandkids likely won’t even know what your name was, let alone anything about who you were as a person. I don’t write that to be mean, either. It’s meant to help unburden you from any sort of ego-driven daydream that anyone is going to care about you when you’re gone. And that’s okay.

Neither the past nor the future matter nearly as much as we think, and being mindful of how you spend your time right now is the essence of living a meaningful life, not worrying about your legacy.

On the flip side, sometimes people view you as their legacy, which can be just as difficult to deal with as letting go of your own feelings on this topic. When family is closely involved in our lives, I think it can sometimes be very difficult to live our highest and best self when we sacrifice the best parts of ourselves or our own potential for family just because they are our blood relatives (mom’s excluded – happy Mother’s Day!). Besides the potential for being a huge drain on your time and energy, families are notorious for either putting unreasonable expectations on us or not allowing us to change for the better by consistently reminding us of who we were in the past. For many of us, family might be the single greatest thing holding us back from personal growth. If you find that certain family members are taking more energy from you than they are putting back in, or it doesn’t feel like they’re respecting your life choices, it might be time to reevaluate whether or not you should be investing so much in your relationship with them instead of respecting and loving yourself.

It’s easy to get bogged down worrying about the past or dreaming about the future. If you find yourself anxious about either one, I’ve personally found mindfulness exercises really helpful, and you might too. I won’t go into details here, but there are a bunch of resources and information on the web and many of the techniques are easy and can be incorporated into your everyday life without too much hassle. I took a 10-week mindfulness meditation course a couple of years back and it changed my entire outlook on life in short order. I recommend it. There are also a handful of apps out there to help you learn some new techniques.

Also, don’t sign up for Ancestry.com. It’s a total rip off.

This post isn’t for the nurses and engineers or those lucky few among us in high demand positions who can basically land a job whenever and wherever they want. As admirable and necessary as those professions are, the world needs people from all walks of life and with all kinds of abilities and skillsets. From carpenters and artists to truck drivers and social workers, this post is for you. 

As someone who grew up in the wake of the post-industrial Midwest, I’ve had my fair share of struggle. I spent over half of my childhood in poverty and the majority of my twenties in crummy jobs and in even crummier cities. To be fair, there is a lot of good in the Midwest, and this post isn’t intended to rip on it. God knows it doesn’t need any more criticism. In fact, I’ve spent all of my professional career in the community development field, a lot of which was focused on trying to make those places better, and many of my closest friends are still working in those areas with the same goals. Things are getting better there and I commend the people who enjoy being there and working to improve it. 

The major problem, in my mind, is that economies are far more elastic than the built environment. By this I mean that when times are good and a place is growing economically, humans tend to build things. We build roads, schools, housing, and infrastructure. All of this is financed by good jobs, whether through the taxes we pay or through the loans we take out to pay for them. We pay our mortgages and the government pays back the bonds it used to build the bridges. The problem occurs when the jobs evaporate. When the jobs disappear, so does the funding to pay for things to be built or maintained. People move away out of necessity and this creates a lack of demand for housing which in turn reduces their value and thus the taxes taken in by government. Things fall apart. 

There is opportunity in the ashes. Cost of living generally goes down in these situations. If you’re lucky enough to have a good paying job, you can carve out a pretty good existence depending on where you’re willing to live and what you’re willing to endure. For instance, before moving to Portland I nearly bought a house in Michigan for $30,000. It needed a lot of work, but it was essentially habitable. The problem was that it wasn’t truly a place I wanted to live. I dreamed about moving away, but I couldn’t land a job elsewhere. I had resigned myself to making the best of a shitty situation. I was trying to look on the bright side. I dreamed up schemes where my cost of living was so low that I could basically go anywhere I wanted on vacations to help assuage the pain of being in a deep depression about where I lived. But that’s not what happened. There I was at 33 years old and hating my life primarily because of where I lived.  

It may be helpful for you to know that there’s a lot of literature out there in the urban planning and community development worlds, both from the popular periodicals (CityLab/The Atlantic) and in the academic journals that argue that people are choosing the places they’d like to live prior to even landing a job. The academics are saying that people are choosing where to live based on certain places having the amenities people want and need to enjoy a fulfilling life. A nightlife, recreational opportunities, cool places to buy a coffee, etc.

Along those lines, here in Portland the joke has been that young people move here to retire. And what people in the Midwest are trying to do is improve their cities so that people will move there, hopefully to create jobs, start families, buy houses and cars, and contribute to the betterment of the economy. Some of them call it “placemaking”. That term may come and go out of fashion, but another name will take its place that essentially means the same thing. The bottom line is that a lot of smart people have looked at successful places and are trying to recreate them to a certain extent. It’s become formulaic in that people believe the form of the built environment—the shape and structure of buildings and the public realm—influence people’s psychology enough to want to be there. It’s like feng shui for cities in a way. 

There’s a lot of truth to it, even anecdotally. Think about it: who wants to live in a slum or spend time in a desolate, ugly downtown? Not many people I know, unless they’re really into taking photos of post-apocalyptic economic collapse. With placemaking, we start to see vestiges of life in once lifeless places. Coffee shops and bars open up, sporadically at first. Community development funding helps building owners tear down the crappy 1970s facades to expose the ornamental brick underneath. Streetscapes are remade and bike lanes are installed. Trees are planted and warehouses are converted to lofts. Streets are rolled back and burned out houses are demolished. All admirable things. 

But the economic output just doesn’t increase the way it once did. At least not for awhile. Sure, the small businesses that employ an enormous amount of people come in, but they don’t bring in the same kind of prosperity that a Cadillac plant once did. What’s going on is that these places are in a slow transition period and have a lot more work to do. Those government officials will create slogans and brand their communities to try and make them seem cool and entice people to move there or to stay there. Hell, many of them are fabulously cool. But that doesn’t mean you should stay there. 

What I think goes unnoticed are the masses of people who are woefully underemployed. I’m talking about the folks with degrees working in restaurants because they can’t find anything else and the construction workers who get laid off every single year. The auto worker who is technically employed at a temp agency and gets half the wages of the regular employee. Like myself before I landed my first professional job at 29, there are a lot of factors to consider when thinking about what’s keeping these people in those situations. For some, it’s proximity to family. For others, they’ve never known anything else. For me, it was the fear of taking the leap without knowing if anywhere else would be different in terms of getting a job. I was fearful of leaving without having landed a position to have the most basic sense of security. 

How does this post have anything to do with minimalism and intentional living? Well, I’m writing this to let you know that you’re not alone if you’re struggling with being from a place that makes you feel like it doesn’t want you. Maybe you don’t see it on the surface, but you feel it when you can’t seem to get ahead in life no matter how hard you try. There may be structural issues at play beyond your control and the only way to correct it is to be as flexible as the economy that left you stranded. 

Of course there is personal responsibility at play as well. Education is a major factor in economic mobility. But there are places right now where there are shortages of workers. Maybe you should ask yourself what is holding you back? For me, it was fear. Fear of the unknown and fear of failure. But once I made the leap, so many things seemed to fall into place. My only regret is that I didn’t try it sooner. I took the safe route and wasted away years of my life in a place that made me feel like it didn’t want me. 

If there’s anything I’ve learned on my journey toward a more intentional lifestyle, it’s that if I would have refocused my priorities early on, I could have saved myself a lot of headaches. I think if I could do it all over again, and if I’d have known then what I know now, I would’ve pared down my possessions to the bare minimum, worked my ass off to pay off all of my debt, and then I would have just leapt for it. I would’ve lived out of my car if I had to and just gone for it. Maybe applied for some temp jobs or worked for Uber or whatever. 

I want you to know that if you did the same, you’d probably be okay. Honestly, you’ll probably be better than okay. The worst that could happen is that you have to go back to where you’re from. Your state loves you and it’s giving you away. If you have to go back, maybe it’s meant to be. 

I try to purchase as many of my household items as possible from thrift and second hand stores. In fact, I consider myself something of a thrifting master. I once bought a $5,000 stainless steel grill for $75 at the Habitat ReStore in Beaverton, OR. I think I must have inherited this gene from my grandmother, whose superhero qualities included going to garage sales to find stellar deals, and digging damaged items out of dumpsters and fixing them up.

I do my thrifting by frequenting second hand stores on my lunch breaks. I think there must be something to that whole ‘retail therapy’ thing, because it’s just something that I really enjoy doing, even if I don’t buy anything. It’s a time for me to clear my head and just let my creativity flow. But I think, more than anything, I enjoy it so much because it’s fascinating to me what others choose to discard. The whole experience is enlightening because it becomes pretty apparent really quickly what we collectively don’t value anymore, especially when some of the wares up for sale seemed ubiquitous or essential when they first arrived on the scene. TiVo readily comes to mind. 

Among the obsolete electronics, dated furniture, and home decor, there are the racks and racks of clothing, most of which was made cheaply by small hands in factories in far off lands. Our clothing has become as disposable as paper plates at a Memorial Day barbecue. And this just couldn’t be possible without the cheap labor that makes the end products so affordable, and thus more easily disposable. For more information on this, there is an excellent documentary you can watch on Netflix called ‘The True Cost‘.

That increase in clothing supply and cheap access has no doubt been a boon for nonprofit second hand clothing stores and the services they provide. Putting aside my own judgments as best I can, I’m sure the outcome of this cheap clothing economy has also been a much welcomed reprieve by those relatively less financially fortunate Americans among us who want to feel the sense of normalcy and belonging that can come with wearing certain types of clothing, as fleeting as that feeling can be. Although I care very little about branding outside of it sometimes being helpful in predicting the likelihood of buying a durable product, I recognize that this is a privileged perspective to have. Growing up in a low-income household, there weren’t many things more important to me at the time than just feeling like I was normal, that I belonged, and few things had the power to equalize me amongst my more fortunate peers than a new pair of Nikes, for example.

Not too long ago, I found some of those same wants and desires from childhood finding their way out again, and they began leading me down a rabbit hole. I started picking up clothing from thrift stores on a weekly basis. Before long, my closet was completely full. But what I found was not only did I not feel more fulfilled, I actually felt a negative impact on my life.

The thing is, I wasn’t really saving any money by ‘thrifting’. I was under the illusion that since I was spending less per item that I was actually saving money. But all those small purchases added up to more than I would spend on just a handful of high quality things. On top of this, mornings were stressful because I had a more difficult time deciding what to wear because I had more in my closet. Laundry day was also an enormous hassle because I could let my clothes pile up because I had more clean clothes to wear. This year I finally said enough is enough and cleared out about 90% of my wardrobe.

Although my partner sometimes gets annoyed with me because I have a tendency to leave things in the dryer since I wear the same things over and over, laundry day is now a breeze. It’s usually a one and done scenario, unless we’re doing towels or bedding. Mornings are a lot smoother as well, and I generally alternate between wearing 2 different colored pairs of dress pants to work Monday through Thursday, and I wear my favorite pair of jeans on Fridays. I have probably 10 dress shirts, a handful of really comfortable t-shirts, a couple of hoodies and sweaters, and a few pairs of shorts, but that’s about it. Oh, and I got rid of all but my most worn pairs of shoes. I have a brown pair of work shoes, one black and one brown pair of dress shoes, a pair of running shoes, 2 pairs of casual shoes, and a pair of sandals. That may sound like a lot, but I use all 7 regularly as each pair has an intended purpose.

So now when I go to the thrift store, I am more deliberate about what I pick up. I’m usually on a mission for something very specific, but if I run across an item that I really like, I will usually skip it unless it’s an upgrade to something I already have. In that situation, I do a 1-for-1 swap in my wardrobe. Life has been a lot simpler ever since.

Since 2013 I have lived in seven different places. You’d think with all of that experience that I’d have moving down to a science. But every time, without fail, I’d view the experience of packing with such dread that I’d procrastinate until the very last minute. I’d putz around, packing some things away, but I’d easily get distracted by some sentimental item I would come across and ponder it for awhile, or I’d just get frustrated and look around and think, “how did I get so much crap?” Usually on the last weekend of my lease I’d end up in a mad scramble, throwing everything that was left in the apartment into boxes, completely unorganized. It was chaos. 

In July of 2016, I purchased my first home and moved out of the 500 sq. ft. apartment I was renting in downtown Portland. I wish I could say it was a different experience moving out of my apartment, but it wasn’t. What was different, however, was how I decided to move into my house.

My friend Justin came down from Seattle to help me move, but instead of dragging everything into the house immediately, I only brought in the essentials. What little furniture I had, some of my clothes, toiletries, and kitchenware. Over the course of the next six months, I brought things in from the garage as I needed them. I left the boxes open and just periodically took from them the items that proved to be the most useful. Sure, it was a little messy in the garage at times. A mouse even ate my favorite suit. But it became apparent pretty quickly what things were bringing the most value to my life and those that were just dead weight.

For the last several months, I have been ridding the garage of the stuff I haven’t been using. Donating things that others might find useful, recycling what I can, and trashing the rest. It’s been really challenging at times because I didn’t fully realize how much of the clutter was due to how attached I’m capable of becoming to things, even if I haven’t really used or needed them in a really long time. Those items that remain are mostly sentimental, but what I have left seems really manageable. I think I will be mostly done by the end of this month. 

I’m also starting to feel my outlook changing whenever I’m deciding whether or not to buy something new. I didn’t get myself into a cluttered situation overnight. It took years and years of unchecked accumulation to get there. But the last thing I want to do is start the whole process over again.

I’m considering getting rid of my Amazon Prime account because I’m just not ordering much these days to even make the $10.99/mo for free shipping worth it anymore. And when I’m at a store, I find myself seriously questioning the purchases I make, and being more intentional about what I bring into my space. The first thing I ask myself is whether or not the thing I’m looking at is a want or a need. If it is a need, the second question is usually, “how much useful life am I going to get out of this thing?”

I probably won’t be moving again for a long time, and it’s a little bit ironic that it took putting down some roots in a larger space to finally declutter.  But I have to say, it’s been really freeing, and I can feel my stress level decrease just a little bit more every time I take the donation box down to the second hand store. 

If you find yourself getting stressed out thinking about an upcoming move, I challenge you not to move out the way I did. Look around and take an honest inventory of what things you are getting regular use out of and those things that aren’t bringing you as much value anymore. I bet if you lighten your load, the move won’t be nearly as bad. It will just feel better, because being lighter feels good.