360

 Holes

I live with 10 items of clothes. 2 pairs of sweatpants, 2 pairs of shorts, 2 linen shirts, and basic tops. Every day, I wear a uniform. Not because I have to, but because I want to take part in normalising looking casual every day, disregarding fashion trends, wearing the same thing every day. I believe that what we wear and do carries a political message, a message about the world we want to see, our values. As an academic researching and writing about genuine sustainability, I do not want to make a fashion or a status statement, to look "successful" and different to my students. 

There are good aspects of living with less clothes. Everything I live with fits me. I like all the items I live with equally. Everything I live with is either beige, off-white, or grey. So I can wash all these clothes together. My reasons for living with 10 items of clothes are ecological, ideological, spiritual, and aesthetic. There are also downsides of living with less. At times, it attracts criticism. The main points of critique are me not doing enough "to attract men" (that's right), and me not "claiming power/authority over my students". The first point of critique is infuriating. The second point of critique shows that my values and the speaker's values are very different. I do not see it as part of my job to claim power. I see my job as em-powering students. As an anarchist, I do not believe in hierarchies and I want to do my best to make the student-teacher hierarchy flat. Apart from critique that doesn't affect me much, but that could affect another person in my position, there is another downside to living with very few items. They wear out. In our materially wealthy society, one sees worn out clothes (e.g., in a workplace) very rarely. Fellow humans replace worn out items quickly. Or fashion trends change, and items are being discarded/recycled/donated far before they reach the end of their life. If I replaced my clothes every time they showed a sign of wear (developed holes, had small stains on them), my practice would not be sustainable. I would have to shop often, and this is something I do my best to avoid. I want to mention that the linen shirt that developed holes was not from a fast-fashion company. It is good quality, and I bought it a while ago to replace a sweatshirt that I wore almost every day in northern Sweden and that developed many holes. I bought a shirt instead of a sweatshirt because I was moving south (from northern Sweden to southern Finland). I wore this shirt almost every day, so the signs of wear are not surprising. 

Some holes I repair, but others I just let be. In the case of this shirt, the holes are mainly on the back, and there are thinned out patches of material, probably due to wearing a heavy backpack. I will let these holes be. I want this item to communicate that it's ok to wear old items, and that one's capacities for love, care, creativity, empathy, solidarity and so on (everything that actually matters) do not diminish if one wears a shirt with holes. 

In the long term, I will not replace this item because I am on a path towards greater simplicity, and a shirt has too many elements and details (collar, buttons, etc.). 

One might think that this is such a trivial matter, that it doesn't deserve attention when severe ecological degradation is unfolding, when we urgently need change in our systems. I believe that small, everyday actions matter, they contribute to change in culture and change in our systems. It might be surprising but my fellow humans from all walks of life often ask me about small, everyday practices. 

359

Modvækst

Recently, this book (in Danish) was brought to my attention. I love how it presents degrowth (degrowth is modvækst in Danish, literally counter-growth): "Dette navn (Modvækst) signalerer to betydninger. For det første at vi opfatter os som en modstandsbevægelse, der kæmper mod det herskende vækst-paradigme. For det andet at vi arbejder på at fremme en vækst i modsat retning af den herskende, dvs. en vækst i alt det, som trædes under fode af det nuværende paradigme, altså f.eks. natur, livskvalitet, nærvær, fællesskab, omsorg, solidaritet – kort sagt de basale livsværdier". It presents degrowth as signalling two meanings: opposition to the prevailing growth paradigm and growth in everything that the current paradigm disregards or works against (e.g., nature, community, care, quality of life). This definition is similar to how my co-author (who is also my partner) and I conceptualise degrowth. We see it as a dialectic of less and more. We believe that degrowth should emphasise reduction and growth at the same time. Thinking about degrowth as a dialectic encourages us to contemplate, for example, what all the bad aspects of social being need to be replaced with and what would help us transcend or eliminate the bad, i.e., what would help us counter growth. Many fellow humans, including students, businesspersons and fellow practitioners of voluntary simplicity/zero-waste that I've met feel sorrow about degrowth criticising something (e.g., capitalism, ecological degradation - and rightly so), but not offering alternatives. My feeling is that this has changed somewhat in more recent years, but these efforts are still insufficient. For example, inner being is not discussed enough. There are few proposals for transformed academia. 

Spending time with the book I mentioned above made me think about languages other than English and how much knowledge exists in other languages. There is a scholar at my current university who chose to write most of his works in Danish. From a conventional perspective, this is not a good strategy. In academia, I believe, most humans know how to succeed. Publish in English, in highly ranked journals, do not waste your time on independent journals and writing books, collaborate with big names. It's wonderful to see fellow humans intentionally going against this. Of course there are consequences of doing things differently, and I feel so much awe when I think about fellow humans who accept these consequences and try to use their agency to make the world a better place.

In the picture above is just a simple, organic cotton net bag. I use it for everything. Storage, as a hand bag, for groceries, when I travel. I think its simplicity makes it incredibly beautiful. It is also relatively inexpensive (this one was around DKK 40, I bought it from a small, independent shop here in Denmark). It doesn't signal status. I hope that in a degrowth society there will be a growing appreciation for simplicity. Simple clothes, simple food, simpler access to education, healthcare, housing and other services.