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Holding my book

My book arrived today. It feels wonderful to hold it in my hands! 

The story of the book goes back to 2016 when I began working on my PhD. I was based in a business school in England (they covered the fees, which, looking back, was not ideal as it made me very dependent for 4 years). I wanted my academic work to be in line with my worldview. By the time I began my PhD journey, I had been practising voluntary simplicity for many years. I immediately gravitated towards ecological economics and degrowth. At that time, there wasn't much about degrowth and business. So I asked myself: what should business be like for a degrowth society to be possible? Eventually it resulted in a PhD thesis that was a monograph and some articles such as my Degrowth business framework: Implications for sustainable development. Looking back, I wish I did some things differently. But back then it made sense to start with a general idea. I remember having disagreements with the supervisors about using the word I. It makes me smile now.  

I didn't want to turn my PhD thesis into a book. It's available online freely anyway. Different humans of course see their PhD journey differently. Perhaps to some it makes sense to get more out of a PhD thesis than I did. For me, it was about becoming, growing, trying. I wanted to give myself some years after my PhD to find my own style, to dive deeper into the topic, to feel more confident about doing science the way I wanted to do it. I had so much growing to do. I was educated in mainstream economics, where statistics and higher maths played an important role. I liberated myself from positivist approaches only towards the end of my masters studies. It took me a long time to bring together my life and my research. 

After my PhD, I moved to Sweden. Then to Finland and Denmark. While I was mainly researching businesses and theorising degrowth transformations, I also began doing autoethnography as a small, personal project. I wrote about my mode of living that is perhaps unusual in this society in many ways. For example, I live with 10 items of clothing, less than 50 personal possessions. This autoethnographic work was initially a side project, but then it became increasingly important to me. I also began to notice how my life and research of businesses intertwined. Much deeper than I initially thought. When I realised that, I decided that my book will be written in a place-based, autoethnographic way. A fellow human from Routledge approached me in the beginning of 2023 and asked me if I was planning to write a book. And so I stepped on this path. By the time I started working on the book, so much had already crystallised in my mind. I only had to convert all of it into paragraphs. 

I never intended this book to be a literature review of degrowth and business. After my PhD, I realised that literature reviews are not my style. There are excellent literature reviews around, and I know that some are on the way too. Since my first article about degrowth and business came out in 2020, many fellow humans (especially masters and PhD students!) reached out to me asking me about doing a similar research. I always encouraged them to do it, and they are doing some wonderful research. I thought that I would not be contributing much if I was reviewing literatures too (something that I did a lot of when I was working on my PhD). I also noticed that inspiration came from so many different sources. From nature, from elderly persons outside academia. I could not include these amazing, deep insights if I was doing a systematic literature review. It still feels uncommon to "cite" a stone or an elderly relative. 

I wanted to write a book in a way that is place-based (I've lived in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden), organic, raw, gentle, and imperfect. At times even repetitive perhaps. It had to read like an email to a friend or a conversation with a fellow human (not necessarily an academic). I wanted it to be playful. There is my grandmother in the Index and a quote from my partner's father. I wanted fellow humans to see how social science is intimate and personal. How one's approach to science goes back to one's childhood. I never wanted to over interpret (or even interpret) what the businesspersons were saying. At times, when I think about degrowth theories (including my co-authored one), bringing about a degrowth future seems simple, despite us saying that it is complex. I wanted to show how messy things really are. I didn't want to present businesspersons as enemies of degrowth, but as fellow humans who are at once our neighbours, mothers and fathers, students, friends. 

I was working on this book while so many things were unfolding in my personal life. My partner and I were stepping on the path of being together. I resigned from my position in Finland. I moved to Denmark. Then my partner and I got engaged. And then we started family planning. On some occasions I thought I should sort things out before continuing working on this book. But then I decided against it. 

I dedicated this book to Mother Nature. 

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 Things I "need"

I'm feeling overwhelmed by all the things I supposedly need for planning a pregnancy and for being pregnant. The first thing my partner's mother mentioned to us when we told her about planning a family was a car seat. We don't even have a car! Something that the NHS (British national healthcare service) whose advice I read (I'm a British citizen) recommends is taking folic acid. I'm a social scientist and not a medical doctor, so I decided to follow their advice. I bought some folic acid tablets in glass jars. While looking for this supplement, I realised how enormous the market selling stuff to those who plan a pregnancy and are pregnant is. It's always been something I've avoided because I didn't even think that planning a family would be an option for me, considering how insecure most academic jobs are. Now I've become aware of this market. I find it difficult to talk with fellow humans, at times even including my partner, about this market and all the stuff that I need and that our future baby will need. Some items seem to be useful or even essential, but many seem to be absolutely unnecessary clutter. My partner says to me that I need to see the act of buying these things as an act of trying to be good parents that many fellow humans perform. That is to say, they buy these things because they care, not to serve capitalism. He tells me about his own experiences of having his first child, about a dedicated changing table, dozens of pacifiers, diapers, toys, cloths, clothing, things that entered his, his ex partner's and the child's life via the child's grandparents, neighbours, and friends. And yet, my intuition tells me to avoid many of these things. I get the same feeling when I think about the categories of products I personally avoid, such as jewellery, makeup, occasion wear. These things are supposed to make me feel more beautiful and confident (or so is the manufacturers' and marketers' message!), but I feel that they only separate me from nature. I am reminded of a wonderful colleague of mine who once mentioned that she used to play with pieces of fabric as a child. I am reminded of myself when I was little. I played with cardboard boxes, shoes, shoe laces, smooth pieces of wood, and later with my grandmother's jewellery and sea shells. 

I don't want a nursery, a lot of storage and storage solutions, small pieces of furniture (change table, book display), small things that feel so useless (e.g., hangers for baby clothes). Fellow humans say that I will see how useful such things are when I have a child. Perhaps I will. But my experience of my own consumption is that many of the things I was supposed to have were not useful at all or even affected me negatively. I feel that this market's strategy is to make me feel incomplete, lacking in something, dysfunctional as an animal, as a biological body. That I cannot walk without these particular shoes, cannot sleep without this particular pillow, cannot entertain my baby without these particular things.