Why don’t we have presidential candidates like this?

Producing garbage, shallow choices, and October course offerings

Last week I read a NYTimes interview with José Mujica, former President of Uruguay. In his 20s, he was leftist guerrilla, was captured and imprisoned for 15 years including 10 years in solitary confinement where he befriended rats and a frog ; and, upon the overthrow of the dictatorship that held him, became president and helped lead the transformation of Uruguay into one of the world’s healthiest and most socially liberal democracies. During his time as president, he declined the presidential palace to live in a tiny tin-roof shack outside the city with his wife and three-legged dog.

In April, at 89, Mujica announced he had esophageal cancer and may not survive. This are parts of his interview with the NY Times, along with my commentary.

We make garbage and work in pain

I think that humanity, as it’s going, is doomed.

We waste a lot of time uselessly. We can live more peacefully. Take Uruguay. Uruguay has 3.5 million people. It imports 27 million pairs of shoes. We make garbage and work in pain. For what?

American population (333 million) purchased a total of 2.68 billion pairs of shoes in 2022.  That’s 8 pairs of shoes per year. On average, an American consumer spends $735 annually on shoes. Americans buy 53 new items of clothing per year — four times as much as in the year 2000.

Are we throwing away 8 pairs of shoes every year, or we stacking them up in our closets, like Imelda Marcoses, glorifying in our “abundance?” How can we buy and use up 53 items of clothes every single year, once per week?

“The first and most sacred commandment (of capitalism) is: The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.” — Yuval Noah Harari

This is consumption run amok. 99% of what we buy is not used 6 months later. As former FF1 student Sterling Roth put it, we spend our lives working to produce garbage.

You’re free when you escape the law of necessity

You’re free when you escape the law of necessity — when you spend the time of your life on what you desire. If your needs multiply, you spend your life covering those needs.

Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives.

Humanity needs to work less, have more free time and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car? Change the refrigerator?

There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth.

[I believe humanity can] change. But the market is very strong. It has generated a subliminal culture that dominates our instinct. It’s subjective. It’s unconscious. It has made us voracious buyers. We live to buy. We work to buy. And we live to pay. Credit is a religion. So we’re kind of screwed up.

We are good-hearted, loving people making shallow choices.

We mistake wealth for happiness.

We mistake sensation for contentment.

We live with infinite “needs” so we think we need to consume more things to stay alive. But we’re wrong. Again, 53 items of clothes per year, four times more than 2000. If we took even an hour to think about it, we’d realize it’s all so senseless.

We’re the ones who are not ready

What meaning can we give to life? Man, compared to other animals, has the ability to find a purpose.

Or not. If you don’t find it, the market will have you paying bills the rest of your life.

If you find it, you will have something to live for. Those who investigate, those who play music, those who love sports, anything. Something that fills your life.

It’s not the phone’s fault. We’re the ones who are not ready. We make a disastrous use of it. Children walk around with a university in their pocket. That’s wonderful. However, we have advanced more in technology than in values.

Nothing replaces this. (He gestures at the two of us talking.) This is nontransferable. We’re not only speaking through words. We communicate with gestures, with our skin. Direct communication is irreplaceable.

Mujica is talking about similar things as I’ve been writing this summer: that in capitalism we’re so busy with frenetic activity. In the meanwhile, we could be doing nothing, scamping, enjoying analog leisure, finding beauty in the moment. We’re hustling, self-improving, “growing”, all to heal the core wound of unworthiness. The crazy Keyser Soze twist is that the one telling the story, the ego, is also the culprit.

Why don’t we have presidential candidates like Jose Mujica? Election season is upon us and no candidate talks about the endless garbage we produce, the senseless work we do, the emptiness of this consumer culture that we think will continue to infinity. Whoever we elect in November will continue the same old shit, sending us further down this environmental hole. And we can’t blame “the system,” we got what we asked for: political and economic processes that gives us more instead of enough. It’s all so senseless. The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.

Put another way, could we elect someone like Jose Mujica?

Nothing is going to change until we grow up.

“Behind the multiparty system in reality is still the tyranny of capitalist corporations” —Nguyen Phu Trong, recently deceased leader of Vietnam

Courses in October

I’m teaching another FF1 cohort in October/November. If you want to take control of your finances to live the life you want, consider signing up. With cohorts getting smaller, I think I’m going to run it twice more at most: this October and perhaps in January. Think about taking it soon!

For those of you who have taken FF1 (about a third of this mailing list!), or consider your finances good, consider taking Money and Meaning: The Course. It’s a course on non-improvement, a 8 week contemplative community about finding the sources of our not-enoughness (53 items of clothing per year!), the sources of our enoughness, and, like Mr. Mujica talks about, the true “value” of our lives. Very little reading, very little screen time. My goal is to help you participate in grace: deep dialogue with others, contemplation with yourself, and ease.

Write me with any questions you have about the course and I’ll answer them in the newsletter next week!

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” — James Baldwin