It is rather awful.
What I keep hearing as an answer to myself when I think of living a homesteading life while having a million dollars in the bank, is that "it's fake."
I mentioned this feeling of "it's fake" when I first started posting here, in regard to acting as if I was wealthy. And somebody suggested I take a look at that feeling, but I don't know where to go with it.
I've been immersed for so long in the world of environmental Greenpeace types, old hippies, back-to-the-landers, somehow that seems 'real' while doing it with a million bucks behind us feels 'fake.'
Like Al Gore seems fake, with his carbon offsets.
It's fake because if you have all that money, you don't have to homestead. You don't have to live that way. You can live abundantly. And then the thought I get is "wasteful."
Steve addressed this really well in one of his blogs. I do have issues with it though. To me a $10,000 hotel room is extremely wasteful, because I see absolutely no benefit to it. It doesn't matter if I have 300 trillion dollars, a $10,000 hotel room is still wasteful. You could get a $500 hotel room and give $9,500 to the homeless shelter.
A girlfriend and I once spent a weekend in a city because we were participating in some environmental protest or another. And there was some giant convention there and so the only hotel room we could get was in a penthouse which had an open free bar and gigantic appetizer buffet for about five hours in the evening. You had to have a key to use the elevator to get to this floor.
We spent the days at the environmental protest with a bunch of people who were driving cars that barely ran and were probably living in apartments with lawn furniture. And so we felt wasteful going back to our hotel at night.
There's also a thought of, "Oh sure, it's easy for you. You have all that money."
Like if I have a million dollars in the bank and I set up a homestead with giant gardens and got immersed in canning/preserving, off-grid energy, and so on . . . "Oh sure, it's easy for you, you have all that money."
Man, I don't know how to get around this. People speak of limiting beliefs as being programmed by others when they were young, but I programmed myself and that seems to make it even harder to break free of it.  |