Beer has always been popular in our country, but always in different ways. It’s an old story to discuss the recent dominance of microbreweries over macrobreweries. The shift that we’ve seen in the last few years has gone even further. Now, even microbreweries are giving way to smaller craft breweries, and because of this trend, never in the history of our country has beer been more of an artisanal practice. This is quite an occasion.

Quite an occasion, because this example provides us with an excellent gauge for how our culture now approaches work. We can all see consumers trying to shift from quantity to quality. Toyota’s CEO recently said that their failure in manufacturing was because they had become more concerned with profit margin than with creating a quality product — ironic, since the highest quality products are starting to take in the most profit. We are becoming (we hope) more intelligent consumers who buy less crap and look for more efficient products.

How astonishingly refreshing that the CEO of a giant company would admit that they were more concerned with profit than their product — and express a (hopefully honest) desire to do something to change that. We’ve all known this was the common corporate modus operandi for years now. Watkins goes on to quote Dorothy Sayers talking about work (in the context of WWII, but very applicable to modern day):

The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work — our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure — and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people. We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it good?” . . . not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: “What goes into the beer?”

Wastefulness: Kohl’s gives stewardship of our environment a lot of attention. They recycle cardboard, paper and plastic, lights are on timers or motion sensors and a number of stores run on solar power (all of which is not just good stewardship, but smart business). However, as a highly trained professional [box unloader] I get to see first hand how ridiculously some of the merch is packaged by the manufacturers for shipping to the stores.

Some of the objects I so professionally unbox — though not most in my opinion — warrant very careful packing. Damage during shipping is not good business. There are a select few of the items I so professionally unpack that are wrapped in plastic, inserted into styrofoam, taped together, put in a box and then put in another box represent what I’ve come to see as an endemic wastefulness in American culture (Granted, some of these things maybe packaged in China.).

What I can’t figure out is why a manufacturer would do this. A company would be more profitable (which of course is the end-all in our corporate cultures) if they didn’t purchase superfluous packaging and then pay wages to the person who’s packing up the products. I don’t understand; any company worth its salt will have researched just how many packing peanuts or layers of bubble wrap are required to protect their products during shipping. So maybe I’m wrong about these objects being excessively wrapped and taped and styrofoamed.

But I don’t think so.

Management: Management and coworkers make all the difference, and Dilbert is much too close to the truth in so many of our workplaces. I already knew this and so did you, but it’s worth repeating. So many people I know work retail jobs they are not very happy with, mainly because of the attitudes and ignorance of their managers and coworkers. The people I work with happen to be very easy to get along with and quite helpful, to customers and other employees. Proverbs chapter 17 reminds us that “Better is a dry morsel and quietness with it than a house full of feasting with strife.”

Consumerism: The retail world screams materialism, consumerism to me. It’s somewhat ironic in my mind that I’m working retail at all, as an aspiring artist who plugs all things handmade.

In and of itself, mass production — and big box retailers which seem to have grown out of the assembly line — isn’t evil. Finding ways to work more efficiently is, I think, virtuous. So much of the industrial and technological revolutions, though, end up as integral parts of our daily lives before any of us stop to think about how they will change us as individuals and as a culture. Any potential consequences be damned in favor of progress (whatever that really is) and the almighty dollar!

Buy-in: As a bit of a side note, I’ve been surprised that nothing has allowed me to really buy into Kohl’s as an employee. I suppose this isn’t something a lot of people working part-time retail jobs expect at their workplace, but I’m learning that I’m the kind of guy who wants to be involved mentally, not just as a grunt.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the grunt work. It’s actually nice to be on my feet a little after a few years behind a desk for eight hours a day. But I’d like a deeper reason to be involved with the company, and so far it hasn’t presented itself.

“The things you own end up owning you.” — Tyler Durden, Fight Club

In high school I became a collector of stuff, mostly decorative objects found at garage sales or hauled out of trash heaps. This practice was in line with my architectural (slash interior design) aspirations, but after a year in college I realized the vanity of so many objects.

So early in my college career I began to cultivate a minimalist aesthetic that has largely stuck with me since graduation. It’s difficult to pull off, though, in a materialistic culture supersaturated with advertisements and run by Washington bureaucrats whose idea of good times seems to revolve solely around the health of a consumerist economy.

Materialism, stuff, a minimalist aesthetic remains on my mind after our move of three months ago. We went from 1,500 square feet of living space to around 500, not including a shared kitchen, bathroom and office. Every so often I find myself looking around again, wondering what we might be able to do without. A multitude of dishes and decorative items remain in boxes. How much of this stuff is worth schlepping around? How much of the unpacked stuff is worth keeping around?

It seems to me this is a more difficult question to answer for craftsmen and women. We are wired to create objects, thus objects potentially have more meaning for us than, say, accountants or fishermen. Furthermore, we often own a slew of tools related to our craft. In some ways these objects are in a different class than what we put in our house, except for the fact that many of us don’t have spaces outside of our home for a shop or studio.

This morning I read a good article on a blog called The Art of Manliness titled Go Small or Go Home: In praise of minimalism. The author quotes Leo Babauta’s answer to the question “What is the minimalist lifestyle?”

It’s one that is stripped of the unnecessary, to
make room for that which gives you joy.

It’s a removal of clutter in all its forms,
leaving you with peace and freedom and
lightness.

A minimalist eschews the mindset of more, of
acquiring and consuming and shopping, of
bigger is better, of the burden of stuff.

A minimalist instead embraces the beauty of
less, the aesthetic of spareness, a life of
contentedness in what we need and what
makes us truly happy.

A minimalist realizes that acquiring stuff
doesn’t make us happy. That earning more
and having more are meaningless. That
filling your life with busy-ness and
freneticism isn’t desirable, but something to
be avoided.

A minimalist values quality, not quantity, in
all forms.

The first and last points in Babauta’s list resonate with me. These are things I’ve realized, that overkill kills the potential for joy and quality is more important than quantity. Overkill I’ve yet to get control of in life, but the value of quality is already present.

So what is unnecessary in my life right now that needs to be done away with? What is truly important? I’ve already culled a number of blogs from my feed reader in an attempt to refine my daily news and reading time. In place of that I’ve been trying to go through part of the Daily Office every morning.

Before doing away with too many things, however, I probably need to focus on setting some attainable short and long-term goals. I’ve never been good at this. I’m much more a live in the moment type of guy. I have come to realize the value of setting a certain direction for your life though. Our culture presents us with never-ending distractions that must be tamed. It also steers us into a certain kind of workaholism; productivity becomes a cult we’re expected to aspire to.

Setting [realistic] goals will help me determine what is unnecessary.

The author of the Art of Manliness post concludes by giving us

Leo Babauta’s Principles of Living the Minimalist Life

1. Omit needless things. Notice this doesn’t say to omit everything. Just needless things.

2. Identify the essential. What’s most important to you? What makes you happy? What will have the highest impact on your life, your career?

3. Make everything count. Whatever you do or keep in your life, make it worthy of keeping. Make it really count.

4. Fill your life with joy. Don’t just empty your life. Put something wonderful in it.

5. Edit, edit. Minimalism isn’t an end point. It’s a constant process of editing, revisiting, editing some more.

I would add the following:

6. Hold on loosely. Even to your prized possessions. At the end of the day its relationships, not possessions, that make life worth living.

I had hopes of finishing at least one sculpture. Hopes were postponed when my brother called to tell me about some wooden boxes at the Salvation Army. The boxes are from a heater company in Central City, Nebraska. I’m assuming these are the scratch and dent models; the Army was given 300 of them and charged customers like me $2 a pop. Can’t buy the lumber for that.

This is a modular storage system — I screwed four boxes together to create 6 2×2 units — for my wife‘s yarn. Some modification was required, although that was fairly easy. Puttying and painting took up most of my weekend. I’m kinda worn out, but I guess that’s what labor does to a guy. The front edges may be redone in the future, and I’ll add backs to them at some point as well, but they function for the time being. I couldn’t just buy the boxes and not work on the project right away though; they took up too much space in the studio.

The white cabinet in the middle I made, mostly from salvaged wood, including the doors, salvaged from a remodel job round-about 2004. Her stash quickly outgrew it.

• I don’t know. Maybe through some false, Puritanical idea that work should be cheerless drudgery? That if you’re enjoying it too much, it’s not really “work”?
• I think it depends on whom you’re talking to. Great societies need art as well as industry and politics (Actually, do we really need politics?). I, for one, would love to quilt or knit, but I’ll apparently have to wait for Heaven to succeed at those arts.
• Arts and Crafts aren’t considered “work” because people can do them as hobbies or in their spare time and don’t realize that (perhaps) there is a great amount of craftsmanship and skill in what you do than in (perhaps) what I do, when I’m not punching a clock. The correct answer is, “Paul, we’d all love to do what we love to do but have to punch a clock and it’s more fun to mock you than to say, ‘I’m jealous.’” I’m not jealous of your vocation but I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to do what I loved either.
• Probably for a similar reason that being a “homemaker & mother” is not considered “real work” — because it doesn’t bring in the bread.

Through the course of these responses, I began to wonder if part of this cultural sentiment might also result from the underlying and powerfully subconscious underpinnings of our mass producing consumerist culture. The value of handmade has, perhaps, been relegated to the status of hobby because such objects don’t make significant contributions to national statistics. They don’t pay homage to the god of the economy. They don’t create enough of the right kind of jobs.

The value of imagination, beauty, leisure, philosophy and so forth also fall short of the god of efficiency’s standards, all of which often tie into the arts. These things take time out of an otherwise productive life and are generally frowned upon by American society.

Those are the beginnings of my thoughts anyway, and I’d be interested in hearing more from readers.

If I recall correctly, and I may not, returns and refunds on retail merchandise were not all that common even when I was a kid (ie, the 80s). I’m wondering how much the freedom to return schtuff we schlep home from big box stores, et al, plays into a materialistic and consumerist mindset. It seems to me we might be more careful with how we spend our hard earned clams if we knew we couldn’t so easily take them back.

Instead, we know we can return items to that magical place called Customer Service. We lose sight of our purchasing priorities and buy little bits of this and little bits of those that turn into garages you can’t park your car in which morph into mini storage units.

And Wall Street celebrates.

I’m not necessarily suggesting returns are a bad thing. In fact, it seems to be one of the few outward manners in which businesses still value their customers. I’m just wondering if the option doesn’t exacerbate our problematic consumerist culture.

And secondly, an excerpt from The Suburban Nation (pages 117-118):

The plight of the suburban housewife was powerfully conveyed in a letter we received in 1990 from a woman living outside of Tulsa:

Dear Architects:

I am a mother of four children who are not able to leave the yard because of our city’s design. Ever since we have moved here I have felt like a caged animal only let out for a ride in the car. It is impossible to walk even to the grocery store two blocks away. If our family wants to go for a ride we need to load two cars with four bikes and a baby cart and drive four miles to the only bike path in this city of over a quarter million people. I cannot exercise unless I drive to a health club that I had to pay $300 to, and that is four and a half miles away. There is no sense of community here on my street, either, because we all have to drive around in our own little worlds that take us fifty miles a day to every corner of the surrounding five miles.

I want to walk somewhere so badly that I could cry. I miss walking! I want the kids to walk to school. I want to walk to the store for a pound of butter. I want to take the kids on a neighborhood stroll or bike. My husband wants to walk to work because it is so close, but none of these things is possible…And if you saw my neighborhood, you would think that I had it all according to the great American dream.

The two-room Boeing 727 suite is part of the Costa Verde Resort in Manuel Antonia, Costa Rica. Rates range from $300-$350 a night.

In February, The inhabitat blog reported on a Boeing 747 turned into a hostel for visitors to Stockholm. As if I needed another reason to visit the land of my (and my wife’s) ancestors,m a land full of good design, generally speaking.

The retired jumbo jet rests at the Stockholm-Arlanda airport. Tthe Jumbo Hostel‘s offers a variety of rooms ranging from 350-3300 SEK (~ $40-$400). A conference room is available for rent as well. I think the next Mission Data International board retreat should be held there (in case my boss is reading this).

She also has an older post that talks a little more about smoke firing titled Smoke Firing. I talk about my process in this post from last July. The following is one of her recent works titled The Abduction, after a Swedish fairy tale. I quite like the coloring on the piece, and give her props for the use of salvaged materials in the base and post.

I think I’m going to have to find myself a barrel and try this smoking method out. It looks much more fun and is probably cheaper than running the kiln to smoke. The only trick to barrel smoking for me could be locally enforced burn bans we suffer from in Northwest Arkansas on a fairly regular basis.

The only thing I recall taking issue with in the video is his use of the term zero carbon. Sure, the resulting vehicle may not create any emissions as it’s used, but the invisible elephant is still in the room. The steel, plastic and batteries for that vehicle still have to be manufactured, and the plant they are manufactured in likely still uses coal power.

(For what it’s worth, when I toured a coal fired power plant in grade school I was told that, if it it was operating properly, no smoke ever floated out of the premises. What we see coming out the stacks should be steam. If this is true — and a lot of people seem to think it isn’t — the problem with coal power isn’t that it pollutes, it’s that it’s a finite fossil fuel.)

And even if we get those factories switched over to sustainable power such as wind and solar, zero impact on the environment is not a reality. Ever. Which I’ve pointed out before. We’ll still mine the earth for raw materials to create turbines and solar panels out of. We’ll still need to dispose of turbines, batteries and solar panels when they wear out. There will still be detractors who point out the environmental impact of these new energy sources, such as how wind power apparently desertifies surrounding landscapes.

I’ve said this already and I’ll say it again. Subduing the earth, as we humans were instructed to do, will always have some kind of result that some person will see as negative. Our goal, thus, is to always strive to be better stewards of the planet.