ONE of the many things that puts me off pets or children is the amount of stuff they come with.
You can't enter the home of an infant or animal without treading accidentally on something soft (a catnip mouse, a teddy bear, a collapsed exhausted mother) or painfully hard (a squeaky toy, Lego, a collapsed exhausted mother).
Having dependents seems to muddy the mind. "I need a car," I've heard parents say. Almost no-one needs a car. In fact, humanity as a whole appears to have forgotten that we need very little; that want and need are distinct.
Attempting to teach this lesson is Jeff Wilson, a dean of Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. Like the modern day old woman who lived in a shoe, Wilson is the professor who lived in a dumpster. I'm not sure we have the exact equivalent of a dumpster in the UK but imagine, if you will, an industrial wheelie bin without wheels.
While living in his 36 foot square home, fuelled by sunlight and surface water, Wilson aims to take the notion of the one per cent - the rich of the world - and turn it on its head. He will be the new one per cent, using just one per cent of the energy, waste and water of the average American home in a space just one per cent of the size of the average American home.
Based on the grounds of Huston-Tillotson, his commute is a minute-and-a-half by foot but what he makes up for in travelling time, he lacks in comfort.
Before moving, Wilson sold his belongings on Ebay and Facebook for token sums. He thought about what a person really needs and came back with very little. Tolstoy considered this issue in his short story How Much Land Does A Man Need? To cut a short story shorter, the protagonist discovers the only land a man needs is seven feet, to lay down in his coffin.
Wilson, however, counts among his personal effects four pairs of trousers, four shirts, three pairs of shoes, three hats and nine bow ties. He has a bed and a model Tardis and a Persian rug. Living in a dumpster is the one and only time I would advocate an eBook.
Beginning very simply, he began to build on his home, living in the dumpster as it was before adding incremental accoutrements. For rain protection he replaced a tarpaulin with a sliding roof and for a floor he swapped cardboard boxes for plywood.
Because it's too hot to go to bed before 11pm or, indeed, spend time at all in his house, Wilson found he reconnected with his local community. He goes out walking, feeling that East Austin is his home and garden.
Spending most of his time outdoors and using laundromats, he has made a wider circle of friends than if he were in the dumpster with, "a large flat screen and a La-Z-Boy", and he now believes most things could be shared communally. Wilson aims to get others thinking about how they live and their choices. Of course, it's all very well for an earning, middle-class academic to eschew his belongings and live inside a box but if a working-class, poor family were to do it, it would be called a failure of the social safety net, an indictment of our economy.
However, people are shy of discomfort. They are generally lazy and living simply has complications. But most could do with examining what they really mean when talking about their "needs".
The Dumpster Project is running through three phases: Dumpster Camping, living as simply as possible; the Average American Dumpster Home, with enough additions to live comfortably; and the über dumpster, with an additional storey, a balcony and a garden.
Therein lies the rub: after uber dumpster comes dumpster mansion and dumpster gated community. You can change how people live but you can't as easily change the essential magpie quality of human nature.
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