Overdoing things

At secondary school, a teacher once told the class a tale of two sages. They were old friends. One was poor and lived in a cabin on the hill. His meagre meal was a cup of lentil soup. The other sage had become the king’s servant and prospered financially. From time to time, they met, telling each other tales and exchanging views on world affairs over a drink. At some point, the wealthy sage asked the poor sage, ‘Why don’t you become a servant of the king so that you don’t have to eat lentil soup?’ The poor sage then replied, ‘Why don’t you learn to eat lentil soup so that you don’t have to serve the king?’ It is a well-known tale from ancient Greece. So, who had a better life? It is a tale of two versions of freedom. The life of the poor sage had some appeal to me, but not enough to seek a life in a cabin on the hill and eat brown beans each day.

Still, this kind of freedom was on my mind and guided my actions, like buying second-hand and not throwing away things that were still functional. The less you need, the more freedom you have. It seemed a precautionary measure for a less abundant future, which seemed not unlikely, so it was not primarily because of ethical values. It was also about not depending on others who don’t have my best interests in mind. My employer might fire me in a reorganisation when the government had just terminated social benefits for the unemployed. These scenarios were on my mind. There were multiple ways to counter that issue. One of them is having savings. Another is having few needs.

In 1994, Princess, my friend from the United States, came over. Before we went to the supermarket in the local mall, I took a shopping bag. Princess remarked on the shopping bag as if it were something peculiar. ‘You could get a new one at the supermarket,’ she said. I answered that it was wasteful. She then called me an environmental extremist. I owned no car, travelled by train and was an active member of an environmentalist group, so it was not just the bag that made her say this. As I already believed that Americans were wasteful consumers, her remark confirmed my prejudices about them. Taking a shopping bag with you was not unusual in the Netherlands and was only a minor inconvenience. Many people did that. So, why the fuss?

Perhaps Princess was right. Where does it stop? In other words, what will life be like after the Apocalypse? Most of my clothes are over twenty years old. Some come from a thrift shop. There are holes in my underwear. No one sees my underwear, except my wife, who complains. I took a bath when the sun was shining, and there was excess solar energy, using an electric heater to heat the water. I left the water in the bath to flush the toilet. That was until the heater caught fire. I was upstairs when a strange noise came from the bathroom. I rushed to the spot. The bath plug had not been properly set, so water had been leaking slowly, leaving the heater dry. Indeed, living on the edge comes with particular dangers. In the winter, when solar energy is in short supply, I might warm up two litres of water, use a washcloth to wash myself, and sprinkle the water over myself to rinse off the soap and get a mini shower.

Compared to a regular shower, it saves over 95% of energy and water, with only a limited loss of comfort. I take a regular shower now and then, usually immediately after my wife does, to save water and energy, since the water heater is far from the bathroom. The piping is about 20 metres. And I eat scraps others leave behind, or when my son still lived with us, reused paper towels he had discarded after hardly using them. It is extreme living, close to the edge, or perhaps already over it, so adventerous that few dare to go there, fearing what other people might say if they learn about these habits.

Waste and spillage unnerve me. I had a poorly insulated old home that was quite large. And so, my natural gas bill was long over twice the average. A contractor had once told me that insulating it would come with serious difficulties. You had to strip the home completely inside, which made me put it off. Yet it caused distress and guilt about me being an excessive energy consumer. It made me anxiously oversee my natural gas consumption. The energy bill was affordable, so it wasn’t that. Insulating my house and only heating the living room resolved these emotional issues. My mansion, which includes a floor with a tenant, now has the natural gas consumption typical of an apartment. Still, I can’t stop brooding over new ways to further reduce my energy consumption.

My mother once said that I overdo things. It also didn’t help that my wife was poor when I met her. She bought second-hand whenever possible. So when a lady on the dole, who was deeply in debt, complained on television about not being able to spend €1000 on Christmas presents for her children, she said, ‘What a idiot! No wonder that she is deeply in debt.’ It is social pressure, real or imagined. It should be cool to live like the poor sage. That would solve the problem. I picked up on that habit of buying second-hand as well. It was not how my parents had raised me. They weren’t pleased. It is what poor people do. My parents had grown up in poverty and had worked hard to get out of it, so they could buy new things and enjoy luxuries, only to have a son who cared little about these things.

I don’t like to upset others with my eccentric behaviour, so I try to act inconspicuously. Everyone should live a simple life, but my argument had long been, ‘Who am I to tell others what to do?’ Later, the excuse became, ‘Who is going to believe me?’ It is not always possible to guess what disturbs others. Or I might forget. Once, I wore worn-out clothes during a family party. My father was not amused. It was an oversight. My father thinks it is disrespectful to the hosts. But they don’t take offence. Nor do I take offence at my family’s excessive consumption habits that ruin the planet. They must know that they turn the planet into a wasteland. Yet, if everyone else lives the good life, then what is the point? Another time, my father praised my clothes. The sweater came from a thrift store. The trousers had seen repairs. The tailor had done a good job.

What is normal?

Who is an extremist depends on what we consider normal. Today, we think it is normal to live at the expense of poor people and future generations. It is normal to aspire to a luxury yacht and extravagant living. Many cannot afford it, but dream of it. My life is rather ordinary, albeit without luxuries, yet without extreme measures like turning off the heating or getting rid of my car. I might have done so if I had lived alone. It is not enough, but what is the point of living without comfort if others go on driving SUVs and taking holidays by aeroplane? It is like building a city while terrorists blow up buildings all the time. You must eliminate the terrorists before you can start building. And the comparison is apt, as these people are eco-terrorists who work hard to ruin other people’s lives. They do more harm than Osama Bin Laden ever did.

My wife complains that the bathroom is cold if the temperature there is 15°C. A dishwasher is a bullshit product you could easily go without. To have clean dishes, you must clean them before they go in. Sticky bits may stick. The advertisements for dishwasher tablets tell you that you don’t need to if you buy their tablets, but we all know that advertisements are bullshit. So, when the dishwasher broke down, and I proposed we try living without it, my wife, being the reasonable person she is, agreed to give it a try. We have been trying for a year now. The discomfort is minimal, but tea has the nasty habit of being undeterred by scrubbing, whereas the dishwasher fully removed the tea stains. Yet there is no danger in drinking tea from a tea-stained cup. The Apocalypse is going to kill us first.

The only way to prevent the Apocalypse is to do it together. Wasteful lifestyles can’t remain the norm much longer. We can manage. My great-grandparents hardly left the village they lived in. They had no car, no television, and had never been to Germany even though that was only 20 kilometres from their home. That seems like extreme living now. But it is not as unforgiving as it appears. The 80/20 rule states that, for many outcomes, roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. For the wealthy, an 80% reduction in consumption would reduce their well-being by 20%. They might view it differently, but subjective experience is not objective reality.

The Netherlands has a mild climate. Winters have become significantly milder, so there is hardly any frost. Cuts in energy use will cause discomfort but little suffering. In other locations, the situation is quite different. A guy in rural Ohio who had lived off the grid for one winter once shared his experience on a message board. He woke up to a harsh reality. Things freeze and break down. You can easily get injured and incapacitated. He will not try it again. And he couldn’t do without a car. More experienced people gave him tips. One commenter suggested that he should move to a warmer location. That is an option if you are serious about it. Or you can cram together in a small heated space. Alaska has its version of the 15-minute city, Whittier, where all 200 residents live in one building, complete with necessities like a shop and a church.¹

Time is money or convenience

In 2002, during a few months of unemployment, I tried my hand at an allotment garden. It was a lot of work. It got me a few vegetables that you could buy cheaply at the supermarket. After getting a job, I gave it up. Not so long ago, most people grew their food because they were poor. They had no other job, so they had the time. There were no agricultural machines, so it was manual labour. Today, home-grown food is uneconomical. Working 1 hour at the office might buy the food that would take 40 hours of work to grow yourself. It is an economic calculation. If I could earn more by producing food than working at the office, I would quit my job and grow food. It is why few people grow their own food.

You can save money by cooking your own meals instead of eating out or ordering takeout. Alternatively, you could work more, and if you make more money than you save by cooking, eating out is economically optimal. Usually, you don’t make these calculations. I never go to the canteen at work. I spread my bread before going to work instead. Many people take the convenience to save time, often because they have no time due to their work commitments. They say that time is money. So, time equates to money or convenience. People who work in restaurants have jobs that wouldn’t exist if we cooked our own food. Many of these jobs are bullshit jobs.

They make economic sense but are not necessary and transform energy and resources into waste and pollution to make money for capital owners. Advertisements tell us how easy a product is and how much time or trouble it saves us. They don’t tell us how long we work for it. Eating out is convenient, but you have to work longer hours to pay for it. You could work less when you cook your meals yourself. If you forego ease, you can have more time. In the past, people had time to grow their food or mend their clothes. That is a lot of work, but food and clothes were more expensive, or incomes were lower. Buying new clothes meant more work than mending the old ones, because they had to work more hours to afford them. It made economic sense because they were poor.

Wealth and poverty

Most of my clothes are over ten years old. A few are from forty years ago. My mother had bought them when I was a teenager. Most clothes don’t last long. The fashion industry is the second-largest polluter. It generates, among others, mountains of waste, including landfills of unsold clothes, 20% of the world’s water pollution, and 10% of global carbon emissions. The economy is about selling more stuff to generate profits. The latest trend is fast fashion, so clothes fall apart after you have worn them a few times. Your clothes won’t last a season, and new ones are cheap, allowing the poor to stay fashionable.

The world’s largest waste producer, China, is making new clothes affordable for more people, including those with small budgets. People in Africa are now forgoing second-hand clothes from Europe and buying new ones from China. And they are not to blame, for who wants to look uncool? Today, many Africans have newer clothes than I have. But then again, who is the coolest guy on Earth? If you think that clothes can make you cool, you are a crap-buying sucker following the directions of the fashion industry. People want to be cool. It is why they start smoking. No rational individual would ever consider doing that.

To me, wealth is how long you can survive on your capital. If your expenses halve, and your capital remains the same, you are twice as rich. You can become rich by consuming less. Our real wealth is how long we can sustain our lifestyles. At present, human consumption levels are unsustainable because they exceed the planet’s capacity. And if you have a capitalist spirit and think ahead, you are willing to save and invest in the future, which is about having fewer desires and fewer children. And now we may have arrived at the point that we have to live like that and force the unwilling eco-terrorists to comply.

Living without and with a car

Many car owners work one day per week to pay for their cars. On top of that, we sacrifice one million people every year to the car. Cars kill more people than wars. Using public transport may take longer, but without a car, you can skip one working day each week or retire earlier. And why should you make that trip? In the past, people hardly ever left their village. If your aunt celebrated her birthday and lived thirty kilometres away, you didn’t go. And no one was offended. Not owning a horse was a good excuse. You didn’t go anywhere. Once or twice a year, there was a fair. For the rest of the time, you had to entertain yourself or bore yourself. That is extreme living.

For many years, I didn’t own a car, despite having a job that normally would require one. I lived in a remote city. My job was there, or at least 200 kilometres from home. That required hotel stays. I took a train to a station nearby and cycled from there. In either case, I went to my work by bicycle, either from my home or from the hotel. Using public transport requires planning, extra time, and sometimes considerable sacrifice. I remember taking a thirty-minute walk through the snow to reach an office outside the city centre, as buses only went there during rush hour. And then there were all those hours waiting at train stations. Yet, it saved me money, allowing me to buy a house.

After I met my wife, we could borrow her mother’s car if we needed one, or we would rent one during the holidays. When her mother’s car fell apart in 2003, I bought my own, a second-hand 1998 Opel Astra, which has survived over 320,000 kilometres and lasted until 2026. I still go to work by public transport and use public transport for trips if it is not too much trouble. You can also reduce energy consumption by combining trips. So, when visiting my sister, I also visited my father, saving 200 kilometres of driving compared to visiting them separately. We went to the forest nearly weekly, a 60-kilometre round trip to see some trees. There are parks near home. We chose to walk in these parks instead.

After the Opel Astra didn’t pass the yearly check, and repairs would be € 3,000, I bought an electric car after having floated the idea of doing away with the car altogether and taking a carshare, following the suggestion of thinkers at the World Economic Forum, who were never going to apply it to themselves, as doing away with their private jets was already too much of a sacrifice for them. Yet, my wife was not in agreement, and I am not a dictator, not yet at least. She didn’t need a car for most of her trips. She could easily do them on a bicycle, as they were 3 kilometres or less. Her excuses were like dust had been gathering on the bicycle, and you can’t have that, or there might be some rust, or the tyres had to be pumped up. Since there were solar panels on the roof, there were no fuel costs for half the year. Yet, now comes the funny part, the hassle.

To employ the electricity from the solar panels, I chose to charge the car at home. There were cost savings, but it was mostly a challenge to minimise energy use, so it was more of a nerdy hobby. A slight oversight caused a fuse to blow. In a modern meter cupboard, that is a switch, so that was not a serious issue. Yet, the situation required reorganising the wiring. In the front garden was a small parking lot, situated behind a narrow gate, barely enough for the car to pass. Luckily, modern cars come with parking assistance, so the most serious issue was the traffic on a busy road. Cars and bicyclists kept on passing in long processions. It was eking out an opportunity to park. Yet, after several loading sessions, there were strange spots on the car.

For a while, I had no clue where they came from. It turned out to be resin from the pine tree in the garden. I hadn’t cut it down. Trying to take care of nature, so saving a tree and driving an electric car, came with a punishment. I then tried to charge the car in front of the house, but parking on the street and the pavement was not allowed, despite there being plenty of room for the traffic to pass. It was allowed on all the other streets in the neighbourhood, so I didn’t know. A municipal parking officer gave me a warning. The next time, I would get a fine. Eventually, I settled for parking in the garden under the pine tree and covering the car with a tarpaulin. But then the wind blew it off. The solution was not to charge on windy days and to secure the tarpaulin with ropes.

Turning down the heating

My grandparents had no central heating. It was cold inside their home in the winter, and it could even freeze inside. They warmed themselves at the stove in the living room, the only warm place. Central heating is a luxury. In 2022, Vladimir Putin decided to launch a special military operation in Ukraine, leading to a sudden termination of cheap Russian gas supplies to Europe. Natural gas prices in Europe skyrocketed for a while until alternative supplies were organised, prompting some people to resort to extreme measures to save energy, such as turning down the heating or heating only the living room. Some even turned off the heating entirely and put on a warm vest or a coat. You may not want to go that far, but heating only the living room makes a lot of sense.

Government policies have aimed to reduce people’s energy use and replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources for decades. Nearly half the homes in the Netherlands have solar panels. Newspapers featured a series about people who cut their energy use. Take, for example, Adri from Yerseke and his wife, who heat the living room of their 1906 home with a modern AC unit. They have insulated the walls, installed high-efficiency windows, and installed solar panels on the property. They consume 2,400 kWh of electricity and generate 3,000 kWh per year. Their natural gas use is nearly zero, as they wash themselves with a washcloth and shower only occasionally.

Like many others, I have also taken measures to reduce energy consumption. In the living room, the winter temperature is around 19°C. Most windows have high-efficiency glass. Solar panels combined with a battery cover half of my electricity consumption. Most rooms have been isolated. An AC in the living room has become the primary heating source. Only when the AC can’t maintain the desired temperature does the central heating come into play. As a result, the remainder of the house remains barely heated, which is where most of the savings come from. The savings are spectacular, like 70%.

In the attic is a small room where I often work. It has large windows on the sunny side, so as soon as there is a little bit of sunshine, the Sun heats the room. If the Sun doesn’t shine, an electric heater can warm the room. I also wear warm clothes and gloves, and if needed, I put an electric pillow on my lap, which lets me work at around 17°C. When you choose to do these things, it feels better than when you have to do them because you can’t afford the energy bill. You feel like the poor sage poking fun at the wealthy sage and his excessive lifestyle. Think of it. In 2026, Trump’s America didn’t have enough diesel fuel and stole it from the starving Cubans. You can’t sink much lower than that. If you do not wish to live like me, you have to steal from the poor.

Growing your own food or local farming

Growing your own food is a lot of work. I found that out myself. Gardening was a hobby of mine, so I once tried an allotment garden but gave up after one season. The area has clay soil, which is sturdy, thus not easy to till. The savings were negligible, probably even less than the plot’s rent. Vegetables and potatoes in the supermarket are affordable, so the allotment garden wasn’t worth the hassle. If we are to live simpler lives in the future, I don’t foresee most of us working in agriculture, as was the case in the Middle Ages. In wealthy countries, that number might rise, but probably not above 10%. Even if we rely on renewable energy, we will have more energy than people did for most of history.

Higher energy prices may revive the case for diversified farming for local and regional markets, as well as growing crops in their respective seasons, as was the case in the past. Selling local products may require setting up separate distribution channels, such as local markets, which still exist in many places, or having people collect produce from farmers and sell it to local customers. Several foods require centralised industrial processing, but a wide range of foodstuffs is suitable for local production and consumption.

If we discontinue the unnecessary activities in the bullshit economy and allocate our resources to essential activities like agriculture, the times in which 90% of the population scraped out a meagre existence as peasants will not return. Agriculture will probably remain largely mechanised and carried out by professional farmers. Today, farmers sell their produce to national and even global markets. Many people have grown dependent on these food supplies, so discontinuing them is not an option in the short term. Dismantling this system requires population reduction, ideally pursued by birth control. That takes time.

Not throwing away

Why produce garbage when you are throwing it away anyway? That was an interesting suggestion Loesje once made in a poster campaign that started in the 1980s. Think of it. Recycling costs energy and doesn’t fully recover all the waste. You can recycle glass by dropping it in a glass container, but making new glass requires a lot of energy. And there is so much packaging. You go to a shop, buy a bottle of this or that, and throw it away when it is empty. That is normal today, yet it is insane. An outlandish suggestion is to install a tank in the supermarket for refilling reusable bottles. And we could bring bags with us for bread and fruit. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, I have some more suggestions.

There are some considerations about bringing in your packaging materials. It is not advisable to mix skin care products with detergents. To prevent that from happening, you separate bottle types that fit the appropriate tanks custom-made for each substance to prevent accidental mixing. We have to bring these bottles and bags to the shop. That is the hardest part because it requires us to think ahead. We have to take the bottles and bags with us. That is a serious issue for modern consumers addicted to convenience. Everything has been made easy for us, so we don’t plan ahead.

Finally, there are a few extreme ideas that might get you out of your comfort zone. You can save energy and water by showering or bathing less frequently and using a washcloth instead of a shower or a bath. You warm a bit of water, add some soap, and there you are. Some people change clothes daily. Once or twice a week can be enough in many cases. You can also switch to less frequent underwear changes, such as every other day instead of daily. Washing your clothes less frequently saves energy and extends their lifespan. It is not poor hygiene, for it is not dangerous. And if you don’t have to perform your bullshit task in the bullshit economy, but do real work, it doesn’t matter, either.

Latest revision: 9 October 2026

1. Welcome To Whittier, Alaska, A Community Under One Roof. NPR (2015).